Read Online The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page A

the least of all the Brodie set to be excited by Miss Brodie’s love affairs, or by anyone else’s sex. And it was always to be the same. Later, when she was famous for sex, her magnificently appealing qualities lay in the fact that she had no curiosity about sex at all, she never reflected upon it. As Miss Brodie was to say, she had instinct.
    “Rose is the only one who believes me,” said Monica Douglas.
    When she visited Sandy at the nunnery in the late nineteen-fifties, Monica said, “I really did see Teddy Lloyd kiss Miss Brodie in the art room one day.”
    “I know you did,” said Sandy.
    She knew it even before Miss Brodie had told her so one day after the end of the war, when they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel eating sandwiches and drinking tea which Miss Brodie’s rations at home would not run to. Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long-preserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before time. She said, “I am past my prime,”
    “It was a good prime,” said Sandy.
    They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had never been capable of losing anything by the war.
    “Teddy Lloyd was greatly in love with me, as you know,” said Miss Brodie, “and I with him. It was a great love. One day in the art room he kissed me. We never became lovers, not even after you left Edinburgh, when the temptation was strongest.”
    Sandy stared through her little eyes at the hills.
    “But I renounced him,” said Miss Brodie. “He was a married man. I renounced the great love of my prime. We have everything in common, the artistic nature.”
    She had reckoned on her prime lasting till she was sixty. But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie’s last and fifty-sixth year. She looked older than that, she was suffering from an internal growth. This was her last year in the world and in another sense it was Sandy’s.
    Miss Brodie sat in her defeat and said, “In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one—are you listening, Sandy?”
    Sandy took her eyes from the hills.
    In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one Miss Brodie was away from school for two weeks. It was understood she had an ailment. The Brodie set called at her flat after school with flowers and found no one at home. On enquiring at school next day they were told she had gone to the country to stay with a friend until she was better.
    In the meantime Miss Brodie’s class was dispersed, and squashed in among the classes of her colleagues. The Brodie set stuck together and were placed with a gaunt woman who was, in fact, a Miss Gaunt from the Western Isles who wore a knee-length skirt made from what looked like grey blanket stuff; this had never been smart even in the knee-length days; Rose Stanley said it was cut short for economy. Her head was very large and bony. Her chest was a slight bulge flattened by a bust bodice, and her jersey was a dark forbidding green. She did not care at all for the Brodie set who were stunned by a sudden plunge into industrious learning and very put out by Miss Gaunt’s horrible sharpness and strict insistence on silence throughout the day.
    “Oh dear,” said Rose out loud one day when they were settled to essay writing, “I can’t remember how you spell ‘possession.’ Are there two s’s or—?”
    “A hundred lines of Marmion ,” Miss Gaunt flung at her.
    The black-marks books which eventually reflected itself on the end-of-term reports, was heavily scored with the names of the Brodie set by the end of the first week. Apart from enquiring their names for this purpose Miss Gaunt did not trouble to remember them. “You, girl,” she would say to every Brodie face. So dazed were the Brodie girls that they did not notice the omission during that week of their singing lesson which should have been on Wednesday.
    On Thursday they were herded into the sewing room in the early afternoon. The