The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (13 page)

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'sâââ"

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. " â 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, halfeducated 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 hot," 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."

For over a year Sandy entered into the spirit of this plan, for she visited the Lloyds'

frequently, and was able to report to Miss Brodie how things were going with the portraits of Rose which so resembled Miss Brodie.

"Rose," said Miss Brodie, "is like a heroine from a novel by D. H. Lawrence. She has got instinct."

But in fact the art master's interest in Rose was simply a professional one, she was a good model; Rose had an instinct to be satisfied with this role, and in the event it was Sandy who slept with Teddy Lloyd and Rose who carried back the information. It was some time before these things came to pass, and meanwhile Miss Brodie was neglecting Mr. Lowther at Cramond and spending as much time as possible with Rose and Sandy discussing art, and then the question of sitting for an artist, and Rose's future as a model, and the necessity for Rose to realise the power she had within her, it was a gift and she an exception to all the rules, she was the exception that proved the rule. Miss Brodie was too cautious to be more precise and Rose only half-guessed at Miss Brodie's meaning, for she was at this time, as Sandy knew, following her instinct and becoming famous for sex among the schoolboys who stood awkwardly with their bicycles at a safe distance from the school gates. Rose was greatly popular with these boys, which was the only reason why she was famed for sex, although she did not really talk about sex, far less indulge it. She did everything by instinct, she even listened to Miss Brodie as if she agreed with every word.

"When you are seventeen or eighteen, Rose, you will come to the moment of your great fulfilment."

"Yes, honestly I think so, Miss Brodie."

Teddy Lloyd's passion for Jean Brodie was greatly in evidence in all the portraits he did of the various members of the Brodie set. He did them in a group during one summer term, wearing their panama hats each in a different way, each hat adorning, in a magical transfiguration, a different Jean Brodie under the forms of Rose, Sandy, Jenny, Mary, Monica and Eunice. But mostly it was Rose, because she was instinctively a good model and Teddy Lloyd paid her five shillings a sitting, which Rose found useful, being addicted to the cinema. Sandy felt warmly towards Miss Brodie at these times when she saw how she was misled in her idea of Rose. It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodie's masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly.

But Miss Brodie as the leader of the set, Miss Brodie as a Roman matron, Miss Brodie as an educational reformer were still prominent. It was not always comfortable, from the school point of view, to be associated with her. The lack of team spirit alone, the fact that the Brodie set preferred golf to hockey or netball if they preferred anything at all, were enough to set them apart, even if they had not dented in the crowns of their hats and tilted them backwards or forwards. It was impossible for them to escape from the Brodie set because they were the Brodie set in the eyes of the school. Nominally, they were members of Holyrood, Melrose, Argyll and Biggar, but it had been well known that the Brodie set had no team spirit and did not care which house won the shield. They were not allowed to care. Their disregard had now become an institution, to be respected like the house system itself. For their own part, and without this reputation, the six girls would have gone each her own way by the time she was in the fourth form and had reached the age of sixteen.