The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (7 page)

Now the two sewing teachers were somewhat apart from the rest of the teaching staff and were not taken seriously. They were the two younger sisters of a third, dead, eldest sister whose guidance of their lives had never been replaced. Their names were Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr; they were incapable of imparting any information whatsoever, so flustered were they, with their fluffed-out hair, dry blue-grey skins and birds' eyes; instead of teaching sewing they took each girl's work in hand, one by one, and did most of it for her. In the worst cases they unstitched what had been done and did it again, saying, "This'll not do," or, "That's never a run and fell seam." The sewing sisters had not as yet been induced to judge Miss Brodie since they were by nature of the belief that their scholastic colleagues were above criticism. Therefore the sewing lessons were a great relaxation to all, and Miss Brodie in the time before Christmas used the sewing period each week to read Jane Eyre to her class who, while they listened, pricked their thumbs as much as was bearable so that interesting little spots of blood might appear on the stuff they were sewing, and it was even possible to make blood-spot designs.

The singing lessons were far different. Some weeks after the report of her kissing in the art room it gradually became plain that Miss Brodie was agitated before, during, and after the singing lessons. She wore her newest clothes on singing days.

Sandy said to Monica Douglas, "Are you sure it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her? Are you sure it wasn't Mr. Lowther?"

"It was Mr. Lloyd," said Monica, "and it was in the art room, not the music room. What would Mr. Lowther have been doing in the art room?"

"They look alike, Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Lowther," Sandy said. Monica's anger was rising in her face. "It was Mr. Lloyd with his one arm round her," she said. "I saw them. I'm sorry I ever told you. Rose is the only one that believes me." Rose Stanley believed her, but this was because she was indifferent. She was the least of all the Brodie set to be excited by Miss Brodie's love affairs, or by anyone else's sex. And it was always to be the same. Later, when she was famous for sex, her magnificently appealing qualities lay in the fact that she had no curiosity about sex at all, she never reflected upon it. As Miss Brodie was to say, she had instinct.

"Rose is the only one who believes me," said Monica Douglas. When she visited Sandy at the nunnery in the late nineteen-fifties, Monica said, "I really did see Teddy Lloyd kiss Miss Brodie in the art room one day."

"I know you did," said Sandy.

She knew it even before Miss Brodie had told her so one day after the end of the war, when they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel eating sandwiches and drinking tea which Miss Brodie's rations at home would not run to. Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her longpreserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before time. She said, "I am past my prime.""It was a good prime," said Sandy.

They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had never been capable of losing anything by the war.

"Teddy Lloyd was greatly in love with me, as you know," said Miss Brodie, "and I with him. It was a great love. One day in the art room he kissed me. We never became lovers, not even after you left Edinburgh, when the temptation was strongest." Sandy stared through her little eyes at the hills.

"But I renounced him," said Miss Brodie. "He was a married man. I renounced the great love of my prime. We had everything in common, the artistic nature." She had reckoned on her prime lasting till she was sixty. But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie's last and fifty-sixth year. She looked older than that, she was suffering from an internal growth. This was her last year in the world and in another sense it was Sandy's.

Miss Brodie sat in her defeat and said, "In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one â are you listening, Sandy?"

Sandy took her eyes from the hills.

In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one Miss Brodie was away from school for two weeks. It was understood she had an ailment. The Brodie set called at her flat after school with flowers and found no one at home. On enquiring at school next day they were told she had gone to the country to stay with a friend until she was better. In the meantime Miss Brodie's class was dispersed, and squashed in among the classes of her colleagues. The Brodie set stuck together and were placed with a gaunt woman who was, in fact, a Miss Gaunt from the Western Isles who wore a knee-length skirt made from what looked like grey blanket stuff; this had never been smart even in the knee-length days; Rose Stanley said it was cut short for economy. Her head was very large and bony. Her chest was a slight bulge flattened by a bust bodice, and her jersey was a dark forbidding green. She did not care at all for the Brodie set who were stunned by a sudden plunge into industrious learning and very put out by Miss Gaunt's horrible sharpness and strict insistence on silence throughout the day.

