The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (6 page)

"Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide," said Miss Brodie. "Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar. One should have an innate sense of these things. We ought to be doing history at the moment according to the time-table. Get out your history books and prop them up in your hands. I shall tell you a little more about Italy. I met a young poet by a fountain. Here is a picture of Dante meeting Beatrice â it is pronounced Beatrichay in Italian which makes the name very beautiful â on the Ponte Vecchio. He fell in love with her at that moment. Mary, sit up and don't slouch. It was a sublime moment in a sublime love. By whom was the picture painted?"

Nobody knew.

"It was painted by Rossetti. Who was Rossetti, Jenny?"

"A painter," said Jenny.

Miss Brodie looked suspicious.

"And a genius," said Sandy, to come to Jenny's rescue.

"A friend ofâââ?" said Miss Brodie.

"Swinburne," said a girl.

Miss Brodie smiled. "You have not forgotten," she said, looking round the class.

"Holidays or no holidays. Keep your history books propped up in case we have any further intruders." She looked disapprovingly towards the door and lifted her fine dark Roman head with dignity. She had often told the girls that her dead Hugh had admired her head for its Roman appearance.

"Next year," she said, "you will have the specialists to teach you history and mathematics and languages, a teacher for this and a teacher for that, a period of forty-five minutes for this and another for that. But in this your last year with me you will receive the fruits of my prime. They will remain with you all your days. First, however, I must mark the register for today before we forget. There are two new girls. Stand up the two new girls." They stood up with wide eyes while Miss Brodie sat down at her desk.

"You will get used to our ways. What religions are you?" said Miss Brodie with her pen poised on the page while, outside in the sky, the gulls from the Firth of Forth wheeled over the school and the green and golden tree-tops swayed towards the windows.

"Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray, And soothe me wi' tidings o' nature's decay âRobert Burns," said Miss Brodie when she had closed the register. "We are now well into the nineteen-thirties. I have four pounds of rosy apples in my desk, a gift from Mr. Lowther's orchard, let us eat them now while the coast is clear â not but what the apples do not come under my own jurisdiction, but discretion is... discretion is... Sandy?"

"The better part of valour, Miss Brodie." Her little eyes looked at Miss Brodie in a slightly smaller way.

Even before the official opening of her prime Miss Brodie's colleagues in the Junior school had been gradually turning against her. The teaching staff of the Senior school was indifferent or mildly amused, for they had not yet felt the impact of the Brodie set; that was to come the following year, and even then these Senior mistresses were not unduly irritated by the effects of what they called Miss Brodie's experimental methods. It was in the Junior school, among the lesser paid and lesser qualified women, with whom Miss Brodie had daily dealings, that indignation seethed. There were two exceptions on the staff, who felt neither resentment nor indifference towards Miss Brodie, but were, on the contrary, her supporters on every count. One of these was Mr. Gordon Lowther, the singing master for the whole school, Junior and Senior. The other was Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the Senior girls' art master. They were the only men on the staff. Both were already a little in love with Miss Brodie, for they found in her the only sex-bestirred object in their daily environment, and although they did not realise it, both were already beginning to act as rivals for her attention. But so far, they had not engaged her attention as men, she knew them only as supporters, and was proudly grateful. It was the Brodie set who discerned, before she did, and certainly these men did, that Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd were at pains to appear well, each in his exclusive right before Miss Brodie. To the Brodie set Gordon Lowther and Teddy Lloyd looked rather like each other until habitual acquaintance proved that they looked very different. Both were red-gold in colouring. Teddy Lloyd, the art master, was by far the better-shaped, the better-featured and the more sophisticated. He was said to be half Welsh, half English. He spoke with a hoarse voice as if he had bronchitis all the time. A golden forelock of his hair fell over his forehead into his eyes. Most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted. The other was a sleeve tucked into his pocket. He had lost the contents of the sleeve in the Great War. Miss Brodie's class had only once had an opportunity to size him up closely, and then it was in a dimmed light, for the blinds of the art room had been drawn to allow Mr. Lloyd to show his lantern slides. They had been marched into the art room by Miss Brodie, who was going to sit with the girls on the end of a bench, when the art master came forward with a chair for her held in his one hand and presented in a special way with a tiny inflection of the knees, like a flunkey. Miss Brodie seated herself nobly like Britannia with her legs apart under her loose brown skirt which came well over her knees. Mr. Lloyd showed his pictures from an exhibition of Italian art in London. He had a pointer with which he indicated the design of the picture in accompaniment to his hoarse voice. He said nothing of what the pictures represented, only followed each curve and line as the artist had left it off â perhaps at the point of an elbow, and picked it up â perhaps at the edge of a cloud or the back of a chair. The ladies of the Primavera, in their netball-playing postures, provided Mr. Lloyd with much pointer work. He kept on passing the pointer along the lines of their bottoms which showed through the drapery. The third time he did this a collective quiver of mirth ran along the front row of girls, then spread to the back rows. They kept their mouths shut tight against these convulsions, but the tighter their lips, the more did the little gusts of humour escape through their noses. Mr. Lloyd looked round with offended exasperation.

