The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [14]
— 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 book 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 two sewing teachers, Miss Alison and Miss Ellen Kerr, seemed rather cowed by gaunt Miss Gaunt, and applied themselves briskly to the sewing machines which they were teaching the girls to use. The shuttle of the sewing machines went up and down, which usually caused Sandy and Jenny to giggle, since at that time everything that could conceivably bear a sexual interpretation immediately did so to them. But the absence of Miss Brodie and the presence of Miss Gaunt had a definite subtracting effect from the sexual significance of everything, and the trepidation of the two sewing sisters contributed to the effect of grim realism. Miss Gaunt evidently went to the same parish church as the Kerr sisters, to whom she addressed remarks from time to time while she embroidered a tray cloth. "My brothurr..." she kept saying, "my brothurr says..." Miss Gaunt's brother was apparently the minister of the parish, which accounted for the extra precautions Miss Alison and Miss Ellen were taking about their work today, with the result that they got a lot of the sewing mixed up. "My brothurr is up in the morning at five-thirty... My brothurr organised a..." Sandy was thinking of the next instalment of Jane Eyre which Miss Brodie usually enlivened this hour by reading. Sandy had done with Alan Breck and had taken up with Mr. Rochester, with whom she now sat in the garden. "You are afraid of me, Miss Sandy." "You talk like the Sphinx, sir, but I am not afraid." "You have such a grave, quiet manner, Miss Sandy — you are going?" "It has struck nine, sir." A phrase of Miss Gaunt's broke upon the garden scene: "Mr. Lowther is not at school this week." "So I hear," Miss Alison said. "It seems he will be away for another week at least." "Is he ill?" "I understand so, unfortunately," said Miss Gaunt. "Miss Brodie is ailing, too," said Miss Ellen. "Yes," said Miss Gaunt. "She too is expected to be absent for another week." "What is the trouble?" "That I couldn't say," said Miss Gaunt. She stuck her needle in and out of her embroidery. Then she looked up at the sisters. "It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther," she said. Sandy saw her face as that of the housekeeper in Jane Eyre, watching her carefully and knowingly as she entered the house, late, from the garden where she had been sitting with Mr. Rochester. "Perhaps Miss Brodie is having a love affair with Mr. Lowther," Sandy said to Jenny, merely in order to break up the sexless gloom that surrounded them. "But it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her. She must be in love with Mr. Lloyd or she wouldn't have let him kiss her." "Perhaps she's working it off on Mr. Lowther. Mr. Lowther isn't married." It was a fantasy worked up between them, in defiance of Miss Gaunt and her forbidding brother, and it was understood in that way. But Sandy, remembering Miss Gaunt's expression as she remarked, "It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther," was suddenly not sure that the suggestion was not true. For this reason she was more reticent than Jenny about the details of the imagined love affair. Jenny whispered, "They go to bed. Then he puts out the light. Then their toes touch. And then Miss Brodie... Miss Brodie..." She broke into giggles. "Miss Brodie yawns," said Sandy in order to restore decency, now that she suspected it was all true. "No, Miss Brodie says, 'Darling.' She says