The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [6]
day." His black eye flashed in the lamplight of the hut. "Back, girl!" he cried, "and do not bar my way. Well do I know that yon girl Jenny will report my whereabouts to my mocking erstwhile fiancée. Well do I know that you are both spies sent by her that she might mock. Stand back from the door, I say!" "Never!" said Sandy, placing her young lithe body squarely in front of the latch and her arm through the bolt. Her large eyes flashed with an azure light of appeal. Sandy handed the pencil to Jenny. "It's your turn," she said. Jenny wrote: With one movement he flung her to the farthest end of the hut and strode out into the moonlight and his strides made light of the drifting snow. "Put in about his boots," said Sandy. Jenny wrote: His high boots flashed in the moonlight. "There are too many moonlights," Sandy said, "but we can sort that later when it comes to publication." "Oh, but it's a secret, Sandy!" said Jenny. "I know that," Sandy said. "Don't worry, we won't publish it till our prime." "Do you think Miss Brodie ever had sexual intercourse with Hugh?" said Jenny. "She would have had a baby, wouldn't she?" "I don't know." "I don't think they did anything like that," said Sandy. "Their love was above all that." "Miss Brodie said they clung to each other with passionate abandon on his last leave." "I don't think they took their clothes off, though," Sandy said, "do you?" "No. I can't see it," said Jenny. "I wouldn't like to have sexual intercourse," Sandy said. "Neither would I. I'm going to marry a pure person." "Have a toffee." They ate their sweets, sitting on the carpet. Sandy put some coal on the fire and the light spurted up, reflecting on Jenny's ringlets. "Let's be witches by the fire, like we were at Hallowe'en." They sat in the twilight eating toffees and incanting witches' spells. Jenny said, "There's a Greek god at the museum standing up with nothing on. I saw it last Sunday afternoon but I was with Auntie Kate and I didn't have a chance to look properly." "Let's go to the museum next Sunday," Sandy said. "It's research." "Would you be allowed to go alone with me?" Sandy, who was notorious for not being allowed to go out and about without a grown-up person, said, "I don't think so. Perhaps we could get someone to take us." "We could ask Miss Brodie." Miss Brodie frequently took the little girls to the art galleries and museums, so this seemed feasible. "But suppose," said Sandy, "she won't let us look at the statue if it's naked." "I don't think she would notice that it was naked," Jenny said. "She just wouldn't see its thingummyjig." "I know," said Sandy. "Miss Brodie's above all that." It was time for Jenny to go home with her mother, all the way in the tram car through the haunted November twilight of Edinburgh across the Dean Bridge. Sandy waved from the window, and wondered if Jenny, too, had the feeling of leading a double life, fraught with problems that even a millionaire did not have to face. It was well known that millionaires led double lives. The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was suddenly a six-o'clock feeling in the house. Miss Brodie was reciting poetry to the class at a quarter to four, to raise their minds before they went home. Miss Brodie's eyes were half shut and her head was thrown back:
In the stormy east wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower'd Camelot.
Sandy watched Miss Brodie through her little pale eyes, screwed them smaller and shut her lips tight. Rose Stanley was pulling threads from the girdle of her gym tunic. Jenny was enthralled by the poem, her lips were parted, she was never bored. Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored. Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott. "By what means did your Ladyship write these words?" Sandy enquired in her mind with her lips shut tight. "There was a pot of white paint and a brush