"It is obvious," said Miss Brodie, "that these girls are not of cultured homes and heritage. The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd."

The girls, anxious to be of cultured and sexless antecedents, were instantly composed by the shock of this remark. But immediately Mr. Lloyd resumed his demonstration of artistic form, and again dragged his pointer all round the draped private parts of one of Botticelli's female subjects, Sandy affected to have a fit of spluttering coughs, as did several girls behind her. Others groped under their seat as if looking for something they had dropped. One or two frankly leant against each other and giggled with hands to their helpless mouths.

"I am surprised at you, Sandy," said Miss Brodie. "I thought you were the leaven in the lump." Sandy looked up from her coughs with a hypocritical blinking of her eyes. Miss Brodie, however, had already fastened on Mary Macgregor who was nearest to her. Mary's giggles had been caused by contagion, for she was too stupid to have any sex-wits of her own, and Mr. Lloyd's lesson would never have affected her unless it had first affected the rest of the class. But now she was giggling openly like a dirty-minded child of an uncultured home. Miss Brodie grasped Mary's arm, jerked her to her feet and propelled her to the door where she thrust her outside and shut her out, returning as one who had solved the whole problem. As indeed she had, for the violent action sobered the girls and made them feel that, in the official sense, an unwanted ring-leader had been apprehended and they were no longer in the wrong. As Mr. Lloyd had now switched his equipment to a depiction of the Madonna and Child, Miss Brodie's action was the more appreciated, for no one in the class would have felt comfortable at being seized with giggles while Mr. Lloyd's pointer was tracing the outlines of this sacred subject. In fact, they were rather shocked that Mr. Lloyd's hoarse voice did not change its tone in the slightest for this occasion, but went on stating what the painter had done with his brush; he was almost defiant in his methodical tracing of lines all over the Mother and the Son. Sandy caught his glance towards Miss Brodie as if seeking her approval for his very artistic attitude and Sandy saw her smile back as would a goddess with superior understanding smile to a god away on the mountain tops.

It was not long after this that Monica Douglas, later famous for mathematics and anger, claimed that she had seen Mr. Lloyd in the act of kissing Miss Brodie. She was very definite about it in her report to the five other members of the Brodie set. There was a general excited difficulty in believing her.

"When?"

"Where?"

"In the art room after school yesterday."

"What were you doing in the art room?" said Sandy who took up the role of crossexaminer.

"I went to get a new sketch pad."

"Why? You haven't finished your old sketch pad yet."

"I have," said Monica.

"When did you use up your old sketch pad?"

"Last Saturday afternoon when you were playing golf with Miss Brodie." It was true that Jenny and Sandy had done nine holes on the Braid Hills course with Miss Brodie on the previous Saturday, while the rest of the Brodie set wandered afield to sketch."Monica used up all her book. She did the Tee Woods from five angles," said Rose Stanley in verification.

"What part of the art room were they standing in?" Sandy said.

"The far side," Monica said. "I know he had his arm round her and was kissing her. They jumped apart when I opened the door."

"Which arm?" Sandy snapped.

"The right of course, he hasn't got a left."

"Were you inside or outside the room when you saw them?" Sandy said.

"Well, in and out. I saw them, I tell you."

"What did they say?" Jenny said.

