The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

  “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 committed 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 grown-up 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,

  The broad stream in his banks complaining,

  Heavily the low sky raining

  Over tower’d Camelot.

  Sandy watched Miss Brodie through her little pale eyes, screwed them smaller and shut her lips tight.

  Rose Stanley was pulling threads from the girdle of her gym tunic. Jenny was enthralled by the poem, her lips were parted, she was never bored. Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored.

  Down she came and found a boat

  Beneath a willow left afloat,

  And round about the prow she wrote

  The Lady of Shalott.

  “By what means did your Ladyship write these words?” Sandy enquired in her mind with her lips shut tight.

  “There was a pot of white paint and a brush which happened to be standing upon the grassy verge,” replied the Lady of Shalott graciously. “It was left there no doubt by some heedless member of the Unemployed.”

  “Alas, and in all that rain!” said Sandy for want of something better to say, while Miss Brodie’s voice soared up to the ceiling, and curled round the feet of the Senior girls upstairs.

  The Lady of Shalott placed a white hand on Sandy’s shoulder and gazed at her for a space. “That one so young and beautiful should be so ill-fated in love!” she said in low sad tones.

  “What can be the meaning of these words?” cried Sandy in alarm, with her little eyes screwed on Miss Brodie and her lips shut tight.

  Miss Brodie said: “Sandy, are you in pain?”

  Sandy looked astonished.

  “You girls,” said Miss Brodie, “must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!”

  All heads turned to look at the reproduction which Miss Brodie had brought back from her travels and pinned on the wall. Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.

  “She is older than the rocks on which she sits. Would that I had been given charge of you girls when you were seven. I sometimes fear it’s too late, now. If you had been mine when you were seven you would have been the crème de la crème. Sandy, come and read some stanzas and let us hear your vowel sounds.”

  Sandy, being half-English, made the most of her vowels, it was her only fame. Rose Stanley was not yet famous for sex, and it was not she but Eunice Gardiner who had approached Sandy and Jenny with a Bible, pointing out the words, “The babe leapt in her womb.” Sandy and Jenny said she was dirty and threatened to tell on her. Jenny was already famous for her prettiness and had a sweet voice, so that Mr. Lowther, who came to teach singing, would watch her admiringly as she sang “Come see where golden-hearted spring …”; and he twitched her ringlets, the more daringly since Miss Brodie always stayed with her pupils during the singing lesson. He twitched her ringlets and looked at Miss Brodie like a child showing off its tricks and almost as if testing Miss Brodie to see if she were at all willing to conspire in his un-Edinburgh conduct.

  Mr. Lowther was small, with a long body and short legs. His hair and moustache were red-gold: He curled his hand round the back of his ear and inclined his head towards each girl to test her voice. “Sing ah!”

  “Ah!” sang Jenny, high and pure as the sea maiden of the Hebrides whom Sandy had been talking about. But her eyes swivelled over to catch Sandy’s.

  Miss Brodie ushered the girls from the music room and, gathering them about her, said, “You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. Form a single file, now, please, and walk with your heads up, up like Sybil Thorndike, a woman of noble mien.”

  Sandy craned back her head, pointed her freckled nose in the air and fixed her little pig-like eyes on the ceiling as she walked along in the file.

  “What are you doing, Sandy?”

  “Walking like Sybil Thorndike, ma’am.”

  “One day, Sandy, you will go too far.”

  Sandy looked hurt and puzzled.

  “Yes,” said Miss Brodie, “I have my eye upon you, Sandy. I observe a frivolous nature. I fear you will never belong to life’s elite or, as one might say, the crème de la crème.”

  When they had returned to the classroom Rose Stanley said, “I’ve got ink on my blouse.”

  “Go to the science room and have the stain removed; but remember it is very bad for the tussore.”

  Sometimes the girls would put a little spot of ink on a sleeve of their tussore silk blouses so that they might be sent to the science room in the Senior school. There a thrilling teacher, a Miss Lockhart, wearing a white overall, with her grey short hair set back in waves from a tanned and weathered golfer’s face, would pour a small drop of white liquid from a large jar on to a piece of cotton wool. With this, she would dab the ink-spot on the sleeve, silently holding the girl’s arm, intently absorbed in the task. Rose Stanley went to the science room with her inky blouse only because she was bored, but Sandy and Jenny got ink on their blouses at discreet intervals of four weeks, so that they could go and have their arms held by Miss Lockhart who seemed to carry six inches of pure air around her person wherever she moved in that strange-smelling room. This long room was her natural setting and she had lost something of her quality when Sandy saw her walking from the school in her box-pleat tweeds over to her sports car like an ordinary teacher. Miss Lockhart in the science room was to Sandy something apart, surrounded by three lanes of long benches set out with jars half-full of coloured crystals and powders and liquids, ochre and bronze and metal grey and cobalt blue, glass vessels of curious shapes, bulbous, or with pipe-like stems. Only once when Sandy went to the science room was there a lesson in progress. The older girls, big girls, some with bulging chests, were standing in couples at the benches, with gas jets burning before them. They held a glass tube full of green stuff in their hands and were dancing the tube in the flame, dozens of dancing green tubes and flames, all along the benches. The bare winter top branches of the trees brushed the windows of this long room, and beyond that was the cold winter sky with a huge red sun. Sandy, on that occasion, had the presence of mind to remember
that her schooldays were supposed to be the happiest days of her life and she took the compelling news back to Jenny that the Senior School was going to be marvellous and Miss Lockhart was beautiful.

  “All the girls in the science room were doing just as they liked,” said Sandy, “and that’s what they were supposed to be doing.”

  “We do a lot of what we like in Miss Brodie’s class,” Jenny said. “My mummy says Miss Brodie gives us too much freedom.”

  “She’s not supposed to give us freedom, she’s supposed to give us lessons,” said Sandy. “But the science class is supposed to be free, it’s allowed.”

  “Well, I like being in Miss Brodie’s,” Jenny said.

  “So do I,” Sandy said. “She takes an interest in our general knowledge, my mother says.”

  All the same, the visits to the science room were Sandy’s most secret joy, and she calculated very carefully the intervals between one ink-spot and another, so that there should be no suspicion on Miss Brodie’s part that the spots were not an accident. Miss Lockhart would hold her arm and carefully dab the inkstain on her sleeve while Sandy stood enthralled by the long room which was this science teacher’s rightful place, and by the lawful glamour of everything there. It was on the occasion when Rose Stanley, after the singing lesson, was sent to the science room to get ink off her blouse that Miss Brodie told her class,

  “You must be more careful with your ink. I can’t have my girls going up and down to the science room like this. We must keep our good name.”