The English Tutor

by Sara Seale

  Brian silently handed over the papers, and Clancy sighed but said no more. She knew her father in this mood. He would tell them nothing until he was ready.

  Aunt Bea got up.

  “I’m going to give my orders in the kitchen. Will you be in for lunch, Kevin?” she said.

  He did not look up from his paper, but replied that he would not. It was market day in Duneen, he said, and he had business there.

  Clancy leant across the table.

  “Take me with you, Kilmallin,” she pleaded. “Just this once—please. I love to hear you bargain and make a good deal. Please, Kilmallin—let’s go roystering.”

  He gave in, why, he was not quite sure.

  “Oh, very well. Be ready by half-past ten. What about you, Brian? We might as well make it a family occasion.”

  But Brian did not want to go. A whole day in his father’s company, even though Clancy would be there to lend support, filled him with dismay. He looked quickly at his aunt, saying:

  “I think I’ll stay with Aunt Bea, if you don’t mind.”

  “Much more sensible,” Aunt Bea said as she left the room.

  Kevin, turned back to his paper with a deep sense of irritation. He knew quite well that had Brian asked if he could come in the first place, he would never have hesitated to grant the small favour as in his daughter’s case, and he felt at once unjust and ill-served by both his children.

  “Be ready by half-past ten,” he said again to Clancy. “I won’t wait a minute after.”

  To Clancy it was one of the halcyon days to be remembered forever after for the little things. The way the thin brittle sunshine struck through the loch mist, as they rattled down the drive in Kevin’s old V8; the soft grey sky curving to the hills, the little, horned mountain sheep with their long tails, skipping out of their way on the moorland road.

  The little grey town of Duneen was always a source of delight, and Clancy and Brian would sometimes walk to the village and take the old ramshackle bus and spend a happy day idling in the market and the shops with no money to spend. But to come with Kilmallin was entirely different. Everything had a flavour of adventure, and she loved to watch her father making a purchase or a deal, striking the bargain so dear to Irish hearts if it was only the matter of a hundredweight of maize. He would greet his friends with increasing bonhomie as the day wore on and the whisky flowed. Clancy sat in a corner of the saloon and listened to their racy stories and sometimes one of them would come over and speak to her, and Kevin, if he was in a good mood, would introduce her all round and she would fancy there was pride in his voice.

  “Ah, Clancy’s a son to me,” Kevin said, and pride and pleasure brought the tears pricking to her eyes.

  But one of the men said quietly:

  “I’d not be wanting a son, Kilmallin, if I’d a daughter like this one.”

  It was the first compliment she had ever received and she was bewildered. Had not she, as well as Kilmallin, all her life wished she had been a boy?

  “You’ll be marrying her off one of these days to a fine young fellow,” the dealer said, his shrewd bright eyes twinkling. “And there’ll be no lack of suitors, I’m thinking. What news have you of Conn Driscoll?”

  Kevin laughed and ordered another round of drinks, and Clancy turned to the dealer with eagerness and began to tell the story of Conn’s grey mare who had lost him the best price he had got for a twelvemonth.

  “Och, that’s the bad luck!” the man sympathized. “But I’m always telling the boy he’ll never make money till he moves his stables. The land his side of Loch Sidhe is no good for horsebreeding.”

  “But Conn doesn’t want to make money—not a lot of money,” she said.

  The dealer smiled.

  “He may want to one day,” he said, and pulled one of her curls.

  The afternoon went well with Kevin. His bargaining produced the right results, and Clancy, encouraged by his good humour, put in a little bargaining of her own and received a slap on the back from her father who told her she was a true O’Shane and as shrewd as himself.

  “You’re a good child, Clancy, here—buy yourself a fairing,” he said, and flung her a five-pound note.

  Clancy’s eyes grew dark with wonder. There was nothing to spend money on at Kilmallin, so she seldom had any. This was riches indeed.

  “Can I spend it all?” she asked with awe.

  “Sure you can spend it all,” laughed Kevin. “Buy yourself some fal-lal to dazzle the eyes of Conn Driscoll.”

  “Conn takes no notice of fal-lals,” said Clancy happily, and rushed off to spend.

  But she did not spend it all. An old-fashioned glass paperweight in the form of a globe which when turned upside down became a snowstorm, took her eye, and she bought this for herself and something for Brian, so that he should share in the pleasure of such a perfect day, and the change she stowed carefully away in the pocket of her neat tweed suit against another occasion. One never knew, she thought, suddenly sober, when one might need money.

  They visited more saloons before they went home. Kevin, mellowed, but by no means drunk, told the company at large all about the English tutor he was engaging for his children, together with anecdotes of the string of governesses, prompted by Clancy when his memory failed him. It would be good, he said, to have a man in the house besides himself. They nodded their heads wisely and all approved his choice of a tutor, even of his nationality.

  “My daughter,” said Kevin solemnly, “has a mislike for the English. She’s a great patriot, my daughter. She doesn’t take kindly to British rule.”

  This was considered a great joke, and one little man, raising his glass said: “To hell with the British, here’s to them!”

  They drove home in the darkness, Clancy’s head resting against her father’s shoulder, while he told her disreputable stories of his youth, and sang old ballads in a rich, tuneful baritone.

