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,
