The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (12 page)

“She looks really like as if she won’t have any prime,” Sandy said.

“The word ‘like’ is redundant in that sentence. What is Mrs. Lloyd’s Christian name?”

“Deirdre,” said Jenny, and Miss Brodie considered the name as if it were new to her although she had heard it last week from Mary and Eunice, and the week before that from Rose and Monica, and so had Mr. Lowther. Outside, light rain began to fall on Mr. Lowther’s leaves.

“Celtic,” said Miss Brodie.

Sandy loitered at the kitchen door waiting for Miss Brodie to come for a walk by the sea. Miss Brodie was doing something to an enormous ham prior to putting it into a huge pot. Miss Brodie’s new ventures into cookery in no way diminished her previous grandeur, for everything she prepared for Gordon Lowther seemed to be large, whether it was family-sized puddings to last him out the week, or joints of beef or lamb, or great angry-eyed whole salmon.

“I must get this on for Mr. Lowther’s supper,” she said to Sandy, “and see that he gets his supper before I go home tonight.”

She always so far kept up the idea that she went home on these week-end nights and left Mr. Lowther alone in the big house. So far the girls had found no evidence to the contrary, nor were they ever to do so; a little later Miss Ellen Kerr was brought to the headmistress by Miss Gaunt to testify to having found Miss Brodie’s nightdress under a pillow of the double bed on which Mr. Lowther took his sleep. She had found it while changing the linen; it was the pillow on the far side of the bed, nearest the wall, under which the nightdress had been discovered folded neatly.

“How do you know the nightdress was Miss Brodie’s?” demanded Miss Mackay, the sharp-minded woman, who smelt her prey very near and yet saw it very far. She stood with a hand on the back of her chair, bending forward full of ears.

“One must draw one’s own conclusions,” said Miss Gaunt.

“I am addressing Miss Ellen.”

“Yes, one must draw one’s own conclusions,” said Miss Ellen, with her tight-drawn red-veined cheeks looking shiny and flustered. “It was crêpe de Chine.”

“It is non proven,” said Miss Mackay, sitting down to her desk. “Come back to me,” she said, “if you have proof positive. What did you do with the garment? Did you confront Miss Brodie with it?”

“Oh, no, Miss Mackay,” said Miss Ellen.

“You should have confronted her with it. You should have said, ‘Miss Brodie, come here a minute, can you explain this?’ That’s what you should have said. Is the nightdress still there?”

“Oh, no, it’s gone.”

“She’s that brazen,” said Miss Gaunt.

All this was conveyed to Sandy by the headmistress herself at that subsequent time when Sandy looked at her distastefully through her little eyes and, evading the quite crude question which the coarse-faced woman asked her, was moved by various other considerations to betray Miss Brodie.

“But I must organise the dear fellow’s food before I go home tonight,” Miss Brodie said in the summer of nineteen-thirty-three while Sandy leaned against the kitchen door with her legs longing to be running along the sea shore. Jenny came and joined her, and together they waited upon Miss Brodie, and saw on the vast old kitchen table the piled-up provisions of the morning’s shopping. Outside on the dining-room table stood large bowls of fruit with boxes of dates piled on top of them, as if this were Christmas and the kitchen that of a holiday hotel.

“Won’t all this give Mr. Lowther a stoppage?” Sandy said to Jenny.

“Not if he eats his greens,” said Jenny.

While they waited for Miss Brodie to dress the great ham like the heroine she was, there came the sound of Mr. Lowther at the piano in the library singing rather slowly and mournfully:

All people that on earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.

Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell,

Come ye before him and rejoice.

Mr. Lowther was the choir-master and an Elder of the church, and had not yet been quietly advised to withdraw from these offices by Mr. Gaunt the minister, brother of Miss Gaunt, following the finding of the nightdress under the pillow next to his.

Presently, as she put the ham on a low gas and settled the lid on the pot Miss Brodie joined in the psalm richly, contralto-wise, giving the notes more body:

O enter then his gates with praise,

Approach with joy his courts unto.

The rain had stopped and was only now hanging damply within the salt air. All along the sea front Miss Brodie questioned the girls, against the rhythm of the waves, about the appointments of Teddy Lloyd’s house, the kind of tea they got, how vast and light was the studio, and what was said.

“He looked very romantic in his own studio,” Sandy said.

“How was that?”

“I think it was his having only one arm,” said Jenny.

“But he always has only one arm.”

“He did more than usual with it,” said Sandy.

