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
