Madame Sousatzka (22 page)

‘I've said what I have to say.' Manders was adamant. ‘Business is business. There's enough worry handling managements and other agents in this cut-throat trade. I can't take on teachers as well. No. I've made up my mind. You take him away from Madame Sousatzka, or he finds another agent.'

Madame Sousatzka looked at Marcus and he tried to look away. Suddenly she understood what was going to happen. She knew that at that moment Marcus was drunk with his success, and he needed more to feed on. She began to pardon him for the choice she knew he would make. ‘You're a little boy,' she said, forgiving him.

‘I'm not a little boy,' Marcus suddenly shouted. He was glad that Madame Sousatzka had given him reason to complain. ‘You've always treated me like a little boy. You won't let me go.'

The tears were rolling down Madame Sousatzka's face. ‘I have already at this moment said goodbye,' she said.

Marcus stared at her, and as she turned to walk out of the room, supported by Uncle and Cordle, he made a move to follow her. ‘Madame Sousatzka,' he called. ‘Uncle. Cordle.'

Mrs Crominski put her hand on his shoulders. ‘It's for the best, Marcus, you'll see.' He threw her hand away from him, and he looked at her and Manders with hatred. Manders managed a weak smile. ‘I'll take you home in my car,' he said.

Madame Sousatzka was sitting in her studio. She had only just come home, and Cordle and Uncle had gone to
their own rooms. She thought with disgust of the table of curled sandwiches in the kitchen, and wondered painfully whether Marcus would come back for the little party they had arranged together. She heard a car draw up outside the house. Yes, yes, who else would come to the square at this hour? She heard the car door open, and whispers of many voices. Yes, they had all come. Manders and his wife, Marcus and his mother. They were laughing now, and she tried to identify the laughter with any one of them. ‘This is Vauxhall Mansions,' she heard a woman's voice. She tried hard to convince herself that it was Mrs Manders. Yes, she'd never been to the house before and she was glad they'd found the right square. ‘Ours is the next on the right,' the woman went on. ‘Sorry, Sammy.' She heard the door slam again, and the car purring away. She waited for its drone to leave the square alone.

Then for the first time, she sobbed aloud. She hunched herself up in her chair, her hands over her face, giving herself up to the red, wet, strangling agony that seemed to pump itself into her body, melting bone and muscle in its hot, unquenchable thirst.

In the morning she awoke, swollen, with the sad and certain knowledge that she was still warm.

Weeks passed and Sousatzka heard nothing from Marcus. She bought all the papers advertising musical events, in the hope that he would be playing somewhere. Even Jenny was of no help. Manders hadn't contacted her since the concert. Very often Sousatzka had wanted to suggest another session with the glass, to find out what and how Marcus was doing. But she knew that the glass was only for advice, and to use it as a detective would have insulted its purpose.

Every night she would sit at the piano, going over Marcus's old music, recalling his fluency or difficulties in each phrase. She was like a discarded mistress reading old love letters. And every day she told herself to pull herself together. There were her other pupils, but none of them was bound to her like Marcus. She taught without heart.

Her lethargy had infected Cordle too, and he spent his time re-examining his old rejected theories, wondering how much their rejection was justified. He took out old copies of a newspaper which had long ago reported his osteopathic methods. And he read the little paragraph over and over again.

Upstairs, he heard Jenny go about her business, and on Friday nights her light went out very early. In the basement, Uncle's unsolved crosswords accumulated and the door that led to Marcus's room was open, revealing the bed, unmade as he had left it. And from top to bottom of the house, they day-dreamed more than ever before.

About three months after the concert Madame Sousatzka was giving a lesson to Paula, a new pupil, a talented eight-year-old, with an over-ambitious mother. It was all Madame Sousatzka could do to keep the woman out of the lessons, and she always waited outside the studio door, breathing heavily through the wooden panel, with her hand, no doubt, on a stop-watch.

