The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [12]
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. And many times throughout her life Sandy knew with a shock, when speaking to people whose childhood had been in Edinburgh, that there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers, and with which she held only the names of districts and streets and monuments in common. Similarly, there were other people's nineteen-thirties. So that, in her middle age, when she was at last allowed all those visitors to the convent — so many visitors being against the Rule, but a special dispensation was enforced on Sandy because of her Treatise — when a man said, "I must have been at school in Edinburgh at the same time as you, Sister Helena," Sandy, who was now some years Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, clutched the bars of the grille as was her way, and peered at him through her little faint eyes and asked him to describe his schooldays and his school, and the Edinburgh he had known. And it turned out, once more, that his was a different Edinburgh from Sandy's. His school, where he was a boarder, had been cold and grey. His teachers had been supercilious Englishmen, "or near-Englishmen," said the visitor, "with third-rate degrees." Sandy could not remember ever having questioned the quality of her teachers' degrees, and the school had always been lit with the sun or, in winter, with a pearly north light. "But Edinburgh," said the man, "was a beautiful city, more beautiful then than it is now. Of course, the slums have been cleared. The Old Town was always my favourite. We used to love to explore the Grassmarket and so on. Architecturally speaking, there is no finer sight in Europe." "I once was taken for a walk through the Canongate," Sandy said, "but I was frightened by the squalor." "Well, it was the 'thirties," said the man. "Tell me, Sister Helena, what would you say was your greatest influence during the 'thirties? I mean, during your teens. Did you read Auden and Eliot?" "No," said Sandy. "We boys were very keen on Auden and that group of course. We wanted to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. On the Republican side, of course. Did you take sides in the Spanish Civil War at your school?" "Well, not exactly," said Sandy. "It was all different for us." "You weren't a Catholic then, of course?" "No," said Sandy. "The influences of one's teens are very important," said the man. "Oh yes," said Sandy, "even if they provide something to react against." "What was your biggest influence, then, Sister Helena? Was it political, personal? Was it Calvinism?" "Oh no," said Sandy. "But there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime." She clutched the bars of the grille as if she wanted to escape from the dim parlour beyond, for she was not composed like the other nuns who sat, when they received their rare visitors, well back in the darkness with folded hands. But Sandy always leaned forward and peered, clutching the bars with