The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (11 page)

But the minister’s sister, gaunt Miss Gaunt, was secretly taking over the dead sisters office. As it became known later, Miss Gaunt approved of their arrangement with Gordon Lowther and encouraged them to make it a permanent one for their own good and also for private reasons connected with Miss Brodie.

Up to now, Miss Brodie’s visits to Mr. Lowther had taken place on Sundays. She always went to church on Sunday mornings, she had a rota of different denominations and sects which included the Free Churches of Scotland, the Established Church of Scotland, the Methodist and the Episcopalian churches and any other church outside the Roman Catholic pale which she might discover. Her disapproval of the Church of Rome was based on her assertions that it was a church of superstition, and that only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics, In some ways, her attitude was a strange one, because she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church; possibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving spirit, it might even have normalised her. But perhaps this was the reason that she shunned it, lover of Italy though she was, bringing to her support a rigid Edinburgh-born side of herself when the Catholic Church was in question, although this side was not otherwise greatly in evidence. So she went round the various non-Roman churches instead, hardly ever missing a Sunday morning. She was not in any doubt, she let everyone know she was in no doubt, that God was on her side whatever her course, and so she experienced no difficulty or sense of hypocrisy in worship while at the same time she went to bed with the singing master. Just as an excessive sense of guilt can drive people to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt.

The side-effects of this condition were exhilarating to her special girls in that they in some way partook of the general absolution she had assumed to herself, and it was only in retrospect that they could see Miss Brodie’s affair with Mr. Lowther for what it was, that is to say, in a factual light. All the time they were under her influence she and her actions were outside the context of right and wrong. It was twenty-five years before Sandy had so far recovered from a creeping vision of disorder that she could look back and recognise that Miss Brodie’s defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects; by which time Sandy had already betrayed Miss Brodie and Miss Brodie was laid in her grave.

It was after morning church on Sundays that Miss Brodie would go to Cramond, there to lunch and spend the afternoon with Mr. Lowther. She spent Sunday evenings with him also, and more often than not the night, in a spirit of definite duty, if not exactly martyrdom, since her heart was with the renounced teacher of art.

Mr. Lowther, with his long body and short legs, was a shy fellow who smiled upon nearly everyone from beneath his red-gold moustache, and who won his own gentle way with nearly everybody, and who said little and sang much.

When it became certain that the Kerr sisters had taken over permanently the housekeeping for this bashful, smiling bachelor, Miss Brodie fancied he was getting thin. She announced this discovery just at a time when Jenny and Sandy had noticed a slimmer appearance in Miss Brodie and had begun to wonder, since they were nearly thirteen and their eyes were more focussed on such points, if she might be physically beautiful or desirable to men. They saw her in a new way, and decided she had a certain deep romantic beauty, and that she had lost weight through her sad passion for Mr. Lloyd, and this noble undertaking of Mr. Lowther in his place, and that it suited her.

Now Miss Brodie was saying: “Mr. Lowther is looking thin these days. I have no faith in those Kerr sisters, they are skimping him, they have got skimpy minds. The supplies of food they leave behind on Saturdays are barely sufficient to see him through Sunday, let alone the remainder of the week. If only Mr. Lowther could be persuaded to move from that big house and take a flat in Edinburgh, he would be so much easier to look after. He needs looking after. But he will not be persuaded. It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.”

She decided to supervise the Kerr sisters on their Saturdays at Cramond when they prepared for Mr. Lowther’s domestic week ahead. “They get well paid for it,” said Miss Brodie. “I shall go over and see that they order the right stuff, and sufficient.” It might have seemed an audacious proposition, but the girls did not think of it this way. They heartily urged Miss Brodie to descend upon the Kerrs and to interfere, partly in anticipation of some eventful consequence, and partly because Mr. Lowther would somehow smile away any fuss; and the Kerr sisters were fairly craven; and above all, Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.

