The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (2 page)

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. I was engaged to a young man at the beginning of the War but he fell on Flanders Field," said Miss Brodie. "Are you thinking, Sandy, of doing a day's washing?"

"No, Miss Brodie."

"Because you have got your sleeves rolled up. I won't have to do with girls who roll up the sleeves of their blouses, however fine the weather. Roll them down at once, we are civilized beings. He fell the week before Armistice was declared. He fell like an autumn leaf, although he was only twenty-two years of age. When we go indoors we shall look on the map at Flanders, and the spot where my lover was laid before you were born. He was poor. He came from Ayrshire, a countryman, but a hardworking and clever scholar. He said, when he asked me to marry him, "We shall have to drink water and walk slow." That was Hugh's country way of expressing that we would live quietly. We shall drink water and walk slow. What does the saying signify, Rose?"

"That you would live quietly, Miss Brodie," said Rose Stanley who six years later had a great reputation for sex.

The story of Miss Brodie's felled fiancé was well on its way when the headmistress, Miss Mackay, was seen to approach across the lawn. Tears had already started to drop from Sandy's little pig-like eyes and Sandy's tears now affected her friend Jenny, later famous in the school for her beauty, who gave a sob and groped up the leg of her knickers for her handkerchief. "Hugh was killed," said Miss Brodie, "a week before the Armistice. After that there was a general election and people were saying, 'Hang the Kaiser!' Hugh was one of the Flowers of the Forest, lying in his grave." Rose Stanley had now begun to weep. Sandy slid her wet eyes sideways, watching the advance of Miss Mackay, head and shoulders forward, across the lawn.

"I am come to see you and I have to be off," she said. "What are you little girls crying for?" "They are moved by a story I have been telling them. We are having a history lesson," said Miss Brodie, catching a falling leaf neatly in her hand as she spoke.

"Crying over a story at ten years of age!" said Miss Mackay to the girls who had stragglingly risen from the benches, still dazed with Hugh the warrior. "I am only come to see you and I must be off. Well, girls, the new term has begun. I hope you all had a splendid summer holiday and I look forward to seeing your splendid essays on how you spent them. You shouldn't be crying over history at the age of ten. My word!"

"You did well," said Miss Brodie to the class, when Miss Mackay had gone, "not to answer the question put to you. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden. Mary, are you listening? What was I saying?"

Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twentythree, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, "Golden."

"What did I say was golden?"

Mary cast her eyes around her and up above. Sandy whispered, "The falling leaves."

"The falling leaves," said Mary.

"Plainly," said Miss Brodie, "you were not listening to me. If only you small girls would listen to me I would make of you the crème de la crème."

2

Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realised that Jean Brodie's confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love-story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie, certainly never disliked her, when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of real misery â

when her first and last boy friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again â she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie's pupils. "Who has spilled ink on the floor â was it you, Mary?"

"I don't know, Miss Brodie."

"I daresay it was you. I've never come across such a clumsy girl. And if you can't take an interest in what I am saying, please try to look as if you did." These were the days that Mary Macgregor, on looking back, found to be the happiest days of her life.

Sandy Stranger had a feeling at the time that they were supposed to be the happiest days of her life, and on her tenth birthday she said so to her best friend Jenny Gray who had been asked to tea at Sandy's house. The speciality of the feast was pineapple cubes with cream, and the speciality of the day was that they were left to themselves. To Sandy the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness and she focussed her small eyes closely on the pale gold cubes before she scooped them up in her spoon, and she thought the sharp taste on her tongue was that of a special happiness, which was nothing to do with eating, and was different from the happiness of play that one enjoyed unawares. Both girls saved the cream to the last, then ate it in spoonfuls.

"Little girls, you are going to be the crème de la crème," said Sandy, and Jenny spluttered her cream into her handkerchief.

"You know," Sandy said, "these are supposed to be the happiest days of our lives."

"Yes, they are always saying that," Jenny said. "They say, make the most of your schooldays because you never know what lies ahead of you."

"Miss Brodie says prime is best," Sandy said.

"Yes, but she never got married like our mothers and fathers."

"They don't have primes," said Sandy.

"They have sexual intercourse," Jenny said.

The little girls paused, because this was still a stupendous thought, and one which they had only lately lit upon; the very phrase and its meaning were new. It was quite unbelievable. Sandy said, then, "Mr. Lloyd had a baby last week. He must have commited sex with his wife." This idea was easier to cope with and they laughed screamingly into their pink paper napkins. Mr. Lloyd was the Art master to the senior girls.

"Can you see it happening?" Jenny whispered.

Sandy screwed her eyes even smaller in the effort of seeing with her mind. "He would be wearing his pyjamas," she whispered back.

The girls rocked with mirth, thinking of one-armed Mr. Lloyd, in his solemnity, striding into school.

