‘All of a sudden he loves his mother,’ she said.
Marcus wondered whether with other boys of his age, it all came naturally.
‘Please, how many times, my darrlink, pianissimo. Not like the …’
‘An elephant?’ From long experience, Marcus knew the analogy for his unsuccessful pianissimos.
‘You are right, my darrlink,’ she said, stroking his hair, ‘an elephant.’
Madame Sousatzka bent over the music, her bosom resting on the keys in a distinctly minor chord. She underlined the offended passage with a red pencil. Marcus took this opportunity of looking at her watch which she wore round her neck and which swung like an inquisitive plumbline in the area of her cleavage. Ten past four. Another twenty minutes. Then up to Mr Cordle on the first floor. That would last until five. Then he’d go up to the attic and see Jenny. He decided he would do nothing else but think of Jenny until five. He would execute all his pianissimos gently in her name.
Madame Sousatzka raised herself from the keys in an ascending arpeggio.
‘Lower the shoulder,’ she said, putting her hands around him. ‘You are not free, my darrlink. How can the message come to the fingers if you do not open the body to let it through? Look at the bump,’ she said. ‘Is that Mr Lawrence again and all his letters.’
But Madame Sousatzka knew that the slight curve in Marcus’s spine was not due to Mr Lawrence at all, but the continual lowering of the shoulder to give the ‘Message’ a freer passage. Week after week, Cordle tried to put it right. What Madame Sousatzka bent, Mr Cordle would straighten, and the battle for poor Marcus’s back was waged every Friday night with the same amount of give and take on each side.
‘It’s all in a good cause,’ Madame Sousatzka would tell Cordle whenever he questioned her method. ‘You go for walk,’ she would tell him, ‘you stick on the straight main road, and what do you see? Cars, factories, smells – no more. But if you go through the lanes,’ she whispered, ‘the twisted narrow streets, what do you see? Life, Meaning, Beauty. The true message cannot travel on the main road.’
Mr Cordle did not try to disprove her vague logic; partly because he was very fond of her, but mainly because it would have cost him most of his clientele which consisted of all those in the Sousatzka Conservatoire who had taken the ‘method’ to heart.
‘Try it again, my darrlink,’ Madame went on. ‘This time, I know you will make it.’
Marcus thought of Jenny, of the crumpets she would have ready for him when he got upstairs; how he would tip-toe into her room and she would be sitting with her back to the door, painting her nails. And he’d creep up behind her and put his hands over her eyes, and she’d pretend she was frightened and she would scream, ‘Who is it?’ and Marcus would know that she knew very well who it was because it had happened every Friday for the last nine months.
‘That’s much better,’ said Madame Sousatzka. ‘No more elephants. Now we will make an end with the study.’
The study always rounded off the lesson. Most brassplate piano teachers would have started the lesson with the study; studies, scales and arpeggios, the drudge work that was written to be got over with, as quickly as possible, as a conscience-saver for both teacher and pupil. With Madame Sousatzka, it was the other way round, rather like a footballer who practises his passes after the game is over and won.
Once more, she bent over the piano to make a readjustment of fingering on the music. Twenty past four. Forty minutes to Jenny.
‘Now,’ she said, leaning back in her chair and shutting her eyes. ‘We will both of us listen to it from the beginning to the end. I will listen, you will listen, and it will play. When you’re ready, darrlink, tell it to begin.’
She took a deep audible breath. Marcus watched her large nostrils dilating, revealing two small clusters of black hair. When she breathed out, it would be the signal to start. Marcus laid his hands on the piano and waited for Madame Sousatzka’s exhalation. She took in an inordinate amount of air, much more, Marcus thought, than was necessary for any practical purpose, and when it was all up there, up in her head, her eyelids closed and her nostrils fluttering, she kept it there, simmering, on an even keel. Marcus waited. He bent backwards and looked at her watch. Thirty-three minutes to Jenny. Madame was certainly record-breaking this lesson. Then it came, suddenly, in a great gush. Marcus pressed the first chord of the study into the piano keys, drowning its release. Now they were off. About half way through, she murmured to him, ‘Listen, my darrlink, how well it plays.’ There was a time, when Marcus first started taking lessons from Madame Sousatzka, that he resented the ‘it’ routine. ‘It’s me playing,’ he used to argue with her. He didn’t see why anything else should be given credit. One day when she had whispered through a scale passage how lucidly it was playing, he left the leading note high and dry, and went off to the corner of the room. ‘Listen how beautifully it’s playing now,’ he had said to her, while the leading note hung irritatingly unresolved on the air. ‘But you’ve taken it with you,’ she said pleadingly. ‘Send it back,’ she insisted, ‘and let us listen to the last pages.’ Marcus had given up. Even though he didn’t understand the ‘it’ fully, he sensed that it was the basis of Madame Sousatzka’s teaching, and probably her whole way of life.
