The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (4 page)

With Rose walked Miss Brodie, head up, like Sybil Thorndike, her nose arched and proud. She wore her loose brown tweed coat with the beaver collar tightly buttoned, her brown felt hat with the brim up at one side and down at the other. Behind Miss Brodie, last in the group, little Eunice Gardiner who, twenty-eight years later, said of Miss Brodie, “I must visit her grave,” gave a skip between each of her walking steps as if she might even break into pirouettes on the pavement, so that Miss Brodie, turning round, said from time to time, “Now, Eunice!” And, from time to time again, Miss Brodie would fall behind to keep Eunice company.

Sandy, who had been reading
Kidnapped
, was having a conversation with the hero, Alan Breck, and was glad to be with Mary Macgregor because it was not necessary to talk to Mary.

“Mary, you may speak quietly to Sandy.”

“Sandy won’t talk to me,” said Mary who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died.

“Sandy cannot talk to you if you are so stupid and disagreeable. Try to wear an agreeable expression at least, Mary.”

“Sandy, you must take this message o’er the heather to the Macphersons,” said Alan Breck. “My life depends upon it, and the Cause no less.”

“I shall never fail you, Alan Breck,” said Sandy. “Never.”

“Mary,” said Miss Brodie, from behind, “please try not to lag behind Sandy.”

Sandy kept pacing ahead, fired on by Alan Breck whose ardour and thankfulness, as Sandy prepared to set off across the heather, had reached touching proportions.

Mary tried to keep up with her. They were crossing the Meadows, a gusty expanse of common land, glaring green under the snowy sky. Their destination was the Old Town, for Miss Brodie had said they should see where history had been lived; and their route had brought them to the Middle Meadow Walk.

Eunice, unaccompanied at the back, began to hop to a rhyme which she repeated to herself:

Edinburgh, Leith,

Portobello, Musselburgh

And
Dalkeith.

Then she changed to the other foot.

Edinburgh, Leith …

Miss Brodie turned round and hushed her, then called forward to Mary Macgregor who was staring at an Indian student who was approaching,

“Mary, don’t you
want
to walk tidily?”

“Mary,” said Sandy, “stop staring at the brown man.”

The nagged child looked numbly at Sandy and tried to quicken her pace. But Sandy was walking unevenly, in little spurts forward and little halts, as Alan Breck began to sing to her his ditty before she took to the heather to deliver the message that was going to save Alan’s life. He sang:

This is the song of the sword of Alan:

The smith made it,

The fire set it;

Now it shines in the hand of Alan Breck.

Then Alan Breck clapped her shoulder and said, “Sandy, you are a brave lass and want nothing in courage that any King’s man might possess.”

“Don’t walk so fast,” mumbled Mary.

“You aren’t walking with your head up,” said Sandy. “Keep it up, up.”

Then suddenly Sandy wanted to be kind to Mary Macgregor, and thought of the possibilities of feeling nice from being nice to Mary instead of blaming her. Miss Brodie’s voice from behind was saying to Rose Stanley, “You are all heroines in the making. Britain must be a fit country for heroines to live in. The League of Nations …” The sound of Miss Brodie’s presence, just when it was on the tip of Sandy’s tongue to be nice to Mary Macgregor, arrested the urge. Sandy looked back at her companions, and understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head. She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice and Monica, all in a frightening little moment, in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose.

She was even more frightened then, by her temptation to be nice to Mary Macgregor, since by this action she would separate herself, and be lonely, and blameable in a more dreadful way than Mary who, although officially the faulty one, was at least inside Miss Brodie’s category of heroines in the making. So, for good fellowship’s sake, Sandy said to Mary, “I wouldn’t be walking with
you
if Jenny was here.” And Mary said, “I know.” Then Sandy started to hate herself again and to nag on and on at Mary, with the feeling that if you did a thing a lot of times, you made it into a right thing. Mary started to cry, but quietly, so that Miss Brodie could not see. Sandy was unable to cope and decided to stride on and be a married lady having an argument with her husband:

“Well, Colin, it’s rather hard on a woman when the lights have fused and there isn’t a man in the house.”

