The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (13 page)

Jenny had done badly in her last term’s examinations and was mostly, these days, at home working up her subjects. Sandy had the definite feeling that the Brodie set, not to mention Miss Brodie herself, was getting out of hand. She thought it perhaps a good thing that the set might split up.

From somewhere below one of the Lloyd children started to yell, and then another, and then a chorus. Deirdre Lloyd disappeared with a swing of her peasant skirt to see to all her children. The Lloyds were Catholics and so were made to have a lot of children by force.

“One day,” said Teddy Lloyd as he stacked up his sketches before taking Sandy down to tea, “I would like to do all you Brodie girls, one by one and then all together.” He tossed his head to move back the golden lock of his hair from his eye. “It would be nice to do you all together,” he said, “and see what sort of a group portrait I could make of you.”

Sandy thought this might be an attempt to keep the Brodie set together at the expense of the newly glimpsed individuality of its members. She turned on him in her new manner of sudden irritability and said, “We’d look like one big Miss Brodie, I suppose.”

He laughed in a delighted way and looked at her more closely, as if for the first time. She looked back just as closely through her little eyes, with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge. Whereupon he kissed her long and wetly. He said in his hoarse voice, “That’ll teach you to look at an artist like that.”

She started to run to the door, wiping her mouth dry with the back of her hand, but he caught her with his one arm and said: “There’s no need to run away. You’re just about the ugliest little thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He walked out and left her standing in the studio, and there was nothing for her to do but to follow him downstairs. Deirdre Lloyd’s voice called from the sitting-room. “In here, Sandy.”

She spent most of the tea time trying to sort out her preliminary feelings in the matter, which was difficult because of the children who were present and making demands on the guest. The eldest boy, who was eight, turned on the wireless and began to sing in mincing English tones, “Oh play to me, Gipsy” to the accompaniment of Henry Hall’s band. The other three children were making various kinds of din. Above this noise Deirdre Lloyd requested Sandy to call her Deirdre rather than Mrs. Lloyd. And so Sandy did not have much opportunity to discover how she was feeling inside herself about Teddy Lloyd’s kiss and his words, and to decide whether she was insulted or not. He now said, brazenly, “And you can call me Teddy outside of school.” Amongst themselves, in any case, the girls called him Teddy the Paint. Sandy looked from one to the other of the Lloyds.

“I’ve heard such a lot about Miss Brodie from the girls,” Deirdre was saying. “I really must ask her to tea. D’you think she’d like to come?”

“No,” said Teddy.

“Why?” said Deirdre, not that it seemed to matter, she was so languid and long-armed, lifting the plate of biscuits from the table and passing them round without moving from the low stool on which she sat.

“You kids stop that row or you leave the room,” Teddy declared.

“Bring Miss Brodie to tea,” Deirdre said to Sandy.

“She won’t come,” Teddy said, “—will she, Sandy?”

“She’s awfully busy” Sandy said.

“Pass me a fag,” said Deirdre.

“Is she still looking after Lowther?” said Teddy.

“Well, yes, a bit—”

“Lowther,” said Teddy, waving his only arm, “must have a way with women. He’s got half the female staff of the school looking after him. Why doesn’t he employ a housekeeper?— He’s got plenty of money, no wife, no kids, no rent to pay, it’s his own house. Why doesn’t he get a proper housekeeper?”

“I think he likes Miss Brodie,” Sandy said.

“But what does she see in him?”

“He sings to her,” Sandy said, suddenly sharp.

Deirdre laughed. “Miss Brodie sounds a bit queer, I must say. What age is she?”

“Jean Brodie,” said Teddy, “is a magnificent woman in her prime.” He got up, tossing back his lock of hair, and left the room.

Deirdre blew a cloud of reflective smoke and stubbed out her cigarette, and Sandy said she would have to go now.

Mr. Lowther had caused Miss Brodie a good deal of worry in the past two years. There had been a time when it seemed he might be thinking of marrying Miss Alison Kerr, and another time when he seemed to favour Miss Ellen, all the while being in love with Miss Brodie herself, who refused him all but her bed-fellowship and her catering.

