The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Muriel Spark
he said.
“When we go to Edinburgh,” she said, “remind me while we’re there to go and visit Miss Brodie’s grave.”
“Who was Miss Brodie?”
“A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime.”
“Prime what?”
“Her prime of life. She fell for an Egyptian courier once, on her travels, and came back and told us all about it. She had a few favourites. I was one of them. I did the splits and made her laugh, you know.”
“I always knew your upbringing was a bit peculiar.”
“But she wasn’t mad. She was as sane as anything. She knew exactly what she was doing. She told us all about her love life, too.”
“Let’s have it then.”
“Oh, it’s a long story. She was just a spinster. I must take flowers to her grave—I wonder if I could find it?”
“When did she die?”
“Just after the war. She was retired by then. Her retirement was rather a tragedy, she was forced to retire before time. The head never liked her. There’s a long story attached to Miss Brodie’s retirement. She was betrayed by one of her own girls, we were called the Brodie set. I never found out which one betrayed her.”
It is time now to speak of the long walk through the old parts of Edinburgh where Miss Brodie took her set, dressed in their deep violet coats and black velour hats with the green and white crest, one Friday in March when the school’s central heating system had broken down and everyone else had been muffled up and sent home. The wind blew from the icy Forth and the sky was loaded with forthcoming snow. Mary Macgregor walked with Sandy because Jenny had gone home. Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head, and for her anger, walked behind them with her dark red face, broad nose and dark pigtails falling from her black hat and her legs already shaped like pegs in their black wool stockings. By her side walked Rose Stanley, tall and blonde with a yellow-pale skin, who had not yet won her reputation for sex, and whose conversation was all about trains, cranes, motor cars, Meccanos and other boys’ affairs. She was not interested in the works of engines or the constructive powers of the Meccanos, but she knew their names, the variety of colours in which they came, the makes of motor cars and their horse-power, the various prices of the Meccano sets. She was also an energetic climber of walls and trees. And although these concerns at Rose Stanley’s eleventh year marked her as a tomboy, they did not go deep into her femininity and it was her superficial knowledge of these topics alone, as if they had been a conscious preparation, which stood her in good stead a few years later with the boys.
With Rose walked Miss Brodie, head up, like Sybil Thorndike, her nose arched and proud. She wore her loose brown tweed coat with the beaver collar tightly buttoned, her brown felt hat with the brim up at one side and down at the other. Behind Miss Brodie, last in the group, little Eunice Gardiner who, twenty-eight years later, said of Miss Brodie, “I must visit her grave,” gave a skip between each of her walking steps as if she might even break into pirouettes on the pavement, so that Miss Brodie, turning round, said from time to time, “Now, Eunice!” And, from time to time again, Miss Brodie would fall behind to keep Eunice company.
Sandy, who had been reading Kidnapped, was having a conversation with the hero, Alan Breck, and was glad to be with Mary Macgregor because it was not necessary to talk to Mary.
“Mary, you may speak quietly to Sandy.”
“Sandy won’t talk to me,” said Mary who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died.
“Sandy cannot talk to you if you are so stupid and disagreeable. Try to wear an agreeable expression at least, Mary.”
“Sandy, you must take this message o’er the heather to the Macphersons,” said Alan Breck. “My life depends upon it, and the Cause no less.”
“I shall never fail you, Alan Breck,” said Sandy. “Never.”
“Mary,” said Miss Brodie, from behind, “please try not to lag behind Sandy.”
Sandy kept pacing ahead, fired on by Alan Breck whose ardour and thankfulness, as Sandy prepared to set off across the heather, had reached touching proportions.
Mary tried to keep up with her. They were crossing the Meadows, a gusty expanse of common land, glaring green under the snowy sky. Their destination was the Old Town, for Miss Brodie had said they should see where history had been lived; and their route had brought them to the Middle Meadow Walk.
Eunice, unaccompanied at the back, began to hop to a rhyme which she repeated to herself:
Edinburgh, Leith,
Portobello, Musselburgh
And Dalkeith.
Then she changed to the other foot.
Edinburgh, Leith …
Miss Brodie turned round and hushed her, then called forward to Mary Macgregor who was staring at an Indian student who was approaching,
“Mary, don’t you want to walk tidily?”
“Mary,” said Sandy, “stop staring at the brown man.”
The nagged child looked numbly at Sandy and tried to quicken her pace. But Sandy was walking unevenly, in little spurts forward and little halts, as Alan Breck began to sing to her his ditty before she took to the heather to deliver the message that was going to save Alan’s life. He sang:
This is the song of the sword of Alan:
The smith made it,
The fire set it;
Now it shines in the hand of Alan Breck.
Then Alan Breck clapped her shoulder and said, “Sandy, you are a brave lass and want nothing in courage that any King’s man might possess.”
“Don’t walk so fast,” mumbled Mary.
“You aren’t walking with your head up,” said Sandy. “Keep it up, up.”
Then suddenly Sandy wanted to be kind to Mary Macgregor, and thought of the possibilities of feeling nice from being nice to Mary instead of blaming her. Miss Brodie’s voice from behind was saying to Rose Stanley, “You are all heroines in the making. Britain must be a fit country for heroines to live in. The League of Nations …” The sound of Miss Brodie’s presence, just when it was on the tip of Sandy’s tongue to be nice to Mary Macgregor, arrested the urge. Sandy looked back at her companions, and understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head. She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice and Monica, all in a frightening little moment, in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose.
She was even more frightened then, by her temptation to be nice to Mary Macgregor, since by this action she would separate herself, and be lonely, and blameable in a more dreadful way than Mary who, although officially the faulty one, was at least inside Miss Brodie’s category of heroines in the making. So, for good fellowship’s sake, Sandy said to Mary, “I wouldn’t be walking with you if Jenny was here.” And Mary said, “I know.” Then Sandy started to hate herself again and to nag on and on at Mary, with the feeling that if you did a thing a lot of times, you made it into a right thing. Mary started to cry, but quietly, so that Miss Brodie could not see. Sandy was unable to cope and decided to stride on and be a married lady having an argument with her husband:
“Well, Colin, it’s rather hard on a woman when the lights have fused and there isn’t a man in the house.”
“Dearest Sandy, how was I to know …”
As they came to the end of the Meadows a group of Girl Guides came by. Miss Brodie’s brood, all but Mary, walked past with eyes ahead. Mary stared