The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

  Miss Brodie sat in her defeat and said, “In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one—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 or—?”

  “A hundred lines of Marmion,” Miss Gaunt flung at her.

  The black-marks books 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—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 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 says—”

  “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, and—”

  “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—“… betrayed me, betrayed me”—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 an
d 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.

  “It’s in the Church Hall, Miss Brodie.”

  “Yes, yes, but social what? Social is an adjective and you are using it as a noun. If you mean a social gathering, by all means attend your social gathering and we shall have our own social gathering in the presence of the great Anna Pavlova, a dedicated woman who, when she appears on the stage, makes the other dancers look like elephants. By all means attend your social gathering. We shall see Pavlova doing the death of the Swan, it is a great moment in eternity.”

  All that term she tried to inspire Eunice to become at least a pioneer missionary in some deadly and dangerous zone of the earth, for it was intolerable to Miss Brodie that any of her girls should grow up not largely dedicated to some vocation. “You will end up as a Girl Guide leader in a suburb like Corstorphine,” she said warningly to Eunice, who was in fact secretly attracted to this idea and who lived in Corstorphine. The term was filled with legends of Pavlova and her dedicated habits, her wild fits of temperament and her intolerance of the second-rate. “She screams at the chorus,” said Miss Brodie, “which is permissible in a great artist. She speaks English fluently, her accent is charming. Afterwards she goes home to meditate upon the swans which she keeps on a lake in the grounds.”

  “Sandy,” said Anna Pavlova, “you are the only truly dedicated dancer, next to me. Your dying Swan is perfect, such a sensitive, final tap of the claw upon the floor of the stage …”

  “I know it,” said Sandy (in considered preference to “Oh, I do my best”), as she relaxed in the wings.

  Pavlova nodded sagely and gazed into the middle distance with the eyes of tragic exile and of art. “Every artist knows,” said Pavlova, “is it not so?” Then, with a voice desperate with the menace of hysteria, and a charming accent, she declared, “I have never been understood. Never. Never.”

  Sandy removed one of her ballet shoes and cast it casually to the other end of the wings where it was respectfully retrieved by a member of the common chorus. Pausing before she removed the other shoe, Sandy said to Pavlova, “I am sure I understand you.”

  “It is true,” exclaimed Pavlova, clasping Sandy’s hand, “because you are an artist and will carry on the torch.”

  Miss Brodie said: “Pavlova contemplates her swans in order to perfect her swan dance, she studies them. That is true dedication. You must all grow up to be dedicated women as I have dedicated myself to you.”

  A few weeks before she died, when, sitting up in bed in the nursing home, she learnt from Monica Douglas that Sandy had gone to a convent, she said: “What a waste. That is not the sort of dedication I meant. Do you think she has done this to annoy me? I begin to wonder if it was not Sandy who betrayed me.”

  The headmistress invited Sandy, Jenny and Mary to tea just before the Easter holidays and asked them the usual questions about what they wanted to do in the Senior school and whether they wanted to do it on the Modern or the Classical side. Mary Macgregor was ruled out of the Classical side because her marks did not reach the required standard. She seemed despondent on hearing this.

  “Why do you want so much to go on the Classical side, Mary? You aren’t cut out for it. Don’t your parents realise that?”

  “Miss Brodie prefers it.”

  “It has nothing to do with Miss Brodie,” said Miss Mackay, settling her great behind more firmly in her chair. “It is a question of your marks or what you and your parents think. In your case, your marks don’t come up to the standard.”

  When Jenny and Sandy opted for Classical, she said: “Because Miss Brodie prefers it, I suppose. What good will Latin and Greek be to you when you get married or take a job? German would be more useful.”

  But they stuck out for Classical, and when Miss Mackay had accepted their choice she transparently started to win over the girls by praising Miss Brodie. “What we would do without Miss Brodie, I don’t know. There is always a difference about Miss Brodie’s girls, and the last two years I may say a marked difference.”

  Then she began to pump them. Miss Brodie took them to the theatre, the art galleries, for walks, to Miss Brodie’s flat for tea? How kind of Miss Brodie. “Does Miss Brodie pay for all your theatre tickets?”

  “Sometimes,” said Mary.

  “Not for all of us every time,” said Jenny.

  “We go up to the gallery,” Sandy said.

  “Well, it is most kind of Miss Brodie. I hope you are appreciative.”

  “Oh, yes,” they said, united and alert against anything unfavourable to the Brodie idea which the conversation might be leading up to. This was not lost on the headmistress.

  “That’s splendid,” she said. “And do you go to concerts with Miss Brodie? Miss Brodie is very musical, I believe?”

  “Yes,” said Mary, looking at her friends for a lead.

  “We went to the opera with Miss Brodie last term to see La Traviata” said Jenny.

  “Miss Brodie is musical?” said Miss Mackay again, addressing Sandy and Jenny.

  “We saw Pavlova,” said Sandy.

  “Miss Brodie is musical?” said Miss Mackay.

  “I think Miss Brodie is more interested in art, ma’am,” said Sandy.

  “But music is a form of art.”

  “Pictures and drawings, I mean,” said Sandy.

  “Very enlightening,” said Miss Mackay. “Do you girls take piano lessons?”

  They all said yes.

  “From whom? From Mr. Lowther?”

  They answered variously, for Mr. Lowther’s piano lessons were not part of the curriculum and these three
girls had private arrangements for the piano at home. But now, at the mention of Mr. Lowther, even slowminded Mary suspected what Miss Mackay was driving at.

  “I understand Miss Brodie plays the piano for your singing lessons. So what makes you think she prefers art to music, Sandy?”

  “Miss Brodie told us so. Music is an interest to her but art is a passion, Miss Brodie said.”

  “And what are your cultural interests? I’m sure you are too young to have passions.”

  “Stories, ma’am,” Mary said.

  “Does Miss Brodie tell you stories?”

  “Yes,” said Mary.

  “What about?”

  “History,” said Jenny and Sandy together, because it was a question they had foreseen might arise one day and they had prepared the answer with a brainracking care for literal truth.

  Miss Mackay paused and looked at them in the process of moving the cake from the table to the tray; their reply had plainly struck her as being on the ready side.

  She asked no further questions, but made the following noteworthy speech:

  “You are very fortunate in Miss Brodie. I could wish your arithmetic papers had been better. I am always impressed by Miss Brodie’s girls in one way or another. You will have to work hard at ordinary humble subjects for the qualifying examinations. Miss Brodie is giving you an excellent preparation for the Senior school. Culture cannot compensate for lack of hard knowledge. I am happy to see you are devoted to Miss Brodie. Your loyalty is due to the school rather than to any one individual.”

  Not all of this conversation was reported back to Miss Brodie.

  “We told Miss Mackay how much you liked art,” said Sandy, however.

  “I do indeed,” said Miss Brodie, “but ‘like’ is hardly the word; pictorial art is my passion.”

  “That’s what I said,” said Sandy.

  Miss Brodie looked at her as if to say, as in fact she had said twice before, “One day, Sandy, you will go too far for my liking.”

  “Compared to music,” said Sandy, blinking up at her with her little pig-like eyes.