He tired of food, for it was making him fat and weary and putting him out of voice. He wanted a wife to play golf with and to sing to. He wanted a honeymoon on the Hebridean island of Eigg, near Rum, and then to return to Cramond with the bride.

In the midst of this dissatisfaction had occurred Ellen Kerr’s finding of a nightdress of quality folded under the pillow next to Mr. Lowther’s in that double bed on which, to make matters worse, he had been born.

Still Miss Brodie refused him. He fell into a melancholy mood upon his retirement from the offices of choir-master and Elder, and the girls thought he brooded often upon the possibility that Miss Brodie could not take to his short legs, and was all the time pining for Teddy Lloyd’s long ones.

Most of this Miss Brodie obliquely confided in the girls as they grew from thirteen to fourteen and from fourteen to fifteen. She did not say, even obliquely, that she slept with the singing master, for she was still testing them out to see whom she could trust, as it would be her way to put it. She did not want any alarming suspicions to arise in the minds of their parents. Miss Brodie was always very careful to impress the parents of her set and to win their approval and gratitude. So she confided according to what seemed expedient at the time, and was in fact now on the look-out for a girl amongst her set in whom she could confide entirely, whose curiosity was greater than her desire to make a sensation outside, and who, in the need to gain further confidences from Miss Brodie, would never betray what had been gained. Of necessity there had to be but one girl; two would be dangerous. Almost shrewdly, Miss Brodie fixed on Sandy, and even then it was not of her own affairs that she spoke.

In the summer of nineteen-thirty-five the whole school was forced to wear rosettes of red, white and blue ribbon in the lapels of its blazers, because of the Silver Jubilee. Rose Stanley lost hers and said it was probably in Teddy Lloyd’s studio. This was not long after Sandy’s visit to the art master’s residence.

“What are you doing for the summer holidays, Rose?” said Miss Brodie.

“My father’s taking me to the Highlands for a fortnight. After that, I don’t know. I suppose I’ll be sitting for Mr. Lloyd off and on.”

“Good,” said Miss Brodie.

Miss Brodie started to confide in Sandy after the next summer holidays. They played rounds of golf in the sunny early autumn after school.

“All my ambitions,” said Miss Brodie, “are fixed on yourself and Rose. You will not speak of this to the other girls, it would cause envy. I had hopes of Jenny, she is so pretty; but Jenny has become insipid, don’t you think?”

This was a clever question, because it articulated what was already growing in Sandy’s mind. Jenny had bored her this last year, and it left her lonely.

“Don’t you think?” said Miss Brodie, towering above her, for Sandy was playing out of a bunker. Sandy gave a hack with her niblick and said, “Yes, a bit,” sending the ball in a little backward half-circle.

“And I had hopes of Eunice,” Miss Brodie said presently, “but she seems to be interested in some boy she goes swimming with.”

Sandy was not yet out of the bunker. It was sometimes difficult to follow Miss Brodie’s drift when she was in her prophetic moods. One had to wait and see what emerged. In the meantime she glanced up at Miss Brodie who was standing on the crest of the bunker which was itself on a crest of the hilly course. Miss Brodie looked admirable in her heather-blue tweed with the brown of a recent holiday in Egypt still warming her skin. Miss Brodie was gazing out over Edinburgh as she spoke.