"Oh dear," said Rose out loud one day when they were settled to essay writing, "I can't remember how you spell 'possession.' Are there two s's orâââ?"

"A hundred lines of Marmion," Miss Gaunt flung at her. The black-marks book which eventually reflected itself on the end-of-term reports, was heavily scored with the names of the Brodie set by the end of the first week. Apart from enquiring their names for this purpose Miss Gaunt did not trouble to remember them. "You, girl," she would say to every Brodie face. So dazed were the Brodie girls that they did not notice the omission during that week of their singing lesson which should have been on Wednesday.

On Thursday they were herded into the sewing room in the early afternoon. The two sewing teachers, Miss Alison and Miss Ellen Kerr, seemed rather cowed by gaunt Miss Gaunt, and applied themselves briskly to the sewing machines which they were teaching the girls to use. The shuttle of the sewing machines went up and down, which usually caused Sandy and Jenny to giggle, since at that time everything that could conceivably bear a sexual interpretation immediately did so to them. But the absence of Miss Brodie and the presence of Miss Gaunt had a definite subtracting effect from the sexual significance of everything, and the trepidation of the two sewing sisters contributed to the effect of grim realism. Miss Gaunt evidently went to the same parish church as the Kerr sisters, to whom she addressed remarks from time to time while she embroidered a tray cloth.

"My brothurr..." she kept saying, "my brothurr says..." Miss Gaunt's brother was apparently the minister of the parish, which accounted for the extra precautions Miss Alison and Miss Ellen were taking about their work today, with the result that they got a lot of the sewing mixed up.

"My brothurr is up in the morning at five-thirty... My brothurr organised a..." Sandy was thinking of the next instalment of Jane Eyre which Miss Brodie usually enlivened this hour by reading. Sandy had done with Alan Breck and had taken up with Mr. Rochester, with whom she now sat in the garden.

"You are afraid of me, Miss Sandy."

"You talk like the Sphinx, sir, but I am not afraid."

"You have such a grave, quiet manner, Miss Sandy â you are going?"

"It has struck nine, sir."

A phrase of Miss Gaunt's broke upon the garden scene: "Mr. Lowther is not at school this week."

"So I hear," Miss Alison said.

"It seems he will be away for another week at least."

"Is he ill?"

"I understand so, unfortunately," said Miss Gaunt.

"Miss Brodie is ailing, too," said Miss Ellen.

"Yes," said Miss Gaunt. "She too is expected to be absent for another week."

"What is the trouble?"

"That I couldn't say," said Miss Gaunt. She stuck her needle in and out of her embroidery. Then she looked up at the sisters. "It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther," she said.

Sandy saw her face as that of the housekeeper in Jane Eyre, watching her carefully and knowingly as she entered the house, late, from the garden where she had been sitting with Mr. Rochester.

"Perhaps Miss Brodie is having a love affair with Mr. Lowther," Sandy said to Jenny, merely in order to break up the sexless gloom that surrounded them.

"But it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her. She must be in love with Mr. Lloyd or she wouldn't have let him kiss her."

"Perhaps she's working it off on Mr. Lowther. Mr. Lowther isn't married." It was a fantasy worked up between them, in defiance of Miss Gaunt and her forbidding brother, and it was understood in that way. But Sandy, remembering Miss Gaunt's expression as she remarked, "It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther," was suddenly not sure that the suggestion was not true. For this reason she was more reticent than Jenny about the details of the imagined love affair. Jenny whispered, "They go to bed. Then he puts out the light. Then their toes touch. And then Miss Brodie... Miss Brodie..." She broke into giggles.

"Miss Brodie yawns," said Sandy in order to restore decency, now that she suspected it was all true.