"They didn't see me," said Monica. "I just turned and ran away."

"Was it a long and lingering kiss?" Sandy demanded, while Jenny came closer to hear the answer.

Monica cast the corner of her eye up to the ceiling as if doing mental arithmetic. Then when her calculation was finished she said, "Yes it was."

"How do you know if you didn't stop to see how long it was?"

"I know," said Monica, getting angry, "by the bit that I did see. It was a small bit of a good long kiss that I saw, I could see it by his arm being round her, andâââ"

"I don't believe all this," Sandy said squeakily, because she was excited and desperately trying to prove the report true by eliminating the doubts. "You must have been dreaming," she said.

Monica pecked with the fingers of her right hand at Sandy's arm, and pinched the skin of it with a nasty half-turn. Sandy screamed. Monica, whose face was becoming very red, swung the attaché case which held her books, so that it hit the girls who stood in its path and made them stand back from her.

"She's losing her temper," said Eunice Gardiner, skipping.

"I don't believe what she says," said Sandy, desperately trying to visualise the scene in the art room and to goad factual Monica into describing it with due feeling.

"I believe it," said Rose. "Mr. Lloyd is an artist and Miss Brodie is artistic too." Jenny said, "Didn't they see the door opening?"

"Yes," said Monica, "they jumped apart as I opened the door."

"How did you know they didn't see you?" Sandy said.

"I got away before they turned round. They were standing at the far end of the room beside the still-life curtain." She went to the classroom door and demonstrated her quick getaway. This was not dramatically satisfying to Sandy who went out of the classroom, opened the door, looked, opened her eyes in a startled way, gasped and retreated in a flash. She seemed satisfied by her experimental renactment but it so delighted her friends that she repeated it. Miss Brodie came up behind her on her fourth performance which had reached a state of extreme flourish.

"What are you doing, Sandy?" said Miss Brodie.

"Only playing," said Sandy, photographing this new Miss Brodie with her little eyes. The question of whether Miss Brodie was actually capable of being kissed and of kissing occupied the Brodie set till Christmas. For the war-time romance of her life had presented to their minds a Miss Brodie of hardly flesh and blood, since that younger Miss Brodie belonged to the prehistory of before their birth. Sitting under the elm last autumn, Miss Brodie's story of

"when I was a girl" had seemed much less real, and yet more believable than this report by Monica Douglas. The Brodie set decided to keep the incident to themselves lest, if it should spread to the rest of the class, it should spread wider still and eventually to someone's ears who would get Monica Douglas into trouble.

There was, indeed, a change in Miss Brodie. It was not merely that Sandy and Jenny, recasting her in their minds, now began to try to imagine her as someone called "Jean." There was a change in herself. She wore newer clothes and with them a glowing amber necklace which was of such real amber that, as she once showed them, it had magnetic properties when rubbed and then applied to a piece of paper.

The change in Miss Brodie was best discerned by comparison with the other teachers in the Junior school. If you looked at them and then looked at Miss Brodie it was more possible to imagine her giving herself up to kissing.

Jenny and Sandy wondered if Mr. Lloyd and Miss Brodie had gone further that day in the art room, and had been swept away by passion. They kept an eye on Miss Brodie's stomach to see if it showed signs of swelling. Some days, if they were bored, they decided it had begun to swell. But on Miss Brodie's entertaining days they found her stomach as flat as ever and at these times even agreed together that Monica Douglas had been telling a lie. The other Junior school teachers said good morning to Miss Brodie, these days, in a more than Edinburgh manner, that is to say it was gracious enough, and not one of them omitted to say good morning at all; but Sandy, who had turned eleven, perceived that the tone of "morning" in good morning made the word seem purposely to rhyme with "scorning," so that these colleagues of Miss Brodie's might just as well have said, "I scorn you," instead of good morning. Miss Brodie's reply was more anglicised in its accent than was its usual proud wont. "Good mawning," she replied, in the corridors, flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority, and deviating her head towards them no more than an insulting halfinch. She held her head up, up, as she walked, and often, when she reached and entered her own classroom, permitted herself to sag gratefully against the door for an instant. She did not frequent the staff common rooms in the free periods when her class was taking its singing or sewing lessons, but accompanied them.