“He was waving it about,” Jenny said. “There was a lovely view from the studio window. He’s proud of it.”

“The studio is in the attic, I presume?”

“Yes, all along the top of the house. There is a new portrait he has done of his family, it’s a little bit amusing, it starts with himself, very tall, then his wife. Then all the little children graded downwards to the baby on the floor, it makes a diagonal line across the canvas.”

“What makes it amusing?” said Miss Brodie.

“They are all facing square and they all look serious,” Sandy said. “You are supposed to laugh at it.”

Miss Brodie laughed a little at this. There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.

“There’s another portrait,” Jenny said, “not finished yet, of Rose.”

“He has been painting Rose?”

“Yes.”

“Rose has been sitting for him?”

“Yes, for about a month.”

Miss Brodie was very excited. “Rose didn’t mention this,” she said.

Sandy halted. “Oh, I forgot. It was supposed to be a surprise. You aren’t supposed to know.”

“What, the portrait, I am to see it?”

Sandy looked confused, for she was not sure how Rose had meant her portrait to be a surprise to Miss Brodie.

Jenny said, “Oh, Miss Brodie, it is the fact that she’s sitting for Mr. Lloyd that she wanted to keep for a surprise.” Sandy realised, then, that this was right.

“Ah,” said Miss Brodie, well pleased. “That is thoughtful of Rose.”

Sandy was jealous, because Rose was not supposed to be thoughtful.

“What is she wearing for her portrait?” said Miss Brodie.

“Her gym tunic,” Sandy said.

“Sitting sideways,” Jenny said.

“In profile,” said Miss Brodie.

Miss Brodie stopped a man to buy a lobster for Mr. Lowther. When this was done she said:

“Rose is bound to be painted many times. She may well sit for Mr. Lloyd on future occasions, she is one of the crème de la crème.”

It was said in an enquiring tone. The girls understood she was trying quite hard to piece together a whole picture from their random remarks.

Jenny accordingly let fall, “Oh, yes, Mr. Lloyd wants to paint Rose in red velvet.”

And Sandy added, “Mrs. Lloyd has a bit of red velvet to put around her, they were trying it round her.”

“Are you to return?” said Miss Brodie.

“Yes, all of us,” Sandy said. “Mr. Lloyd thinks we’re a jolly nice set.”

“Have you not thought it remarkable,” said Miss Brodie, “that it is you six girls that Mr. Lloyd has chosen to invite to his studio?”

“Well, we’re a set,” said Jenny.

“Has he invited any other girls from the school?”—but Miss Brodie knew the answer.

“Oh, no, only us.”

“It is because you are mine,” said Miss Brodie. “I mean of my stamp and cut, and I am in my prime.”

Sandy and Jenny had not given much thought to the fact of the art master’s inviting them as a group. Indeed, there was something special in his acceptance of the Brodie set. There was a mystery here to be worked out, and it was clear that when he thought of them he thought of Miss Brodie.

“He always asks about you,” Sandy said to Miss Brodie, “as soon as he sees us.”

“Yes, Rose did tell me that,” said Miss Brodie.

Suddenly, like migrating birds, Sandy and Jenny were of one mind for a run and without warning they ran along the pebbly beach into the air which was full of sunset, returning to Miss Brodie to hear of her forthcoming summer holiday when she was going to leave the fattened-up Mr. Lowther, she was afraid, to fend for himself with the aid of the Misses Kerr, and was going abroad, not to Italy this year but to Germany, where Hitler was become Chancellor, a prophet-figure like Thomas Carlyle, and more reliable than Mussolini; the German brownshirts, she said, were exactly the same as the Italian black, only more reliable.

Jenny and Sandy were going to a farm for the summer holidays, where in fact the name of Miss Brodie would not very much be on their lips or in their minds after the first two weeks, and instead they would make hay and follow the sheep about. It was always difficult to realise during term times that the world of Miss Brodie might be half forgotten, as were the worlds of the school houses, Holyrood, Melrose, Argyll and Biggar.

“I wonder if Mr. Lowther would care for sweetbreads done with rice,” Miss Brodie said.

“W
HY, IT’S LIKE
M
ISS
Brodie!” said Sandy, “It’s terribly like Miss
Brodie.” Then, perceiving that what she had said had accumulated a meaning between its passing her lips and reaching the ears of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd, she said, “Though of course it’s Rose, it’s more like Rose, it’s terribly like Rose.”

