Apropos Spark's Ms Brodie on this cold black Canberra afternoon -
Fully to savour her position, Sandy would go and stand outside St. Giles'
Cathedral or the Tolbooth, and contemplate these emblems of a dark and terrible
salvation which made the fires of the damned seem very merry to the
imagination by contrast, and much preferable. Nobody in her life, at home or at
school, had ever spoken of Calvinism except as a joke that had once been taken
seriously. She did not at the time understand that her environment had not been
on the surface peculiar to the place, as was the environment of the Edinburgh
social classes just above or, even more, just below her own. She had no
experience of social class at all. In its outward forms her fifteen years might have
been spent in any suburb of any city in the British Isles; her school, with its alien
house system, might have been in Ealing. All she was conscious of now was that
some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on
unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt
deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to
cease to be protected from it by enlightened people.
In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a
specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to
reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some
ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and
the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned
for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.
Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular
conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was
no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it
God's pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and
salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.
Sandy was unable to formulate these exciting propositions; nevertheless she
experienced them in the air she breathed, she sensed them in the curiously
defiant way in which the people she knew broke the Sabbath, and she smelt them
in the excesses of Miss Brodie in her prime. Now that she was allowed to go
about alone, she walked round the certainly forbidden quarters of Edinburgh to
look at the blackened monuments and hear the unbelievable curses of drunken
men and women, and, comparing their faces with the faces from Morningside
and Merchisten with which she was familiar, she saw, with stabs of new and
exciting Calvinistic guilt, that there was not much difference.
In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie
who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic
suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters
who couldn't stand it any more.