"No, Miss Brodie says, 'Darling.' She saysâââ"

"Quiet," whispered Sandy, "Eunice is coming." Eunice Gardiner approached the table where Jenny and Sandy sat, grabbed the scissors and went away. Eunice had lately taken a religious turn and there was no talking about sex in front of her. She had stopped hopping and skipping. The phase did not last long, but while it did she was nasty and not to be trusted. When she was well out of the way Jenny resumed:

"Mr. Lowther's legs are shorter than Miss Brodie's, so I suppose she winds hers round his, andâââ"

"Where does Mr. Lowther live, do you know?" Sandy said.

"At Cramond. He's got a big house with a housekeeper." In that year after the war when Sandy sat with Miss Brodie in the window of the Braid Hills Hotel, and brought her eyes back from the hills to show she was listening, Miss Brodie said: "I renounced Teddy Lloyd. But I decided to enter into a love affair, it was the only cure. My love for Teddy was an obsession, he was the love of my prime. But in the autumn of nineteen-thirty-one I entered an affair with Gordon Lowther, he was a bachelor and it was more becoming. That is the truth and there is no more to say. Are you listening, Sandy?"

"Yes, I'm listening."

"You look as if you were thinking of something else, my dear. Well, as I say, that is the whole story."

Sandy was thinking of something else. She was thinking that it was not the whole story.

"Of course the liaison was suspected. Perhaps you girls knew about it. You, Sandy, had a faint idea... but nobody could prove what was between Gordon Lowther and myself. It was never proved. It was not on those grounds that I was betrayed. I should like to know who betrayed me. It is incredible that it should have been one of my own girls. I often wonder if it was poor Mary. Perhaps I should have been nicer to Mary. Well, it was tragic about Mary, I picture that fire, that poor girl. I can't see how Mary could have betrayed me, though."

"She had no contact with the school after she left," Sandy said.

"I wonder, was it Rose who betrayed me?" The whine in her voice â "... betrayed me, betrayed me" â bored and afflicted Sandy. It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman. What does she mean by "betray"? She was looking at the hills as if to see there the first and unbetrayable Miss Brodie, indifferent to criticism as a crag. After her two weeks' absence Miss Brodie returned to tell her class that she had enjoyed an exciting rest and a well-earned one. Mr. Lowther's singing class went on as usual and he beamed at Miss Brodie as she brought them proudly into the music room with their heads up, up. Miss Brodie now played the accompaniment, sitting very well at the piano and sometimes, with a certain sadness of countenance, richly taking the second soprano in "How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot," and other melodious preparations for the annual concert. Mr. Lowther, short-legged, shy and golden-haired, no longer played with Jenny's curls. The bare branches brushed the windows and Sandy was almost as sure as could be that the singing master was in love with Miss Brodie and that Miss Brodie was in love with the art master. Rose Stanley had not yet revealed her potentialities in the working-out of Miss Brodie's passion for one-armed Teddy Lloyd, and Miss Brodie's prime still flourished unbetrayed. It was impossible to imagine Miss Brodie sleeping with Mr. Lowther, it was impossible to imagine her in a sexual context at all, and yet it was impossible not to suspect that such things were so.

During the Easter term Miss Mackay, the headmistress, had the girls in to tea in her study in small groups and, later, one by one. This was a routine of enquiry as to their intentions for the Senior school, whether they would go on the Modern side or whether they would apply for admission to the Classical.

Miss Brodie had already prompted them as follows: "I am not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely." So that the girls were left in no doubt as to Miss Brodie's contempt for the Modern side.

From among her special set only Eunice Gardiner stood out to be a Modern, and that was because her parents wanted her to take a course in domestic science and she herself wanted the extra scope for gymnastics and games which the Modern side offered. Eunice, preparing arduously for Confirmation, was still a bit too pious for Miss Brodie's liking. She now refused to do somersaults outside of the gymnasium, she wore lavender water on her handkerchief, declined a try of Rose Stanley's aunt's lipstick, was taking a suspiciously healthy interest in international sport and, when Miss Brodie herded her set to the Empire Theatre for their first and last opportunity to witness the dancing of Pavlova, Eunice was absent, she had pleaded off because of something else she had to attend which she described as "a social."

"Social what?" said Miss Brodie, who always made difficulties about words when she scented heresy.