Free The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Brodie’s, so I suppose she winds hers round his, and—”
    “Where does Mr. Lowther live, do you know?” Sandy said.
    “At Cramond. He’s got a big house with a housekeeper.”
    In that year after the war when Sandy sat with Miss Brodie in the window of the Braid Hills Hotel, and brought her eyes back from the hills to show she was listening, Miss Brodie said:
    “I renounced Teddy Lloyd. But I decided to enter into a love affair, it was the only cure. My love for Teddy was an obsession, he was the love of my prime. But in the autumn of nineteen-thirty-one I entered an affair with Gordon Lowther, he was a bachelor and it was more becoming. That is the truth and there is no more to say. Are you listening, Sandy?”
    “Yes, I’m listening.”
    “You look as if you were thinking of something else, my dear. Well, as I say, that is the whole story.”
    Sandy was thinking of something else. She was thinking that it was not the whole story.
    “Of course the liaison was suspected. Perhaps you girls knew about it. You, Sandy, had a faint idea … but nobody could prove what was between Gordon Lowther and myself. It was never proved. It was not on those grounds that I was betrayed. I should like to know who betrayed me. It is incredible that it should have been one of my own girls. I often wonder if it was poor Mary. Perhaps I should have been nicer to Mary. Well, it was tragic about Mary, I picture that fire, that poor girl. I can’t see how Mary could have betrayed me, though.”
    “She had no contact with the school after she left,” Sandy said.
    “I wonder, was it Rose who betrayed me?”
    The whine in her voice—“… betrayed me, betrayed me”—bored and afflicted Sandy. It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman. What does she mean by “betray”? She was looking at the hills as if to see there the first and unbetrayable Miss Brodie, indifferent to criticism as a crag.
    After her two weeks’ absence Miss Brodie returned to tell her class that she had enjoyed an exciting rest and a well-earned one. Mr. Lowther’s singing class went on as usual and he beamed at Miss Brodie as she brought them proudly into the music room with their heads up, up. Miss Brodie now played the accompaniment, sitting very well at the piano and sometimes, with a certain sadness of countenance, richly taking the second soprano in “How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot,” and other melodious preparations for the annual concert. Mr. Lowther, short-legged, shy and golden-haired, no longer played with Jenny’s curls. The bare branches brushed the windows and Sandy was almost as sure as could be that the singing master was in love with Miss Brodie and that Miss Brodie was in love with the art master. Rose Stanley had not yet revealed her potentialities in the working-out of Miss Brodie’s passion for one-armed Teddy Lloyd, and Miss Brodie’s prime still flourished unbetrayed.
    It was impossible to imagine Miss Brodie sleeping with Mr. Lowther, it was impossible to imagine her in a sexual context at all, and yet it was impossible not to suspect that such things were so.
    During the Easter term Miss Mackay, the headmistress, had the girls in to tea in her study in small groups and, later, one by one. This was a routine of enquiry as to their intentions for the Senior school, whether they would go on the Modern side or whether they would apply for admission to the Classical.
    Miss Brodie had already prompted them as follows: “I am not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely.” So that the girls were left in no doubt as to Miss Brodie’s contempt for the Modern side.
    From among her special set only Eunice Gardiner stood out to be a Modern, and that was because her parents wanted her to take a course in