Читать книгу The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark - Страница 6

II

MARY MACGREGOR, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realised that Jean Brodie’s confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love-story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie, certainly never disliked her, when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of real misery—when her first and last boy friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again—she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils. “Who has spilled ink on the floor—was it you, Mary?”

“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.”

She added, “Art is greater than science. Art comes first, and then science.”

The large map had been rolled down over the blackboard because they had started the geography lesson. Miss Brodie turned with her pointer to show where Alaska lay. But she turned again to the class and said: “Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance.”

This was the first winter of the two years that this class spent with Miss Brodie. It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls’ education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie’s special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf. “It is for the sake of you girls—my influence, now, in the years of my prime.” This was the beginning of the Brodie set. Eunice Gardiner was so quiet at first, it was difficult to see why she had been drawn in by Miss Brodie. But eventually she cut capers for the relief and amusement of the tea-parties, doing cart-wheels on the carpet. “You are an Ariel,” said Miss Brodie. Then Eunice began to chatter. She was not allowed to do cart-wheels on Sundays, for in many ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye. Eunice Gardiner did somersaults on the mat only at Saturday gatherings before high teas, or afterwards on Miss Brodie’s kitchen linoleum, while the other girls were washing up and licking honey from the depleted comb off their fingers as they passed it over to be put away in the food cupboard. It was twenty-eight years after Eunice did the splits in Miss Brodie’s flat that she, who had become a nurse and married a doctor, said to her husband one evening:

“Next year when we go for the Festival—”

“Yes?”

She was making a wool rug, pulling at a different stitch.

“Yes?” 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 at the dark blue big girls with their regimented vigorous look and broader accents of speech than the Brodie girls used when in Miss Brodie’s presence. They passed, and Sandy said to Mary, “It’s rude to stare.” And Mary said, “I wasn’t staring.” Meanwhile Miss Brodie was being questioned by the girls behind on the question of the Brownies and the Girl Guides, for quite a lot of the other girls in the Junior School were Brownies.

“For those who like that sort of thing,” said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, “that is the sort of thing they like.”

So Brownies and Guides were ruled out. Sandy recalled Miss Brodie’s admiration for Mussolini’s marching troops, and the picture she had brought back from Italy showing the triumphant march of the black uniforms in Rome.

“These are the fascisti,” said Miss Brodie, and spelt it out. “What are these men, Rose?”

“The fascisti, Miss Brodie.”

They were dark as anything and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie’s disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.

“We make good company for each other, Sandy,” said Alan Breck, crunching beneath his feet the broken glass in the blood on the floor of the ship’s round-house. And taking a knife from the table, he cut off one of the silver buttons from his coat. “Wherever you show that button,” he said, “the friends of Alan Breck will come around you.”

“We turn to the right,” said Miss Brodie.

They approached the Old Town which none of the girls had properly seen before, because none of their parents was so historically minded as to be moved to conduct their young into the reeking network of slums which the Old Town constituted in those years. The Canongate, The Grassmarket, The Lawnmarket, were names which betokened a misty region of crime and desperation: “Lawnmarket Man Jailed.”

Only Eunice Gardiner and Monica Douglas had already traversed the High Street on foot on the Royal Mile from the Castle or Holyrood. Sandy had been taken to Holyrood in an uncle’s car and had seen the bed, too short and too broad, where Mary Queen of Scots had slept, and the tiny room, smaller than their own scullery at home, where the Queen had played cards with Rizzio.

Now they were in a great square, the Grassmarket, with the Castle, which was in any case everywhere, rearing between a big gap in the houses where the aristocracy used to live. It was Sandy’s first experience of a foreign country, which intimates itself by its new smells and shapes and its new poor. A man sat on the icy-cold pavement, he just sat. A crowd of children, some without shoes, were playing some fight game, and some boys shouted after Miss Brodie’s violet-clad company, with words that the girls had not heard before, but rightly understood to be obscene. Children and women with shawls came in and out of the dark closes. Sandy found she was holding Mary’s hand in her bewilderment, all the girls were holding hands, while Miss Brodie talked of history. Into the High Street, and “John Knox,” said Miss Brodie, “was an embittered man. He could never be at ease with the gay French Queen. We of Edinburgh owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.” The smell was amazingly terrible. In the middle of the road farther up the High Street a crowd was gathered. “Walk past quietly,” said Miss Brodie.

A man and a woman stood in the midst of the crowd which had formed a ring round them. They were shouting at each other and the man hit the woman twice across the head. Another woman, very little, with cropped black hair, a red face and a big mouth, came forward and took the man by the arm. She said:

“I’ll be your man.”

From time to time throughout her life Sandy pondered this, for she was certain that the little woman’s words were “I’ll be your man,” not “I’ll be your woman,” and it was never explained.