by Olga Wojtas
“How did she get here?” Cart Woman demanded.
The mayor’s enthusiasm evaporated. “She made other arrangements,” he mumbled.
“And how’s that wonderful news, inundations of visitors who make other arrangements? As if things aren’t already bad enough with you ruining my business.” She smacked her hand against the side of the cart. “I might as well chop this thing up for firewood.”
“Nonsense,” said the mayor. “I’ll be putting more work your way any moment. Things aren’t entirely under my control just now.”
“Well, get them under your control. You’re the mayor, aren’t you?”
“For the moment,” said the mayor, his voice so low that Cart Woman didn’t even hear him.
“And I hope there’s no problem with the celebrations,” she went on. “My girl’s all excited about being in the choir, hasn’t talked about anything else for weeks.”
The mayor roused himself to give a feeble laugh. “I said these would be the best celebrations yet, didn’t I? That’s why Madame Maque is here. If you’ll excuse us, we must get on.”
He hustled me down some more streets until we reached a small chalet that had a more cheerful look than the others. Its door and window frames were painted blue and there were red geraniums on the windowsills.
The mayor led me up the stairs to the first floor and pushed open the front door, staying on the doorstep.
“Now then, Madeleine–” he said, and ducked as a plate came whizzing by him. It looked as though the widow had progressed from denial to anger. Instinctively, I raised the suitcase to protect myself, and the plate shattered against it.
“Madeleine, you’ll have no crockery left at this rate,” the mayor said, stepping over the threshold. “And without Sylvain’s salary, I don’t see how you’re going to buy more.”
Her shrug was quintessentially Gallic. “I’ll buy it with the rent I get from my new lodger.”
The mayor beamed. “I knew you’d see sense. Right, I’ll get off to work and let you two girls get better acquainted.”
“I’m not a girl,” I called after him as he headed down the stairs. “I mean, I’m cisgender,” I explained to Madeleine who was eyeing me suspiciously. “But once someone’s over eighteen, it’s inappropriate to call them a girl. It’s used by men to demean and infantilise, and we must call it out whenever it occurs.” She didn’t need to know I thought of her as a wee lassie. That was quite different.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
I hoped that by the end of my mission, I would have raised her consciousness sufficiently not to allow any man to call her a girl. But standing on the doorstep with smashed crockery round me wasn’t the place to start. I stepped over the threshold into a small hallway and put down my case. If Miss Blaine’s time-travelling rules and regulations remained the same, and I had no reason to think otherwise, I was allowed one calendar week to compete my mission.
“I’ll be staying for a week,” I said.
“Staying for a week?”
“At the most.”
“At the most?”
“Perhaps less.”
“Perhaps less?”
Madeleine repeating everything was really quite irritating. And then I remembered how I had been accused of doing exactly the same, very recently.
I was sitting at my computer in Morningside Library, checking the reservation requests, when a borrower appeared and said, “Bonjour.”
Having had the finest education in the world, I’m fluent in a great many foreign languages, and slip easily from one to another. I didn’t even notice that I had been addressed in French, but simply responded automatically, “Bonjour, Madame.”
“Que veut dire cette conduite?”
Since my conduct is at all times exemplary, I merely asked, “Conduite, Madame?”
I looked up to see Miss Blaine glaring down at me, just as her marble statue glared down on everyone in the school assembly hall.
“Tu es perroquet?” she demanded. Being accused of being a parrot was bad enough, but “tu” is the word used to address children. Given that I was an adult, and wasn’t related to the Founder, this was quite offensive. On the other hand, since Miss Blaine was at least two hundred years old, my being fifty-something no doubt qualified as childhood in her eyes.
However, I still didn’t understand. “Je ne comprends pas.”
She waved a yellow-covered book in my face. “Ce n’est que trop evident!” she hissed. “Tu ne comprends presque rien. Tu n’as pas vu ce… ce… bouquin qui vient de reparaître avec sa héroïne détestable? Il risque de réintroduire cette harpie à de nouvelles lectrices. C’est abominable.”