Marcus was absorbed in the study. He was no longer thinking about Jenny. He was conscious only of his own participation in the sounds that filled the room. He was happy while playing, though unaware of how well he played. But Madame Sousatzka grew more and more aware, and once again, as so often during the last few weeks, she realized that there was nothing more about the piano that she could teach Marcus, and the fear that one day he would discover it made her shudder. The study came to an end. There was no doubt in Madame Sousatzka’s mind about the brilliance of playing. ‘It has done well,’ was all she could bring herself to tell him, but this time the ‘it’ did not refer to her method. A slight pang of jealousy prevented her from ascribing the virtuosity of the performance to Marcus. He was still too innocent to detect anything but the most genuine motives in Madame Sousatzka’s comments. And even if he had been aware of her envy, he would have forgiven her. He loved Madame Sousatzka for so many things that had nothing to do with the piano. For her house that she let Jenny live in, for the room upstairs that she rented to old Mr Cordle, and for the dirty Countess in the basement; for a whole world of oddities and eccentrics that Marcus was too young to recognize as a world of failures.
When the study came to an end he suddenly remembered his promise to his mother. ‘Sousatzka,’ he ventured, ‘when will I give a concert, d’you think?’
‘When you’re ready, my darrlink,’ Madame Sousatzka tried to be cheerful. ‘The concert is the last thing you should think. So much time you have yet. So much Sousatzka has to teach you.’ Marcus bent down to tie his shoelace. ‘That’s what you always say,’ he mumbled.
Madame Sousatzka pretended not to hear him. ‘Hurry now,’ she said, ruffling his hair and pushing him gently from her, ‘Cordle will be waiting for you.’ There was another half hour before Sally would come for her lesson. Normally Madame Sousatzka spent the intervals between lessons playing herself, or in preparation. But now, she couldn’t settle to either. Marcus’s questioning had upset her. She didn’t want to let him go. He had become part of her. Even during the week, when he stayed with his mother, she felt she was with him. She knew when he was biting his nails, and as he did so, she followed the contours of the birthmark on his right hand, and the flattened domes of his thumbs, smooth as mushrooms. She wondered whether he was talking to Cordle about the concert and the thought of Cordle’s gentle hands on Marcus’s back sickened her. She went over to the piano and started to play the study that Marcus had just finished. And as she played she heard how clearly he had outgrown her. She stopped playing suddenly, and gathered up Marcus’s music; his study book, his scales and his book of sonatas. She wound her arms round the pile and pressed it to her body, clinging to it frantically as if she had already lost
him.
6
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Mr Cordle in surprise, as Marcus entered the room. Marcus had been coming to Mr Cordle’s consulting room every Friday for the last three months, but Mr Cordle always greeted him as if he was entirely unexpected. ‘Now, what can we do for you?’ he said.
Both Marcus and Mr Cordle knew very well what they could do for him, but the question was a formal opening to each session. The ‘we’ added a professional touch to Mr Cordle’s lay activities. The other part of ‘we’ was related in Marcus’s mind to Madame Sousatzka’s ‘it’. It was as if the house was haunted by two disembodied operators.