“Dearest Sandy,
how
was I to know …”

As they came to the end of the Meadows a group of Girl Guides came by. Miss Brodie’s brood, all but Mary, walked past with eyes ahead. Mary stared at the dark blue big girls with their regimented vigorous look and broader accents of speech than the Brodie girls used when in Miss Brodie’s presence. They passed, and Sandy said to Mary, “It’s rude to stare.” And Mary said, “I wasn’t staring.” Meanwhile Miss Brodie was being questioned by the girls behind on the question of the Brownies and the Girl Guides, for quite a lot of the other girls in the Junior School were Brownies.

“For those who like that sort of thing,” said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, “that is the sort of thing they like.”

So Brownies and Guides were ruled out. Sandy recalled Miss Brodie’s admiration for Mussolini’s marching troops, and the picture she had brought back from Italy showing the triumphant march of the black uniforms in Rome.

“These are the fascisti,” said Miss Brodie, and spelt it out. “What are these men, Rose?”

“The fascisti, Miss Brodie.”

They were dark as anything and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie’s disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.

“We make good company for each other, Sandy,” said Alan Breck, crunching beneath his feet the broken glass in the blood on the floor of the ship’s round-house. And taking a knife from the table, he cut off one of the silver buttons from his coat. “Wherever you show that button,” he said, “the friends of Alan Breck will come around you.”

“We turn to the right,” said Miss Brodie.

They approached the Old Town which none of the girls had properly seen before, because none of their parents was so historically minded as to be moved to conduct their young into the reeking network of slums which the Old Town constituted in those years. The Canongate, The Grassmarket, The Lawnmarket, were names which betokened a misty region of crime and desperation: “Lawnmarket Man Jailed.”

Only Eunice Gardiner and Monica Douglas had already traversed the High Street on foot on the Royal Mile from the Casde or Holyrood. Sandy had been taken to Holyrood in an uncle’s car and had seen the bed, too short and too broad, where Mary Queen of Scots had slept, and the tiny room, smaller than their own scullery at home, where the Queen had played cards with Rizzio.

Now they were in a great square, the Grassmarket, with the Castle, which was in any case everywhere, rearing between a big gap in the houses where the aristocracy used to live. It was Sandy’s first experience of a foreign country, which intimates itself by its new smells and shapes and its new poor. A man sat on the icy-cold pavement, he just sat. A crowd of children, some without shoes, were playing some fight game, and some boys shouted after Miss Brodie’s violet-clad company, with words that the girls had not heard before, but rightly understood to be obscene. Children and women with shawls came in and out of the dark closes. Sandy found she was holding Mary’s hand in her bewilderment, all the girls were holding hands, while Miss Brodie talked of history. Into the High Street, and “John Knox,” said Miss Brodie, “was an embittered man. He could never be at ease with the gay French Queen. We of Edinburgh owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.” The smell was amazingly terrible. In the middle of the road farther up the High Street a crowd was gathered. “Walk past quietly,” said Miss Brodie.

A man and a woman stood in the midst of the crowd which had formed a ring round them. They were shouting at each other and the man hit the woman twice across the head. Another woman, very little, with cropped black hair, a red face and a big mouth, came forward and took the man by the arm. She said:

“I’ll be your man.”

From time to time throughout her life Sandy pondered this, for she was certain that the little woman’s words were “I’ll be your man,” not “I’ll be your woman,” and it was never explained.

