The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (3 page)

They sat in the twilight eating toffees and incanting witches’ spells. Jenny said, “There’s a Greek god at the museum standing up with nothing on. I saw it last Sunday afternoon but I was with Auntie Kate and I didn’t have a chance to
look
properly.”

“Let’s go to the museum next Sunday,” Sandy said. “It’s research.”

“Would you be allowed to go alone with me?”

Sandy, who was notorious for not being allowed to go out and about without a grown-up person, said, “I don’t think so. Perhaps we could get someone to take us.”

“We could ask Miss Brodie.”

Miss Brodie frequently took the little girls to the art galleries and museums, so this seemed feasible.

“But suppose,” said Sandy, “she won’t let us look at the statue if it’s naked.”

“I don’t think she would notice that it was naked,” Jenny said. “She just wouldn’t see its thingummyjig.”

“I know,” said Sandy. “Miss Brodie’s above all that.”

It was time for Jenny to go home with her mother, all the way in the tram car through the haunted November twilight of Edinburgh across the Dean Bridge. Sandy waved from the window, and wondered if Jenny, too, had the feeling of leading a double life, fraught with problems that even a millionaire did not have to face. It was well known that millionaires led double lives. The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house.

Miss Brodie was reciting poetry to the class at a quarter to four, to raise their minds before they went home. Miss Brodie’s eyes were half shut and her head was thrown back:

In the stormy east wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

Over tower’d Camelot.

Sandy watched Miss Brodie through her little pale eyes, screwed them smaller and shut her lips tight.

Rose Stanley was pulling threads from the girdle of her gym tunic. Jenny was enthralled by the poem, her lips were parted, she was never bored. Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored.

Down she came and found a boat

Beneath a willow left afloat,

And round about the prow she wrote

The Lady of Shalott
.

“By what means did your Ladyship write these words?” Sandy enquired in her mind with her lips shut tight.

“There was a pot of white paint and a brush which happened to be standing upon the grassy verge,” replied the Lady of Shalott graciously. “It was left there no doubt by some heedless member of the Unemployed.”

“Alas, and in all that rain!” said Sandy for want of something better to say, while Miss Brodie’s voice soared up to the ceiling, and curled round the feet of the Senior girls upstairs.

The Lady of Shalott placed a white hand on Sandy’s shoulder and gazed at her for a space. “That one so young and beautiful should be so ill-fated in love!” she said in low sad tones.

“What can be the meaning of these words?” cried Sandy in alarm, with her little eyes screwed on Miss Brodie and her lips shut tight.

Miss Brodie said: “Sandy, are you in pain?”

Sandy looked astonished.

“You girls,” said Miss Brodie, “must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!”

All heads turned to look at the reproduction which Miss Brodie had brought back from her travels and pinned on the wall. Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.

“She is older than the rocks on which she sits. Would that I had been given charge of you girls when you were seven. I sometimes fear it’s too late, now. If you had been mine when you were seven you would have been the crème de la crème. Sandy, come and read some stanzas and let us hear your vowel sounds.”

Sandy, being half-English, made the most of her vowels, it was her only fame. Rose Stanley was not yet famous for sex, and it was not she but Eunice Gardiner who had approached Sandy and Jenny with a Bible, pointing out the words, “The babe leapt in her womb.” Sandy and Jenny said she was dirty and threatened to tell on her. Jenny was already famous for her prettiness and had a sweet voice, so that Mr. Lowther, who came to teach singing, would watch her admiringly as she sang “Come see where golden-hearted spring …”; and he twitched her ringlets, the more daringly since Miss Brodie always stayed with her pupils during the singing lesson. He twitched her ringlets and looked at Miss Brodie like a child showing off its tricks and almost as if testing Miss Brodie to see if she were at all willing to conspire in his un-Edinburgh conduct.

Mr. Lowther was small, with a long body and short legs. His hair and moustache were red-gold: He curled his hand round the back of his ear and inclined his head towards each girl to test her voice. “Sing ah!”

“Ah!” sang Jenny, high and pure as the sea maiden of the Hebrides whom Sandy had been talking about. But her eyes swivelled over to catch Sandy’s.

Miss Brodie ushered the girls from the music room and, gathering them about her, said, “You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. Form a single file, now, please, and walk with your heads up,
up
like Sybil Thorndike, a woman of noble mien.”

Sandy craned back her head, pointed her freckled nose in the air and fixed her little pig-like eyes on the ceiling as she walked along in the file.

“What are you doing, Sandy?”

“Walking like Sybil Thorndike, ma’am.”

“One day, Sandy, you will go too far.”

Sandy looked hurt and puzzled.

“Yes,” said Miss Brodie, “I have my eye upon you, Sandy. I observe a frivolous nature. I fear you will never belong to life’s elite or, as one might say, the crème de la crème.”

When they had returned to the classroom Rose Stanley said, “I’ve got ink on my blouse.”

“Go to the science room and have the stain removed; but remember it is very bad for the tussore.”