Then Jenny said, "You do it on the spur of the moment. That's how it happens." Jenny was a reliable source of information, because a girl employed by her father in his grocer shop had recently been found to be pregnant, and Jenny had picked up some fragments of the ensuing fuss. Having confided her finds to Sandy, they had embarked on a course of research which they called "research," piecing together clues from remembered conversations illicitly overheard, and passages from the big dictionaries.

"It all happens in a flash," Jenny said. "It happened to Teenie when she was out walking at Puddocky with her boy friend. Then they had to get married."

"You would think the urge would have passed by the time she got her clothes off," Sandy said. By "clothes," she definitely meant to imply knickers, but "knickers" was rude in this scientific context.

"Yes, that's what I can't understand," said Jenny.

Sandy's mother looked round the door and said, "Enjoying yourselves, darlings?" Over her shoulder appeared the head of Jenny's mother. "My word," said Jenny's mother, looking at the tea-table, "they've been tucking in!"

Sandy felt offended and belittled by this; it was as if the main idea of the party had been the food.

"What would you like to do now?" Sandy's mother said.

Sandy gave her mother a look of secret ferocity which meant: you promised to leave us all on our own, and a promise is a promise, you know it's very bad to break a promise to a child, you might ruin all my life by breaking your promise, it's my birthday. Sandy's mother backed away bearing Jenny's mother with her. "Let's leave them to themselves," she said. "Just enjoy yourselves, darlings." Sandy was sometimes embarrassed by her mother being English and calling her

"darling," not like the mothers of Edinburgh who said "dear." Sandy's mother had a flashy winter coat trimmed with fluffy fox fur like the Duchess of York's, while the other mothers wore tweed or, at the most, musquash that would do them all their days. It had been raining and the ground was too wet for them to go and finish digging the hole to Australia, so the girls lifted the tea-table with all its festal relics over to the corner of the room. Sandy opened the lid of the piano stool and extracted a notebook from between two sheaves of music. On the first page of the notebook was written, The Mountain Eyrie by Sandy Stranger and Jenny Gray This was a story, still in the process of composition, about Miss Brodie's lover, Hugh Carruthers. He had not been killed in the war, that was a mistake in the telegram. He had come back from the war and called to enquire for Miss Brodie at school, where the first person whom he encountered was Miss Mackay, the headmistress. She had informed him that Miss Brodie did not desire to see him, she loved another. With a bitter, harsh laugh, Hugh went and made his abode in a mountain eyrie, where, wrapped in a leathern jacket, he had been discovered one day by Sandy and Jenny. At the present stage in the story Hugh was holding Sandy captive but Jenny had escaped by night and was attempting to find her way down the mountainside in the dark. Hugh was preparing to pursue her. Sandy took a pencil from a drawer in the sideboard and continued:

"Hugh!" Sandy beseeched him, "I swear to you before all I hold sacred that Miss Brodie has never loved another, and she awaits you below, praying and hoping in her prime. If you will let Jenny go, she will bring back your lover Jean Brodie to you and you will see her with your own eyes and hold her in your arms after these twelve long years and a day." His black eye flashed in the lamplight of the hut. "Back, girl!" he cried, "and do not bar my way. Well do I know that yon girl Jenny will report my whereabouts to my mocking erstwhile fiancée. Well do I know that you are both spies sent by her that she might mock. Stand back from the door, I say!"

"Never!" said Sandy, placing her young lithe body squarely in front of the latch and her arm through the bolt. Her large eyes flashed with an azure light of appeal. Sandy handed the pencil to Jenny. "It's your turn," she said. Jenny wrote: With one movement he flung her to the farthest end of the hut and strode out into the moonlight and his strides made light of the drifting snow.

"Put in about his boots," said Sandy.

Jenny wrote: His high boots flashed in the moonlight.

"There are too many moonlights," Sandy said, "but we can sort that later when it comes to publication."

"Oh, but it's a secret, Sandy!" said Jenny.

"I know that," Sandy said. "Don't worry, we won't publish it till our prime."

"Do you think Miss Brodie ever had sexual intercourse with Hugh?" said Jenny.

"She would have had a baby, wouldn't she?"

"I don't know."

"I don't think they did anything like that," said Sandy. "Their love was above all that."

"Miss Brodie said they clung to each other with passionate abandon on his last leave."

"I don't think they took their clothes off, though," Sandy said, "do you?"

"No. I can't see it," said Jenny.

"I wouldn't like to have sexual intercourse," Sandy said.

"Neither would I. I'm going to marry a pure person."

"Have a toffee."

They ate their sweets, sitting on the carpet. Sandy put some coal on the fire and the light spurted up, reflecting on Jenny's ringlets. "Let's be witches by the fire, like we were at Hallowe'en."

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 grownup 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,