And many times throughout her life Sandy knew with a shock, when speaking to people whose childhood had been in Edinburgh, that there were other people’s Edinburghs quite different from hers, and with which she held only the names of districts and streets and monuments in common. Similarly, there were other people’s nineteen-thirties. So that, in her middle age, when she was at last allowed all those visitors to the convent—so many visitors being against the Rule, but a special dispensation was enforced on Sandy because of her Treatise— when a man said, “I must have been at school in Edinburgh at the same time as you, Sister Helena,” Sandy, who was now some years Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, clutched the bars of the grille as was her way and peered at him through her little faint eyes and asked him to describe his schooldays and his school, and the Edinburgh he had known. And it turned out, once more, that his was a different Edinburgh from Sandy’s. His school, where he was a boarder, had been cold and grey. His teachers had been supercilious Englishmen, “or near-Englishmen,” said the visitor, “with third-rate degrees.” Sandy could not remember ever having questioned the quality of her teachers’ degrees, and the school had always been lit with the sun or, in winter, with a pearly north light. “But Edinburgh,” said the man, “was a beautiful city, more beautiful then than it is now. Of course, the slums have been cleared. The Old Town was always my favourite. We used to love to explore the Grassmarket and so on. Architecturally speaking, there is no finer sight in Europe.”

“I once was taken for a walk through the Canon-gate,” Sandy said, “but I was frightened by the squalor.”

“Well, it was the ’thirties,” said the man. “Tell me, Sister Helena, what would you say was your greatest influence during the ’thirties? I mean, during your teens. Did you read Auden and Eliot?”

“No,” said Sandy.

“We boys were very keen on Auden and that group of course. We wanted to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. On the Republican side, of course. Did you take sides in the Spanish Civil War at your school?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Sandy. “It was all different for us.”

“You weren’t a Catholic then, of course?”

“No,” said Sandy.

“The influences of one’s teens are very important,” said the man.

“Oh yes,” said Sandy, “even if they provide something to react against.”

“What was your biggest influence, then, Sister Helena? Was it political, personal? Was it Calvinism?”

“Oh no,” said Sandy. “But there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.” She clutched the bars of the grille as if she wanted to escape from the dim parlour beyond, for she was not composed like the other nuns who sat, when they received their rare visitors, well back in the darkness with folded hands. But Sandy always leaned forward and peered, clutching the bars with both hands, and the other sisters remarked it and said that Sister Helena had too much to bear from the world since she had published her psychological book which was so unexpectedly famed. But the dispensation was forced upon Sandy, and she clutched the bars and received the choice visitors, the psychologists and the Catholic seekers, and the higher journalist ladies and the academics who wanted to question her about her odd psychological treatise on the nature of moral perception, called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.”

“We will not go into St. Giles’,” said Miss Brodie, “because the day draws late. But I presume you have all been to St. Giles’ Cathedral?”

They had nearly all been in St. Giles’ with its tattered blood-stained banners of the past. Sandy had not been there, and did not want to go. The outsides of old Edinburgh churches frightened her, they were of such dark stone, like presences almost the colour of the Castle rock, and were built so warningly with their upraised fingers.

Miss Brodie had shown them a picture of Cologne Cathedral, like a wedding cake, which looked as if it had been built for pleasure and festivities, and parties given by the Prodigal Son in his early career. But the insides of Scottish churches were more reassuring because during the services they contained people, and no ghosts at all. Sandy, Rose Stanley and Monica Douglas were of believing though not church-going families. Jenny Gray and Mary Macgregor were Presbyterians and went to Sunday School. Eunice Gardiner was Episcopalian and claimed that she did not believe in Jesus, but in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Sandy, who believed in ghosts, felt that the Holy Ghost was a feasible proposition. The whole question was, during this winter term, being laid open by Miss Brodie who, at the same time as adhering to the strict Church of Scotland habits of her youth, and keeping the Sabbath, was now, in her prime, attending evening classes in comparative religion at the University. So her pupils heard all about it, and learned for the first time that some honest people did not believe in God, nor even Allah. But the girls were set to study the Gospels with diligence for their truth and goodness, and to read them aloud for their beauty.