Teddy Lloyd shifted the new portrait so that it stood in a different light. It still looked like Miss Brodie.

Deirdre Lloyd said, “I haven’t met Miss Brodie I don’t think. Is she fair?”

“No,” said Teddy Lloyd in his hoarse way, “she’s dark.”

Sandy saw that the head of the portrait was fair, it was Rose’s portrait all right. Rose was seated in profile by a window in her gym dress, her hands palm-downwards, one on each knee. Where was the resemblance to Miss Brodie? It was the profile perhaps; it was the forehead, perhaps; it was the type of stare from Rose’s blue eyes, perhaps, which was like the dominating stare from Miss Brodie’s brown. The portrait was very like Miss Brodie.

“It’s Rose, all right,” Sandy said, and Deirdre Lloyd looked at her.

“Do you like it?” said Teddy Lloyd.

“Yes, it’s lovely.”

“Well, that’s all that matters.”

Sandy continued looking at it through her very small eyes, and while she was doing so Teddy Lloyd drew the piece of sheeting over the portrait with a casual flip of his only arm.

Deirdre Lloyd had been the first woman to dress up as a peasant whom Sandy had ever met, and peasant women were to be fashionable for the next thirty years or more. She wore a fairly long full-gathered dark skirt, a bright green blouse with the sleeves rolled up, a necklace of large painted wooden beads and gipsy-looking earrings. Round her waist was a bright red wide belt. She wore dark brown stockings and sandals of dark green suède. In this, and various other costumes of similar kind, Deirdre was depicted on canvas in different parts of the studio. She had an attractive near-laughing voice. She said:

“We’ve got a new one of Rose. Teddy, show Sandy the new one of Rose.”

“It isn’t quite at a stage for looking at.”

“Well, what about Red Velvet? Show Sandy that—Teddy did a splendid portrait of Rose last summer, we swathed her in red velvet, and we’ve called it Red Velvet.”

Teddy Lloyd had brought out a canvas from behind a few others. He stood it in the light on an easel. Sandy looked at it with her tiny eyes which it was astonishing that anyone could trust.

The portrait was like Miss Brodie. Sandy said, “I like the colours.”

“Does it resemble Miss Brodie?” said Deirdre Lloyd with her near-laughter.

“Miss Brodie is a woman in her prime,” said Sandy, “but there is a resemblance now you mention it.”

Deirdre Lloyd said: “Rose was only fourteen at the time; it makes her look very mature, but she is very mature.”

The swathing of crimson velvet was so arranged that it did two things at once, it made Rose look one-armed like the artist himself, and it showed the curves of her breast to be more developed than they were, even now, when Rose was fifteen. Also, the picture was like Miss Brodie, and this was the main thing about it and the main mystery. Rose had a large-boned pale face. Miss Brodie’s bones were small, although her eyes, nose and mouth were large. It was difficult to see how Teddy Lloyd had imposed the dark and Roman face of Miss Brodie on that of pale Rose, but he had done so.

Sandy looked again at the other recent portraits in the studio, Teddy Lloyd’s wife, his children, some unknown sitters. They were none of them like Miss Brodie.

Then she saw a drawing lying on top of a pile on the work-table. It was Miss Brodie leaning against a lamp post in the Lawnmarket with a working woman’s shawl around her; on closer inspection it proved to be Monica Douglas with the high cheekbones and long nose. Sandy said:

“I didn’t know Monica sat for you.”

“I’ve done one or two preliminary sketches. Don’t you think that setting’s rather good for Monica? Here’s one of Eunice in her harlequin outfit, I thought she looked rather well in it.”

Sandy was vexed. These girls, Monica and Eunice, had not said anything to the others about their being painted by the art master. But now they were all fifteen there was a lot they did not tell each other. She looked more closely at this picture of Eunice.

Eunice had worn the harlequin dress for a school performance. Small and neat and sharp-featured as she was, in the portrait she looked like Miss Brodie. In amongst her various bewilderments Sandy was fascinated by the economy of Teddy Lloyd’s method, as she had been four years earlier by Miss Brodie’s variations on her love story, when she had attached to her first, war-time lover the attributes of the art master and the singing master who had then newly entered her orbit. Teddy Lloyd’s method of presentation was similar, it was economical, and it always seemed afterwards to Sandy that where there was a choice of various courses, the most economical was the best, and that the course to be taken was the most expedient and most suitable at the time for all the objects in hand. She acted on this principle when the time came for her to betray Miss Brodie.