Tartar

Excerpt from “Tartar” published in The Southern Review

“Sometimes I don’t actually meet a character I have created in a novel until some time after the novel has been written and published.”

—Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent

In 1988, my second posting in store management for the fashion chain Laura Ashley took me to Edinburgh. The company put me up in the comfortable but fusty Braid Hills Hotel while I hunted for a flat to rent. I breakfasted alone every morning in its kipper-scented dining room feeling self-conscious, hoping the drapery print of my flowery frock allowed me to camouflage into the curtains surrounding the picture windows. Edinburgh glowered in the distance.

            The Braid Hills Hotel sits like an island in a sea of hazards and fairways. Golf was a sport that could have been enjoyed, had they but the opportunity, by Florence Nightingale, Cleopatra, or Helen of Troy, women lauded by Muriel Spark’s most famous protagonist for their total disregard of team spirit. I had no idea, having not yet read anything by Spark, that I was breakfasting a mile and a half south of her birthplace in Morningside, and on the set of her most celebrated book.

            “And Miss Brodie, sitting in the window of the Braid Hills Hotel with Sandy, had said: ‘I wonder if it was Mary Macgregor betrayed me? Perhaps I should have been kinder to Mary.’”

            It is here, having tea with her betrayer, Sandy Stranger, that Brodie reminisces about her life at the Marcia Blaine School before she was ousted for political agitation. And it is here that Brodie confesses her affair with the music teacher, Mr. Lowther, and her renunciation of the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, “the great love of my prime,” and avoids conceding that Hitler and Mussolini, with whom she had been much enamored before the war, had let her down.

            The Braid Hills Hotel typifies the prudish Calvinist lifestyle Brodie disdained but which trounced her in the end. Sandy Stranger, with whom Spark shared thin slivers of her childhood biography and a fair slice of her sharp personality, takes tea with her nemesis before entering the Roman Catholic Church to become a nun, “in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.” Spark, too, converted to Catholicism, though not the cloistered kind—despite flirting with this vocation she concluded that the vow of obedience would prove problematic—and I doubt any convent would have had the courage to take her in.

Having tested the limits of my area manager’s meager relocation budget, I finally rented a flat on Magdala Crescent, a rain-stained Georgian terrace, on the western edge of the New Town, north of Spark’s more prim and proper Bruntsfield Place. I trembled on the edge of my landlord’s worsted sofa (having fallen hard for the black-and-white kitchen linoleum and his mother’s collection of Danish plates), while he explained the ridiculously low rent. He wanted someone who would appreciate his flat while he worked in London. Apparently I fitted the bill. He never checked my references, choosing to judge entirely by appearances. The Laura Ashley brand’s aura of rose water and perpetual virginity coated me like a miasma; it’s hard to sustain doubts about a Glaswegian when she’s dressed like Laura Ingalls.