Sometimes the girls would put a little spot of ink on a sleeve of their tussore silk blouses so that they might be sent to the science room in the Senior school. There a thrilling teacher, a Miss Lockhart, wearing a white overall, with her grey short hair set back in waves from a tanned and weathered golfer’s face, would pour a small drop of white liquid from a large jar on to a piece of cotton wool. With this, she would dab the ink-spot on the sleeve, silently holding the girl’s arm, intently absorbed in the task. Rose Stanley went to the science room with her inky blouse only because she was bored, but Sandy and Jenny got ink on their blouses at discreet intervals of four weeks, so that they could go and have their arms held by Miss Lockhart who seemed to carry six inches of pure air around her person wherever she moved in that strange-smelling room. This long room was her natural setting and she had lost something of her quality when Sandy saw her walking from the school in her box-pleat tweeds over to her sports car like an ordinary teacher. Miss Lockhart in the science room was to Sandy something apart, surrounded by three lanes of long benches set out with jars half-full of coloured crystals and powders and liquids, ochre and bronze and metal grey and cobalt blue, glass vessels of curious shapes, bulbous, or with pipe-like stems. Only once when Sandy went to the science room was there a lesson in progress. The older girls, big girls, some with bulging chests, were standing in couples at the benches, with gas jets burning before them. They held a glass tube full of green stuff in their hands and were dancing the tube in the flame, dozens of dancing green tubes and flames, all along the benches. The bare winter top branches of the trees brushed the windows of this long room, and beyond that was the cold winter sky with a huge red sun. Sandy, on that occasion, had the presence of mind to remember that her schooldays were supposed to be the happiest days of her life and she took the compelling news back to Jenny that the Senior School was going to be marvellous and Miss Lockhart was beautiful.

“All the girls in the science room were doing just as they liked,” said Sandy, “and that’s what they were supposed to be doing.”

“We do a lot of what we like in Miss Brodie’s class,” Jenny said. “My mummy says Miss Brodie gives us too much freedom.”

“She’s not supposed to give us freedom, she’s supposed to give us lessons,” said Sandy. “But the science class is supposed to be free, it’s allowed.”

“Well, I like being in Miss Brodie’s,” Jenny said.

“So do I,” Sandy said. “She takes an interest in our general knowledge, my mother says.”

All the same, the visits to the science room were Sandy’s most secret joy, and she calculated very carefully the intervals between one ink-spot and another, so that there should be no suspicion on Miss Brodie’s part that the spots were not an accident. Miss Lockhart would hold her arm and carefully dab the inkstain on her sleeve while Sandy stood enthralled by the long room which was this science teacher’s rightful place, and by the lawful glamour of everything there. It was on the occasion when Rose Stanley, after the singing lesson, was sent to the science room to get ink off her blouse that Miss Brodie told her class,

“You must be more careful with your ink. I can’t have my girls going up and down to the science room like this. We must keep our good name.”

She added, “Art is greater than science. Art comes first, and then science.”

The large map had been rolled down over the blackboard because they had started the geography lesson. Miss Brodie turned with her pointer to show where Alaska lay. But she turned again to the class and said: “Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance.”

This was the first winter of the two years that this class spent with Miss Brodie. It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls’ education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie’s special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf. “It is for the sake of you girls—my influence, now, in the years of my prime.” This was the beginning of the Brodie set. Eunice Gardiner was so quiet at first, it was difficult to see why she had been drawn in by Miss Brodie. But eventually she cut capers for the relief and amusement of the tea-parties, doing cart-wheels on the carpet. “You are an Ariel,” said Miss Brodie. Then Eunice began to chatter. She was not allowed to do cart-wheels on Sundays, for in many ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye. Eunice Gardiner did somersaults on the mat only at Saturday gatherings before high teas, or afterwards on Miss Brodie’s kitchen linoleum, while the other girls were washing up and licking honey from the depleted comb off their fingers as they passed it over to be put away in the food cupboard. It was twenty-eight years after Eunice did the splits in Miss Brodie’s flat that she, who had become a nurse and married a doctor, said to her husband one evening:

“Next year when we go for the Festival—”

“Yes?”

She was making a wool rug, pulling at a different stitch.

“Yes?” he said.

“When we go to Edinburgh,” she said, “remind me while we’re there to go and visit Miss Brodie’s grave.”

“Who was Miss Brodie?”

“A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime.”

“Prime what?”

“Her prime of life. She fell for an Egyptian courier once, on her travels, and came back and told us all about it. She had a few favourites. I was one of them. I did the splits and made her laugh, you know.”

“I always knew your upbringing was a bit peculiar.”

“But she wasn’t mad. She was as sane as anything. She knew exactly what she was doing. She told us all about her love life, too.”

“Let’s have it then.”

“Oh, it’s a long story. She was just a spinster. I must take flowers to her grave—I wonder if I could find it?”

“When did she die?”

“Just after the war. She was retired by then. Her retirement was rather a tragedy, she was forced to retire before time. The head never liked her. There’s a long story attached to Miss Brodie’s retirement. She was betrayed by one of her own girls, we were called the Brodie set. I never found out which one betrayed her.”

It is time now to speak of the long walk through the old parts of Edinburgh where Miss Brodie took her set, dressed in their deep violet coats and black velour hats with the green and white crest, one Friday in March when the school’s central heating system had broken down and everyone else had been muffled up and sent home. The wind blew from the icy Forth and the sky was loaded with forthcoming snow. Mary Macgregor walked with Sandy because Jenny had gone home. Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head, and for her anger, walked behind them with her dark red face, broad nose and dark pigtails falling from her black hat and her legs already shaped like pegs in their black wool stockings. By her side walked Rose Stanley, tall and blonde with a yellow-pale skin, who had not yet won her reputation for sex, and whose conversation was all about trains, cranes, motor cars, Meccanos and other boys’ affairs. She was not interested in the works of engines or the constructive powers of the Meccanos, but she knew their names, the variety of colours in which they came, the makes of motor cars and their horse-power, the various prices of the Meccano sets. She was also an energetic climber of walls and trees. And although these concerns at Rose Stanley’s eleventh year marked her as a tomboy, they did not go deep into her femininity and it was her superficial knowledge of these topics alone, as if they had been a conscious preparation, which stood her in good stead a few years later with the boys.