The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [51]
but no insight." Teddy Lloyd continued reproducing Jean Brodie in his paintings. "You have instinct," Sandy told him, "but no insight, or you would see that the woman isn't to be taken seriously." "I know she isn't," he said. "You are too analytical and irritable for your age." The family had returned and their meetings were dangerous and exciting. The more she discovered him to be still in love with Jean Brodie, the more she was curious about the mind that loved the woman. By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time. But that autumn, while she was still probing the mind that invented Miss Brodie on canvas after canvas, Sandy met Miss Brodie several times. She was at first merely resigned to Sandy's liaison with the art master. Presently she was exultant, and presently again enquired for details, which she did not get. "His portraits still resemble me?" said Miss Brodie. "Yes, very much," said Sandy. "Then all is well," said Miss Brodie. "And after all, Sandy," she said, "you are destined to be the great lover, although I would not have thought it. Truth is stranger than fiction. I wanted Rose for him, I admit, and sometimes I regretted urging young Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco, she would have done admirably for him, a girl of instinct, a———" "Did she go to fight for Franco?" said Sandy. "That was the intention. I made her see sense. However, she didn't have the chance to fight at all, poor girl." When Sandy returned, as was expected of her, to see Miss Mackay that autumn, the headmistress said to this rather difficult old girl with the abnormally small eyes, "You'll have been seeing something of Miss Brodie, I hope. You aren't forgetting your old friends, I hope." "I've seen her once or twice," said Sandy. "I'm afraid she put ideas into your young heads," said Miss Mackay with a knowing twinkle, which meant that now Sandy had left school it would be all right to talk openly about Miss Brodie's goings-on. "Yes, lots of ideas," Sandy said. "I wish I knew what some of them were," said Miss Mackay, slumping a little and genuinely worried. "Because it is still going on, I mean class after class, and now she has formed a new set, and they are so out of key with the rest of the school, Miss Brodie's set. They are precocious. Do you know what I mean?" "Yes," said Sandy. "But you won't be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?" Miss Mackay turned her chair so that it was nearly square with Sandy's. This was business. "My dear," she said, "what do you mean? I didn't know she was attracted by politics." "Neither she is," said Sandy, "except as a side interest. She's a born Fascist, have you thought of that?" "I shall question her pupils on those lines and see what emerges, if that is what you advise, Sandy. I had no idea you felt so seriously about the state of world affairs, Sandy, and I'm more than delighted———" "I'm not really interested in world affairs," said Sandy, "only in putting a stop to Miss Brodie." It was clear the headmistress thought this rather unpleasant of Sandy. But she did not fail to say to Miss Brodie, when the time came, "It was one of your own girls who gave me the tip, one of your set, Miss Brodie." Sandy was to leave Edinburgh at the end of the year and when she said goodbye to the Lloyds she looked round the studio at the canvases on which she had failed to put a stop to Miss Brodie. She congratulated Teddy Lloyd on the economy of his method. He congratulated her on the economy of hers, and Deirdre looked to see whatever did he mean? Sandy thought, if he knew about my stopping of Miss Brodie, he would think me more economical still. She was more fuming, now, with Christian morals, than John Knox. Miss Brodie was forced to retire at the end