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 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 which happened to be standing upon the grassy verge,” replied the Lady of Shalott graciously. “It was left there no doubt by some heedless member of the Unemployed.”
“Alas, and in all that rain!” said Sandy for want of something better to say, while Miss Brodie’s voice soared up to the ceiling, and curled round the feet of the Senior girls upstairs.
The Lady of Shalott placed a white hand on Sandy’s shoulder and gazed at her for a space. “That one so young and beautiful should be so ill-fated in love!” she said in low sad tones.
“What can be the meaning of these words?” cried Sandy in alarm, with her little eyes screwed on Miss Brodie and her lips shut tight.
Miss Brodie said: “Sandy, are you in pain?”
Sandy looked astonished.
“You girls,” said Miss Brodie, “must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!”