It was very difficult to work out what she was on about. She was obviously completely fluent in French, but she had retained her thick Morningside accent, which made it tricky to follow. She was also agitated, one might even say enraged, which didn’t help her comprehensibility. But I tried to piece it together. Why hadn’t I seen some book that had a detestable heroine. I wondered what book it might be. Reading literature is very subjective: one person’s detestable heroine is another person’s role model. Anyway, Miss Blaine was worried that new readers would be introduced to this awful woman.
But before I could seek further clarification, she slammed the book down on the desk in front of me.
I can’t say my blood froze, because blood only starts to freeze at minus two degrees Celsius and we like to keep the temperature in the library at twenty degrees Celsius, despite council cuts. But I did feel a distinct chill.
“Oh, lovely,” said Dorothy as she passed. “Dame Muriel’s wonderful book in the marvellous new Polygon edition, with all their colourful covers.”
She leaned over confidentially to Miss Blaine. “I feel so privileged to work in Morningside Library. When Dame Muriel was a wee girl, she came in here twice a week. I really think we should celebrate that in some way. A plaque would be nice, don’t you think? Shona, could you maybe draft a petition and we can collect signatures? We’d have hundreds in the blink of an eye. And in the meantime, we could get the Marcia Blaine pupils to put on a wee exhibition, just to show how grateful they are to Dame Muriel for writing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie about their school.”
Miss Blaine made a choking noise.
“Oh, sorry, here’s me prattling on when you’re wanting to take a book out,” said Dorothy, taking the yellow-covered volume off my desk. “Do you want me to help you with that, dear? These machines are very confusing when we’re that wee bit older, aren’t they?”
There’s a lot of dangerous things you can do in this world. Swim in shark-infested waters. Scale the Empire State Building without a safety harness. Visit Glasgow. But by far the most dangerous thing you can do is address Marcia Blaine as “dear”. The Founder, her face puce, was staring at the ground, but if she turned her gaze on Dorothy, I was sure my colleague would be turned to stone.
I snatched back That Book. “Thank you, Dorothy, I’m already helping this lady.”
Dorothy wandered off humming Rod McKuen’s “Jean”, no doubt thinking of plaques, exhibitions, kittens and rainbows.
“Miss Blaine,” I said urgently, since the Founder looked as though she was about to tear apart the nearby shelves with her bare hands, “let me take you upstairs and get you a wee cup of tea. That’s always good for shock.”
She growled a bit but she followed me up to the small meeting room. I brought her the tea and some Bourbon biscuits as quickly as I could, but she had picked up That Book, which I had left on the table, and was riffling through it with an expression of revulsion.
“Dame Muriel, forsooth!” she exclaimed. “These pages are an offence to right-minded people. The mockery of the team spirit! Outrageous! We are as nothing without cooperation and competition.” She flung it back down and glared at the cover, which read under the author’s name, “Introduced by Alan Taylor”.
“And who, pray, is this Mr Taylor who insists on intr
oducing unwary readers to Mrs Spark’s scribblings?”
“I believe he used to be a librarian,” I said.
Miss Blaine looked heavenward. “I remember a time when librarianship was an honourable profession,” she said.
She crunched her way through a Bourbon biscuit much as I imagined a tiger would crunch through human bone. “The name of my school is paraded throughout these pages. One can no longer rely on readers in these end times. Many will take it as fact, not fiction. And those who take it as fiction will see it as a roman à clef.”
She picked up another biscuit and studied me over the top of it.
“I wonder,” she said, “which character the readers would think was based on you.”
I thought. Although I am now fifty-something, it would be likely, since I am a Former Pupil, that a reader would conflate me with one of the girls rather than a teacher, suggesting that I would be one of the so-called Brodie set. I had a number of characters to choose from: Monica Douglas, famous for her mathematical abilities; Eunice Gardiner, famous for her gymnastics and swimming prowess; Jenny Gray, who spoke beautifully and was a stalwart of the Dramatic Society.