Sandy got out of the bunker. “Eunice,” said Miss Brodie, “will settle down and marry some professional man. Perhaps I have done her some good. Mary, well Mary. I never had any hopes of Mary. I thought, when you were young children that Mary might be something. She was a little pathetic. But she’s really a most irritating girl, I’d rather deal with a rogue than a fool. Monica will get her B.Sc. with honours I’ve no doubt, but she has no spiritual insight, and of course that’s why she’s—”

Miss Brodie was to drive off now and she had decided to stop talking until she had measured her distance and swiped her ball. Which she did. “—that’s why she has a bad temper, she understands nothing but signs and symbols and calculations. Nothing infuriates people more than their own lack of spiritual insight, Sandy, that is why the Moslems are so placid, they are full of spiritual insight. My dragoman in Egypt would not have it that Friday was their Lord’s Day. ‘Every day is the Lord’s day,’ he said to me. I thought that very profound, I felt humbled. We had already said our farewells on the day before my departure, Sandy, but lo and behold when I was already seated in the train, along the platform came my dragoman with a beautiful bunch of flowers for me. He had true dignity. Sandy, you will never get anywhere by hunching over your putter, hold your shoulders back and bend from the waist. He was a very splendid person with a great sense of his bearing.”

They picked up their balls and walked to the next tee. “Have you ever played with Miss Lockhart” Sandy said.

“Does she play golf?”

“Yes, rather well.” Sandy had met the science mistress surprisingly on the golf course one Saturday morning playing with Gordon Lowther.

“Good shot, Sandy. I know very little of Miss Lockhart,” said Miss Brodie. “I leave her to her jars and gases. They are all gross materialists, these women in the Senior school, they all belong to the Fabian Society and are pacifists. That’s the sort of thing Mr. Lowther, Mr. Lloyd and myself are up against when we are not up against the narrow-minded, half-educated crowd in the junior departments. Sandy, I’ll swear you are short-sighted, the way you peer at people. You must get spectacles.”

“I’m not,” said Sandy irritably, “it only seems so.”

“It’s unnerving,” said Miss Brodie. “Do you know, Sandy dear, all my ambitions are for you and Rose. You have got insight, perhaps not quite spiritual, but you’re a deep one, and Rose has got instinct, Rose has got instinct.”

“Perhaps not quite spiritual,” said Sandy.

“Yes,” said Miss Brodie, “you’re right. Rose has got a future by virtue of her instinct.”

“She has an instinct how to sit for her portrait,” said Sandy.

“That’s what I mean by your insight,” said Miss Brodie. “I ought to know, because my prime has brought me instinct and insight, both.”

Fully to savour her position, Sandy would go and stand outside St. Giles’ Cathedral or the Tolbooth, and contemplate these emblems of a dark and terrible salvation which made the fires of the damned seem very merry to the imagination by contrast, and much preferable. Nobody in her life, at home or at school, had ever spoken of Calvinism except as a joke that had once been taken seriously. She did not at the time understand that her environment had not been on the surface peculiar to the place, as was the environment of the Edinburgh social classes just above or, even more, just below her own. She had no experience of social class at all. In its outward forms her fifteen years might have been spent in any suburb of any city in the British Isles; her school, with its alien house system, might have been in Ealing. All she was conscious of now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to cease to be protected from it by enlightened people.

In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God’s pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.

Sandy was unable to formulate these exciting propositions; nevertheless she experienced them in the air she breathed, she sensed them in the curiously defiant way in which the people she knew broke the Sabbath, and she smelt them in the excesses of Miss Brodie in her prime. Now that she was allowed to go about alone, she walked round the certainly forbidden quarters of Edinburgh to look at the blackened monuments and hear the unbelievable curses of drunken men and women, and, comparing their faces with the faces from Morningside and Merchisten with which she was familiar, she saw, with stabs of new and exciting Calvinistic guilt, that there was not much difference.

In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more.

It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea which fascinated Sandy in her present mind. After all, it was only an idea. And there was no pressing hurry in the matter, for Miss Brodie liked to take her leisure over the unfolding of her plans, most of her joy deriving from the preparation, and moreover, even if these plans were as clear to her own mind as they were to Sandy’s, the girls were too young. All the same, by the time the girls were sixteen Miss Brodie was saying to her set at large: “Sandy will make an excellent Secret Service agent, a great spy”; and to Sandy alone she had started saying, “Rose will be a great lover. She is above the common moral code, it does not apply to her. This is a fact which it is not expedient for anyone to hear about who is not endowed with insight.”