The Kerr sisters took Miss Brodie’s intrusion quite meekly, and that they were so unquestioning about any authority which imposed itself upon them was the very reason why they also did not hesitate later on to answer the subsequent questions of Miss Gaunt. Meantime Miss Brodie set about feeding Mr. Lowther up, and, since this meant her passing Saturday afternoons at Cramond, the Brodie set was invited to go, two by two, one pair every week, to visit her in Mr. Lowther’s residence where he smiled and patted their hair or pulled pretty Jenny’s ringlets, looking meanwhile for reproof or approval, or some such thing, at brown-eyed Jean Brodie. She gave them tea while he smiled; and he frequently laid down his cup and saucer, went and sat at the piano and burst into song. He sang:

March, march Ettrick and Teviotdale,

Why
the de’il dinna ye march
forward
in order?

March, march, Eskdale and Liddesdale,

All the Blue Bonnets are bound for the Border.

At the end of the song he would smile his overcome and bashful smile and take his teacup again, looking up under his ginger eyebrows at Jean Brodie to see what she felt about him at the current moment. She was Jean to him, a fact that none of the Brodie set thought proper to mention to anyone.

She reported to Sandy and Jenny: “I made short work of those Kerr sisters. They were starving him. Now it is I who see to the provisions. I am a descendant, do not forget, of Willie Brodie, a man of substance, a cabinet maker and designer of gibbets, a member of the Town Council of Edinburgh and a keeper of two mistresses who bore him five children between them. Blood tells. He played much dice and fighting cocks. Eventually he was a wanted man for having robbed the Excise Office—not that he needed the money, he was a night burglar only for the sake of the danger in it. Of course, he was arrested abroad and was brought back to the Tolbooth prison, but that was mere chance. He died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising in seventeen-eighty-eight. However all this may be, it is the stuff I am made of, and I have brooked and shall brook no nonsense from Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr.”

Mr. Lowther sang:

O mother, mother, make my bed,

O make it soft and narrow,

For my true love died for me today.

I’ll die for him tomorrow.

Then he looked at Miss Brodie. She was, however, looking at a chipped rim of a teacup. “Mary Macgregor must have chipped it,” she said. “Mary was here last Sunday with Eunice and they washed up together. Mary must have chipped it.”

Outside on the summer lawn the daisies sparkled. The lawn spread wide and long, one could barely see the little wood at the end of it and even the wood belonged to Mr. Lowther, and the fields beyond. Shy, musical and gentle as he was, Mr. Lowther was a man of substance.

Now Sandy considered Miss Brodie not only to see if she was desirable, but also to find out if there was any element of surrender about her, since this was the most difficult part of the affair to realise. She had been a dominant presence rather than a physical woman like Norma Shearer or Elisabeth Bergner. Miss Brodie was now forty-three and this year when she looked so much thinner than when she had stood in the classroom or sat under the elm, her shape was pleasanter, but it was still fairly large compared with Mr. Lowther’s. He was slight and he was shorter than Miss Brodie. He looked at her with love and she looked at him severely and possessively.

By the end of the summer term, when the Brodie set were all turned, or nearly turned, thirteen, Miss Brodie questioned them in their visiting pairs each week about their art lesson. The girls always took a close interest in Teddy Lloyd’s art classes and in all he did, making much of details, so as to provide happy conversation with Miss Brodie when their turn came to visit her at Gordon Lowther’s house at Cramond.

It was a large gabled house with a folly-turret. There were so many twists and turns in the wooded path leading up from the road, and the front lawn was so narrow, that the house could never be seen from the little distance that its size demanded and it was necessary to crane one’s neck upward to see the turret at all. The back of the house was quite plain. The rooms were large and gloomy with Venetian blinds. The banisters began with a pair of carved lions’ heads and carried up and up, round and round, as far as the eye could reach. All the furniture was large and carved, dotted with ornaments of silver and rose-coloured glass. The library on the ground floor where Miss Brodie entertained them held a number of glass bookcases so dim in their interiors that it was impossible to see the titles of the books without peering close. A grand piano was placed across one corner of the room, and on it, in summer, stood a bowl of roses.