Cordle moved over to the couch and laid his hands on Marcus’s bony frame, massaging deeply into his shoulders, working his way gently into the slight curve of the spine. ‘She’s been at it again,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘We can’t go on like this. In half an hour she destroys what I take weeks to repair. I shall have to talk to her again.’ He pressed his hands up and down the curve, muttering, ‘Sousatzka, Sousatzka’ to give his movements a certain waltzing rhythm. Sometimes he would change his beat, and thunder, ‘Forte, forte’ instead, and with the new time-signature Marcus would feel the massage take on a marching measure up and down his spine. ‘Now let’s take a plunge into the Arctic Ocean,’ Mr Cordle said. He took a cold wet flannel and pressed it around Marcus’s neck to give a semblance of reality to his fantasies. Marcus shivered. ‘We’ll be warm in no time,’ Mr Cordle said, protecting himself in the plural, and he rubbed Marcus’s neck until a tingling warmth filtered through the boy’s body.
‘Let’s have a look at Russia, shall we,’ he said, in his best rack-side manner. Marcus turned over. He was a boy who responded conscientiously to his cues. He knew the routine by heart. Mr Cordle laid his hands across Marcus’s chest. ‘Oh dear, we are skinny, aren’t we,’ he chided, thumping his fingers between the jutting ribs. ‘Here, have some chocolate.’
Marcus sat up on the couch. The offer of chocolate always marked an interval in the session. ‘And when are you going to give this concert of yours?’ Mr Cordle always asked this question every week at chocolate time. It was another way of stating that Madame Sousatzka was afraid of losing her prize pupil to the public.
‘Next year, I suppose. Madame Sousatzka says I’m not ready yet.’
‘D’you think you’re ready?’
‘Sometimes I do. I’d like to play for lots of people. I get fed up with practising on my own, with no-one listening except Madame Sousatzka. But maybe she’s right. I haven’t learnt everything yet.’
‘You’ll always have a lot to learn. You’ll never stop learning. If Madame Sousatzka has her way, you’ll never be ready. Have you started on a programme?’
‘I know lots of pieces. They could be made into a programme. I know concertos, too, but however will I get a chance to play them?’
‘Never,’ said Mr Cordle. He pulled what was left of his hair over his head as a fringe, and played with an imaginary watch round his neck, ‘Never,’ he mimicked in the Sousatzka guttural, ‘You’ll never be ready.’
Marcus laughed, but he quickly checked himself with the thought that he was being disloyal. He remembered his mother’s threatened visit and fleetingly thought that it was justified. When away from her, he found it so easy to be on her side. ‘She’s in my way,’ he said suddenly, ‘I could be earning money. I could be famous. I’m ready. She knows I’m ready but she won’t let me go. I’ll leave her. I’ll go to someone else.’
Mr Cordle put his hand on Marcus’s shoulder. He felt responsible for the boy’s sudden rebellion. ‘She’s taught you everything you know,’ he said quietly, ‘it would be ungrateful to leave her. Maybe she’s right. Perhaps you aren’t ready. She knows what she’s doing. You’re still young. You’ve got a lot to learn. Lots of things, other than the piano.’
‘But she called me a genius. Only this week, she said I was a genius.’
Mr Cordle sighed. ‘You see that picture over there,’ he pointed to a sheet on the opposite wall. It was the plan of a man’s body and embedded in each bone, muscle and joint was a line which extended to the outside of the body and which ended in a name of the part to which it belonged. The titles were neatly and symmetrically placed together, assuming the contours of the human frame around a hollow man. ‘When I was a boy,’ Mr Cordle said, ‘about your age, I suppose, that chart used to hang by my bed. And every night I looked at it and I cried. I cried for that man hemmed in by a battery of labels. Those lines you see travelling out of the body,’ he went on, pointing to the chart with a long pole, ‘I was convinced that they were arrows. The blood was pouring through the body because of them. And there he was, hanging by my bed, crucified with labels, dying a little more every day, and there was nothing I could do about it. My mother came in one day to kiss me goodnight, and she saw that I was crying. She asked me why and I told her it was because of the man dying on my wall. She laughed and stroked my cheek and told me I was too imaginative. I saw a picture of myself in my mind, like the man on the chart, and at the end of the line it said, Imagination. You can kill a man with labels, Marcus. That was the first time in my life that I started to die. That was my first arrow. I’ve had lots since and each time it hurts a little more. Dying gets harder and harder,’ he murmured, and Marcus was horrified to hear a break in his voice. Marcus only vaguely understood what Mr Cordle was getting at. He wished he’d never mentioned the genius business. It was bound to lead to some theory or another.