“I believe,” said Miss Blaine, “they would think you to be one of two.”
I wondered which of Monica, Eunice and Jenny was to be jettisoned.
“First, Mary Macgregor, a character of the utmost stupidity who is always to blame.”
I felt myself flinch, not least because I remembered that Mary Macgregor died by fire in Chapter Two.
“Or, and indeed more likely, Sandy Stranger, a character so repugnant that even the author detested her. A character who claims to be dependable, but who outrageously betrays the trust placed in her.”
I was close to tears. “Miss Blaine,” I whispered, “how can you say such a thing?”
“Because!” Her hand crashed down on the wretched yellow book.
“I’m so sorry!” I burst out. “I’ve been running a community choir – singing is very beneficial both for strengthening the immune system and reducing stress levels – and after a sell-out performance, we went out for a celebration. I had a wee half of shandy. I remember feeling very sleepy the next day, which must have been when…” I dropped my voice, “…that Book sneaked in. But you must know even Homer nods.”
“I do,” she snapped. “I think it shame when worthy Homer nods. And he nods off for only a couple of minutes – you, girl, are a positive Rip Van Winkle. You have one simple job to do – one! – to ensure that this flawed and outrageous narrative is not read. And yet I find it not only on the shelves but positively displayed. You surely cannot have failed to notice that 2018 was the centenary of Mrs Spark’s birth.”
I had noticed it, but I didn’t dwell on it. The year 2018 was notable for a number of anniversaries: 1,175 years after King Kenneth MacAlpin united the Picts and the Scots; two hundred years after the first human blood transfusion; one hundred and fifty years after the first Trades Union Congress; a hundred years after women over thirty getting the vote, Stonehenge being donated to the nation, the death of Debussy, and the end of World War One.
Miss Blaine picked up another Bourbon and virtually swallowed it whole. Then she drained her teacup in a oner. She rose. “I am disappointed in you.”
Her words cut me to the quick. I am a Blainer, I am the crème de la crème, and it is my duty to make the world a better place. Now, through the sin of omission, I had made it worse. At that moment, I vowed never to drink again.
The Founder moved towards the door.
“Please,” I begged, “give me another chance. You won’t regret it.”
“You have been guilty of a gross dereliction of duty,” she said, disappearing into the corridor. “Nevertheless…”
It was shortly after that that the abdominal pains began.
And now, here I was in fin de siècle France, having time travelled back more than a century, trying to sort out my accommodation with a very uncooperative young woman.
“If you have a room to rent, I should like to book it for a period of up to a week,” I said slowly and distinctly.
“A week’s rent is the minimum,” she said.
“Are those your usual terms?” I asked.
“They are now. I’ve never let out a room before. And it’s rent in advance.”
“I’d like to see the room first.”
We glared at each other for a while, and then she picked up my weighty suitcase as though it was a bag of marshmallows, leading the way up a narrow wooden staircase to a tiny room nestled under the chalet’s sloping roof. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it was perfectly adequate, with a single bed, dresser and chair. The small window had a view over dense forest and the ubiquitous mountains.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
She gave a sardonic smile. “Well, there’s a surprise. Do I get the rent from you or the mayor?”
It struck me that Sans-Soleil would get a lot more visitors if people thought the mayor would pay for their accommodation. But I was on a mission, and I was sure Miss Blaine would be prepared to support the local economy.
“From me. Just give me a moment to unpack,” I said and Madeleine went back downstairs.
I opened the suitcase. There was a small reticule with a purse in it. A long-skirted suit just like the one I was wearing, except in dark grey, and another frilly white blouse. Proper M&S underwear rather than anything Victorian, with an ordinary balcony bra, not the multiway ones I had been given to accommodate the revealing ballgowns on my previous mission.
Beneath the clothes were a few other things that would presumably also come in useful, although I couldn’t immediately see how. I stowed them neatly in the dresser along with the underwear, and hung the spare suit and blouse over the chair.
