Madame Sousatzka by Bernice Rubens Read Free Book Online Page A

curve on his back. She remembered that it had been one of Boris’s affectionate gestures. ‘All the rubbish from Mr Lawrence’s teachings,’ she said.
    â€˜Oh, it’s nothing,’ Marcus wanted her to know that he didn’t attach as much importance to it as his mother.
    â€˜In any case, after the lesson, you will go to Cordle. He will take away the bump. He is osteopath.’
    Marcus smiled at the recollection of the word and Cordle’s first strange greeting, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ He had seen Cordle very rarely since their first meeting, and he was too excited at the prospect of seeing him again to concentrate deeply on his lesson.
    Madame Sousatzka noticed it and half resented Cordle as a competitor for Marcus’s affections. She could feel Marcus’s impatience with her, and once or twice she caught him looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. She was going to have to fight to keep him. But she didn’t want his resentment. She decided to cut the lesson short so thathe wouldn’t feel that she was holding him.
    â€˜Today, such a headache Sousatzka has,’ she told him. ‘Tomorrow, we have long lesson, yes? You go now to Cordle,’ she said.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ said Marcus, highly delighted. Without thinking, he flung his arms round her and kissed her. ‘I hope the headache will be gone tomorrow,’ he said. Madame Sousatzka clung to him.
    â€˜For you and for the lesson, Sousatzka will be better,’ she said. She watched him as he left the room, noting the thin wet lines on the backs of his knees, like furrows on a young brow, the half-hearted crease in his short trousers, the knotted corner of a handkerchief that dropped from a side-pocket, and the black soft mould of his head. She lay on the couch and shut her eyes, clinging to his arm-prints on her shoulders, and trying hard not to think of Cordle’s hands on him.
    Cordle lived on the first landing, and Marcus knocked timidly on his door. Cordle himself, in his white jacket, opened it. He ushered Marcus into the room and pointed shyly to a couch at the far end.
    â€˜Take off your jacket, will you,’ he said, ‘and lie down.’
    Marcus climbed on to the couch and lay on his back. Cordle was fiddling with some charts in the corner and Marcus looked at the room around him. It seemed bigger than Madame Sousatzka’s, and very bare. On the wall opposite him, there hung an anatomical chart, one of the many that almost papered the four walls of the room. It was the picture of the body of a man, shaded in a hundred different colours. Colour was a great thing with Mr Cordle. The functions of each bone prescribed its own colour. The spinal column, for instance, was filled in in blue, because blue was the imagined colour of balance. The rib-cage was shaded gradually from black to grey, and the breast-bone sprouted in a menacing red. All the charts on the walls were similarly coloured, some in greater detail than others. They looked like political maps of the world, for to Mr Cordle, the whole of the discovered universe lay in the body ofMan. In each picture, there were certain unshaded parts, which Mr Cordle had not yet accounted for in colour.
    â€˜The undiscovered continents, they are,’ he would tell his patients. ‘One day, I, Horace Cordle, will discover them. Horace Cordle, the Discoverer,’ he laughed, and he would pose himself as a statue in a National Square.
    â€˜The body, Marcus, is the world,’ he said, walking over to the couch. He switched on a lamp on a table beside him. A pair of curved yellowing rib-bones protected the naked bulb like two stubborn stamens. ‘Here,’ he said, laying his hand on Marcus’s navel, ‘is the centre of the Universe. On the chest, spreading over the rib-cage, lies Asia. Take care of Asia, Marcus,’ he said, ‘it can be the cause of great troubles. Now turn over. I think what we came for