‘Lie on the couch,’ Mr Cordle said softly. His tone of command frightened Marcus. For some odd reason, he felt he was about to sacrificed. He walked towards the couch and felt Mr Cordle’s hand. But Mr Cordle turned his face as if to hide something and lightly lifted Marcus on to the bed. Marcus lay there, terrified. Mr Cordle looked down on him and a tear from his cheek dropped on to Marcus’s shirt. At the sight of Mr Cordle’s weeping Marcus felt safer. He stretched out his hand and clasped Mr Cordle’s knuckles, as Madame Sousatzka so often did to him.
‘I’m burdened with labels, Marcus,’ Mr Cordle confided. ‘I have to shake them off before I die. That’s the process of dying, Marcus. Shaking them off, shedding the labels one by one, until Man is free, pure and in space, until he is free of all his packaging. Until there is room for the only label that really matters.’
‘Which one is that?’ said Marcus, who felt he ought to keep the conversation going if for no other reason than to divert Mr Cordle’s attention from anything more violent.
‘When I die,’ Mr Cordle went on, ‘I want to be lying unburdened, except for that one label.’ He put a finger gently on Marcus’s navel. ‘Here the label will be,’ he whispered, ‘and the label will be called Man, the centre of the Universe.’
Marcus stared at Mr Cordle’s bent head. The crown was completely bald, shining like a peeled hard-boiled egg. There was a tiny speck of dirt in the middle, and Marcus’s eyes were riveted on the black dot in the centre of all that shining cleanliness. He stared at it for what seemed an eternity, and a surge of compassion overcame him. And out of pity for that poor little speck of dirt in the middle of all that whiteness he began to cry.
‘Turn over,’ Mr Cordle suddenly said. ‘Back to business. Let’s go back to the North Pole.’
Marcus gratefully turned over. He wanted to shut out the last five minutes from his mind. He tried to think of Jenny, but when he imagined her, he saw her cluttered up with labels. He closed his eyes and the portly figure of Madame Sousatzka blotted his vision. But he fared no better with her. The labels dangled from her as from a giant Christmas tree. Then he thought of himself. Where was the label that Madame Sousatzka had pierced him with? His heart, his head, his finger maybe? He felt suddenly tired and overburdened with scraps of knowledge and experience that lead a child to think he understands everything. Mr Cordle’s hands were gentle on his back. He knew he was going to fall off to sleep, but he wanted to do nothing about it. He heard Mr Cordle call his name, once and then twice, very softly.
He thought he heard a door close, and even a fleeting thought of Jenny couldn’t keep him from sleep.
Marcus’s first thought on waking up was that he had been sleeping for many days. Firstly because he was hungry, and secondly, the feeling of utter remoteness. Mr Cordle was shutting the door quietly behind him. He turned round, surprised to find Marcus awake. ‘I thought you’d sleep till tomorrow, at least,’ he laughed.
‘How long have I been sleeping?’
‘Not ten minutes,’ Mr Cordle said. ‘I just saw Jenny on the stairs. She’s waiting for you.’
Suddenly Marcus remembered in detail their strange session together. He looked quickly for the chart on the wall. But the space that it had occupied was bare now, a pure white space in an off-white frame. Marcus thought of the dirty mark on Mr Cordle’s head, and wondered whether he had washed it off. Mr Cordle had obviously regretted his outburst and had removed all evidence of it whilst Marcus was asleep.
‘You’d better wash your face before you go up to Jenny’s,’ Mr Cordle said. ‘You look as if you’ve been asleep for a week.’ Mr Cordle giggled with embarrassment. ‘Don’t forget your exercises,’ he said automatically. He seemed to realise that there was no point in trying to believe that nothing had happened. ‘Marcus,’ he said pleadingly, ‘forget all that nonsense about the labels. It’s just a theory I have,’ he laughed. ‘I’m working it out. Sometimes I don’t understand it myself, but it’s something I feel.’
‘Does Madame Sousatzka know about it? The labels, I mean.’ Marcus tried to laugh too. If Mr Cordle himself was prepared to ridicule his own theory, Marcus was ready to give him support.
‘She knows,’ Mr Cordle answered. ‘She says I’m right. I think she understands it better than I do.’
Madame Sousatzka Page 5