As I smoothed down the clothes, I looked at my hands. My skin colour was midway between Madeleine’s deep tan and the pallor of the other inhabitants of Sans-Soleil. I wondered whether she frequented a beauty salon or perhaps self-medicated. Spray tan wouldn’t have been invented, but I knew that by the turn of the century, the Glasgow firm of Paterson & Sons had been producing Camp Coffee for over twenty years. I supposed you could have a bath in it and rub it in.
I picked up the reticule and went downstairs. Madeleine, her curly brown hair spectacularly wild now that she had taken off her headscarf, was busying herself in the small kitchen, preparing to peel vegetables. I held out my purse to her. “Just take whatever you think is suitable for a week’s rent.”
She opened it and gave a gasp. “Where did you get all this money?”
“From my employer,” I said. Strictly speaking, Miss Blaine wasn’t my employer, since I was working pro bono, albeit with expenses. But I felt that was the easiest way to put it.
Her lips tightened. “I see. Your employer must expect a lot of you.” She rummaged in my purse and extracted a couple of coins.
“Are you sure that’s right?” I asked.
“Are you accusing me of overcharging?” She held out her hand to show me what she had taken. “Don’t you think this is reasonable for a respectable home?”
I judged her to be irritable but honest. “You misunderstand. I was worried you might be undercharging.”
“Really?” Her tone was acid.
“Really. Apply some logic, please. If I thought you were on the take, I wouldn’t have handed you my purse.”
“You might have been trying to trap me.”
“Believe me, if I was trying to trap you, I’d be much more subtle than that.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
We stared at one another. She was the first to look away.
“I suppose you’d like something to drink?” she muttered.
“Yes, please. A cup of tea would be lovely.”
“We have no tea. You can have coffee or water. Or cognac.” The distaste in her tone at the last offering would have done credit to Miss Blaine.
“Thank you, no, I don’t touch alcohol when I’m on a
mission,” I said with dignity.
“And what’s your mission? To comfort the poor widow?”
I felt terrible. I had momentarily forgotten all about her being a widow, what with the undulating and the bosom and the irritability. She was obviously in a very volatile emotional state if she couldn’t even accept that her husband was dead. She deserved to be treated with kindness and understanding, whatever she looked like.
“If there’s any help I can give you, of course,” I said.
“So, you’ll be with me every moment of the day?”
This was awkward. “Well … if you want me around, I’ll do my best. But I’ve got one or two things to do while I’m here.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what they were. A good start would be to find out who I was supposed to help. I really felt Miss Blaine should provide written instructions. But it had all happened so quickly that perhaps she didn’t have time. One moment she was saying, “Nevertheless…” and the next I was suffering severe abdominal pain.
Madeleine looked a bit nonplussed at my answer, before becoming sardonic all over again. “I see. You go your way and I go mine, and then by a strange coincidence, we meet en route.”
“I suppose it would be a strange coincidence if we went our separate ways and then met en route,” I agreed. I was going to have to be really nice to her to make up for being cranky earlier.
“What can I get you to drink?” she repeated.
“Just a glass of water, please.”
She poured me out a glass from a large jug. As she handed it over, her hand brushed against mine, and I thought I felt a mild tingling. Tingling was what alerted me to the subject of my mission. But I wasn’t sure whether I had felt it or not. And I couldn’t exactly say, “I think I tingled when our hands touched. Can we do it again?” because that could be misinterpreted.
Instead, I said, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. Could I have a coffee after all?”
She looked grumpy, but she got up and started to make it. I’m always a bit dubious about coffee. The studies have come up with conflicting results, some saying it prolongs your life, others saying it kills you, while a few insist it doesn’t do anything at all. And the NHS website doesn’t adjudicate. It just says: “Cohort studies can’t show cause and effect, so aren’t able to prove that drinking coffee decreases or increases likelihood of death. A randomised controlled trial where people are put into groups to either drink coffee or not drink coffee until they died would be needed to prove this, something that wouldn’t be feasible.” It sounds perfectly feasible to me. I’d be happy to volunteer.
