The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [5]
then, "Mr. Lloyd had a baby last week. He must have commited sex with his wife." This idea was easier to cope with and they laughed screamingly into their pink paper napkins. Mr. Lloyd was the Art master to the senior girls. "Can you see it happening?" Jenny whispered. Sandy screwed her eyes even smaller in the effort of seeing with her mind. "He would be wearing his pyjamas," she whispered back. The 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