Madame Sousatzka spent the lesson, as she did all her lessons, trying to pretend that the pupil was Marcus, trying to transfer to them all the love she had given him. The pain of his departure still nagged at her, and there were many moments when she wanted to stand up and scream ‘it's not fair'. She was worried, too, about the letter she'd received that morning from the ground landlords of the house. It informed her that their surveyors would be coming the following week to examine the house and to assess the repairs that would have to be carried out. The diminishing lease had worried her for a long time, but as long as she knew that the whole square was worrying for the same reason, she could shelve the problem till it became acute. She knew it was insoluble. She had not enough money to carry out even the most minor repairs to the house, and the time was running out. They had offered her the freehold, but at an unthinkable price. The thought of selling it assailed her like a wound and she tried desperately to put it out of her mind. She thought she would speak to Cordle about it, though why, she couldn't imagine.

Paula was playing a scale and Madame Sousatzka suddenly heard the front door crash open, followed by running steps across the hall and up the stairs. Cordle was in, Jenny was in, and so was Uncle, and there was no one else who knew how to open the front door without a key. She got up quickly and went into the hall, almost knocking Paula's mother over as she opened the door of her studio.

‘Who was that?' she asked breathlessly.

‘A man.'

Madame Sousatzka made for the stairs, but the woman barred her way.

‘Madame Sousatzka,' she said, ‘you are in the middle of a lesson. You can go up afterwards. It was probably a friend of one of your tenants.'

Madame Sousatzka turned back to the studio. She was suddenly sure that the visitor was someone from the ground landlord. Who else could barge into a house as if it were his own? In which case, she preferred not to confront whoever had come in. She returned to the safety of the studio and tried to concentrate on the lesson. But the letter had said
next week, she thought. No official authority could make such an unofficial entrance. It couldn't be a surveyor. Paula was labouring with her scales and although Madame Sousatzka heard the jerkiness of her rhythms, she couldn't concentrate sufficiently to correct her. Suddenly she heard Jenny's voice screaming from the top of the house. Then the heavy thud of someone falling downstairs. Madame Sousatzka got up quickly and told the astonished Paula that her lesson was over. She hurriedly pushed the child's music into her case and more or less shoved her out of the room in front of her.

Mother was waiting. She looked at her watch. ‘She's not had an hour yet, Madame Sousatzka,' she said.

In a panic to see what had happened, Madame Sousatzka decided to lose no time on this woman. ‘How often do you count the hour over the hour? I don't hear you complain then. You stand there all the time counting minutes on the watch. I am not breaking the record, Missus,' she shouted at her on her way up the stairs. ‘For the five minutes, I give you back the money.' She rushed upstairs to the first landing.

Cordle was on the floor in his white coat, massaging a massive hulk on the floor. ‘Is he dead?' Sousatzka asked. The identity of the man could come later.

‘No, just a bad fall.'

The man on the floor made an attempt to get up. He managed to stand by supporting himself on the banister. He turned round to find Sousatzka staring at him.

‘Manders,' she gasped. ‘Felix Manders,' she laughed, ‘the great impresario. Manders, the thief,' she waved her arm over the banisters. ‘Come, Uncle,' she invited her, seeing her at the foot of the stairs. Uncle had somehow made the journey from her basement room to see what had happened. ‘Look what we have here, lady and gentleman.' She nodded at Cordle. ‘The great Felix Manders. Ah, it will be in the paper. Felix Manders, the music middle-man,' she spat out, ‘the dealer, kicked down the stairs in the house of Madame Sousatzka, the celebrating teacher of the piano. Sit down a little, Manders,' she coaxed him. ‘You are not well. The shock is too much. I will ring up your wife. She
should come to take you away.'

Manders was nursing his shoulder. ‘I beg you, Madame Sousatzka,' he managed to blurt out, sitting down on the bottom stair.

‘Ah,' Sousatzka laughed, ‘Felix Manders is begging. Come here, Uncle,' she called, ‘have the front seat. This is my concert, my management, and here,' she pointed at him, ‘is the latest one on my books.'

Uncle came slowly up the stairs and stood beside Sousatzka. Cordle was squatting on his heels massaging Manders's shoulder with a fixed ‘pain knows no frontier' look on his face. They heard Jenny's door open and her light footsteps running down the stairs. Manders tried to turn his head, and he shielded his face with his good arm in anticipation of another blow.