This was a great house to explore and on days when Miss Brodie was curiously occupied in the kitchen with some enormous preparation for the next day’s eating—in those months when her obsession with Mr. Lowther’s food had just begun— the girls were free to roam up the big stairs, hand-in-hand with awe, and to open the doors and look into the dust-sheeted bedrooms and especially into two rooms that people had forgotten to furnish properly, one of which had nothing in it but a large desk, not even a carpet, another of which was empty except for an electric light bulb and a large blue jug. These rooms were icy cold, whatever the time of year. On their descending the stairs after these expeditions, Mr. Lowther would often be standing waiting for them, shyly smiling in the hall with his hands clasped together as if he hoped that everything was to their satisfaction. He took roses from the bowl and presented one each to the girls before they went home.

Mr. Lowther never seemed quite at home in his home, although he had been born there. He always looked at Miss Brodie for approval before he touched anything or opened a cupboard as if, really, he was not allowed to touch without permission. The girls decided that perhaps his mother, now four years dead, had kept him under all his life, and he was consequently unable to see himself as master of the house.

He sat silently and gratefully watching Miss Brodie entertain the two girls whose turn it was to be there, when she had already started on her project of fattening him up which was to grow to such huge proportions that her food-supplying mania was the talk of Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr, and so of the Junior school. One day, when Sandy and Jenny were on the visiting rota, she gave Mr. Lowther, for tea alone, an admirable lobster salad, some sandwiches of liver paste, cake and tea, followed by a bowl of porridge and cream. These were served to him on a tray for himself alone, you could see he was on a special diet. Sandy was anxious to see if Mr. Lowther would manage the porridge as well as everything else. But he worked his way through everything with impassive obedience while she questioned the girls: “What are you doing in the art class just now?”

“We’re at work on the poster competition.”

“Mr. Lloyd—is he well?”

“Oh yes, he’s great fun. He showed us his studio two weeks ago.”

“Which studio, where? At his house?”—although Miss Brodie knew perfectly well.

“Yes, it’s a great long attic, it—”

“Did you meet his wife, what was she like? What did she say, did she give you tea? What are the children like, what did you do when you got there? ...”

She did not attempt to conceal from her munching host her keen interest in the art master. Mr. Lowther’s eyes looked mournful and he ate on. Sandy and Jenny knew that similar questions had been pressed upon Mary Macgregor and Eunice Gardiner the previous week, and upon Rose Stanley and Monica Douglas the week before. But Miss Brodie could not hear enough versions of the same story if it involved Teddy Lloyd, and now that the girls had been to his house—a large and shabby, a warm and unconventional establishment in the north of Edinburgh—Miss Brodie was in a state of high excitement by very contact with these girls who had lately breathed Lloyd air.

“How many children?” said Miss Brodie, her teapot poised.

“Five, I think,” said Sandy.

“Six, I think,” said Jenny, “counting the baby.”

“There are lots of babies,” said Sandy.

“Roman Catholics, of course,” said Miss Brodie, addressing this to Mr. Lowther.

“But the littlest baby,” said Jenny, “you’ve forgotten to count the wee baby. That makes six.”

Miss Brodie poured tea and cast a glance at Gordon Lowther’s plate.

“Gordon,” she said, “a cake.”

He shook his head and said softly, as if soothing her, “Oh, no, no.”

“Yes, Gordon. It is full of goodness.” And she made him eat a Chester cake, and spoke to him in a slightly more Edinburgh way than usual, so as to make up to him by both means for the love she was giving to Teddy Lloyd instead of to him.

“You must be fattened up, Gordon,” she said. “You must be two stone the better before I go my holidays.”

He smiled as best he could at everyone in turn, with his drooped head and slowly moving jaws. Meanwhile Miss Brodie said:

“And Mrs. Lloyd—is she a woman, would you say, in her prime?”

“Perhaps not yet,” said Sandy.

“Well, Mrs. Lloyd may be past it,” Jenny said. “It’s difficult to say with her hair being long on her shoulders. It makes her look young although she may not be.”