Jenny leaned over the banister. ‘Here,' she shouted, ‘you left your business behind,' and she flung a half-open briefcase on to his head. The contents spilled out and fluttered around him, pamphlets, brochures and contracts. A folded brochure landed on his knee, and Madame Sousatzka was able to read
‘Management. Felix Manders Ltd.'
She picked it up to look at the other side. A large sad photograph of Marcus stared back at her. Uncle gripped her arm to support her. But she shook her off. The agony of Marcus's departure returned and gave her strength. She bent down, and lifted Manders bodily from the floor. She steadied him on the top of the flight of stairs leading to the hall. Then she screwed up Marcus's picture in one hand and with the other she pushed Manders down the stairs. He rolled over on the threadbare carpet, and landed with a groan on the coconut mat in the hall.

‘All my good work,' Cordle reproached her. But even as he spoke he was smiling.

At the sight of Manders painfully putting himself together in the hall, Uncle giggled, and Jenny leaned over the banister and started to laugh aloud. Sousatzka joined in too, and Manders slunk out of the hall, not caring to retrieve his briefcase, and out of the front door. They saw his shadow hobble painfully down the front steps.

‘We won't see him again,' Sousatzka said.

Jenny's laughter trailed into a sob, and they heard her going back into her room. Uncle took a deep breath and started her return journey. Madame Sousatzka watched her disappear. She uncrumpled the paper in her hand and spread out Marcus's photograph in front of her. The creases had inserted a smile into his face. She smoothed them out against the wall as gently as she could, until Marcus was sad again. Her head drooped and she gave a deep sigh.

Cordle put his arm round her shoulder. ‘Come and sit with me for a while,' he said. She let Cordle take her into his room. He sat her down on the low couch, and switched off the light above her head. He stood in front of her, his hands resting on her shoulders, and lightly massaging the back of her neck. ‘Lie down and relax,' he said. ‘I'll help you.' He lifted her feet on to the couch and she lay down on her stomach, her head resting on the small pillow at the top of the bed. Cordle worked his way around the shoulderblades, and as he pressed he saw the tears fall on to the pillow as if he was, with his manipulations, squeezing them out of her. ‘You must forget about Marcus,' he said gently. ‘There are other things. Other pupils. There's so much more for us to do. New methods to be examined, practice, work, people and love.' He drove each example into her back with his thumbs. He let his hands come to rest alongside her spine. ‘You should marry, Sousatzka,' he said flatly. ‘You're lonely. You need companionship. You need help. You need love. You have so much love to give.'

Madame Sousatzka turned round and sat upright on the couch. Cordle took his hands away and stepped backwards away from her. She looked at him steadily for a moment and then she smiled. It was the first genuine smile Cordle had seen on her face since the concert. ‘Who would I marry, Cordle?' she said.

Cordle was silent. Although the situation had arisen quite naturally, he was astonished at the turn it had taken. He thought of himself as Monsieur Sousatzka, and a sudden thrill of pleasure forced him to sit down and steady the trembling in his body. ‘I have nothing to offer you, my dear, except respect and admiration. I am lonely too and
groping. Groping in a jungle of bones and muscles and colours for some understanding. There have been moments when I knew you understood, and I've gone back to my work with renewed confidence.' Cordle suddenly realized that this was the real speech of his day-dreams. His fluency, such as it was, surprised him, and the moment he became conscious of it he began to stutter and stammer, the words strangling in his throat. ‘Madame Sousatzka,' he blurted out, ‘this is the point of it all. When Marcus went away, we both lost him. Perhaps we will find him again, if we come together. Sousatzka,' he whispered, ‘D'you think you could marry me?'

Sousatzka got up and came towards him. ‘You are a good man, Cordle,' she said, touching him on the shoulder. ‘I must be by myself for a while. I have so much to decide. I tell you.' She left him trembling in his chair and went down to the studio.

She had wondered, when Cordle had proposed to her, whether she was happy. She would only know in recollection. She sat down at the piano and began to play. Cordle opened his door and listened. She was playing a Mozart sonata, and in the abandon of her playing, he decided he was entitled to some hope.

He didn't see Sousatzka for a few days after the incident, but he noticed that she was playing more than ever before. Sometimes the music was melancholy, and she would often break off in the middle to practise a scale or a study. Meanwhile, he worked on his charts and the occasional pupils. Jenny's customers went upstairs, and Uncle restarted on her crosswords. The house was alive again, despite the fact that it had but a short while to live, but it was living at a feverish pace, like a knitter who, seeing her wool running out, knits fast and furiously.