  Clancy sighed deeply with contentment and closed her eyes. If the notion of another man in the house—even an Englishman—could do so much for Kilmallin, then she would suffer him, for now at last they were companions, father and son, roystering together.

  She lifted up her own small voice and joined him in a rendering of The Wearing of the Green.

  It was the beginning, but it was also the end. The next day Kevin was morose, already a little ashamed of his foolish pretence. He looked broodingly at his boy, so reluctant to share his company. Here was his son, his true son, on whom his hopes had rested for so many years. Nature had cheated him and given a girl’s sickly body to the boy. What matter if the girl had been frail? Ailing women were a nuisance to be sure, but it was to be expected and they had no need of that strength and vitality that were so cruelly Clancy’s. He felt resentful of her health and her misplaced eagerness for his company. It should have been Brian receiving kindness from his friends, Brian beside him, happy and singing, after the day’s small pleasures.

  As the days passed, he seemed to ignore her more than before, and at first she thought she must have failed him by some thoughtless offence. But, watching him with Brian, she understood. She had failed him, but only by reason of her sex.

  There was much activity going on in the tower room, where Aunt. Bea was supervising the cleaning and rearrangement of furniture. They had none of them been in it for years, and Clancy and Brian spent much time exploring its treasures. It was still as it had been in their Grandfather’s time, and many of its contents were the best pieces in the whole house. Aunt Bea, looking with disapproval at a solid Victorian writing-desk, said she had never seen any one room so mixed in periods.

  “But the desk will have to stay. He’ll be needing that,” she said.

  “To correct our exercises at,” said Brian complacently. “Will we do lessons up here, Aunt Bea?”

  “Of course not,” she replied. “You’ll do them in the schoolroom where you always have. This is the man’s own private sanctum and you’re not to come here disturbing him at all hours.”

&nb
sp; “Who on earth would want to?” asked Clancy, with deep disgust at so much fuss and upheaval for a stranger. “I hope he stops up here all the time, except when he’s on duty. We never had this set out for any of the others, Aunt Bea.”

  Her aunt straightened one of the fine Persian rugs and peered closely at it for signs of moth.

  “No, well, that was different,” she said vaguely.

  “Why?” demanded Clancy truculently. “Just because he’s a man?”

  “I expect so,” said Aunt Bea mildly. She was quite used to a world fashioned to accommodate the male. So was Clancy in her brief experience, but she was not prepared to truckle to a Sassenach.

  “What’s his name, Aunt Bea?” asked Brian, exploring the inside of a Buhl cabinet. “And why wouldn’t Kilmallin tell us?”

  “I don’t know, dear. Some private joke of his own, I expect.”

  Clancy was gazing out of one of the long narrow windows, thinking how high up they seemed in the tower room, and how plainly you could see Conn’s little farm on the other side of the loch.

  “He’s probably got some frightful name like Ramsbottom or Featherstonehaugh, or perhaps it’s just something like Smelly or Wiffen,” she said.

  Brian went into shrieks of laughter and they began to invent names until Aunt Bea told them both to go away and find something to do and let her get on with the cleaning.

  “You might find Michael John, Clancy, and tell him we shall want some easy chairs carried up here,” she called after them.

  They went out into the garden to look for the garden boy, and Clancy kicked the turf disconsolately.

  “He comes the day after tomorrow,” she said, “Kilmallin had a telegram this morning. If I’d only caught Micky-the-post, I could have found out what his name is.”

  “More fun not to know, then when he’s introduced we’ll just double up laughing.” Brian, who was excited at all the fuss, regarded their tutor’s advent with no sense of dismay.

  “There’s one thing,” Clancy said, suddenly thoughtful, “if he’s very old, those stairs to the tower room will finish him. I wonder if they’ve thought of that? There’s Michael John!”

  Michael John, although just on sixty, was still called the garden boy, having worked at Kilmallin since he was twelve. He was quite bald and had been so ever since Clancy could remember.

  “Aunt Bea wants some chairs taken up to the tower room,” she said, and looked at him speculatively. “Michael John, if you had to go up and down those stairs five or six times a day, wouldn’t you drop dead?”

  “Me?” He scratched his head, then spat over his shoulder. “Well now, I wouldn’t like to say. I’m not as old as I look, you know.”

  He was devoted to the young O’Shanes, but Clancy was his favourite. A broth of a girl and worth ten of the boy.

  “But if you were over sixty, or even seventy—wouldn’t it be too much for you?”

  “Ah, well, in that case, I’d like as not turn up me toes.”

  “Ramsbottom or Smelly is hardly likely to be seventy, is he?” objected Brian. “I mean he wouldn’t be much use if he was as old as that.”

  “The English schoolmaster, is it?” said Michael John, and screwed up his face in serious thought. “No, that would be a little old, maybe. About fifty would be my guess.”

  “Fifty,” said Clancy dubiously. “That’s old of course, but not very old. I’m afraid he might manage the stairs at fifty, wouldn’t you, Michael John?”

  “Ah, well, there’s no tellin’,” Michael John said comfortably. “Thim English are a puny race. The poor felly will likely have a heart attack when he’s run up and down enough times.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want him to do that,” said Clancy hastily. “Just perhaps weaken him a little so he’d go back to England.”

  Michael John spat on his hands and went back to the digging which they had interrupted.

  “They’ll weaken him,” he said, and began to cackle with mirth. “An’ if the stairs don’t do it, Miss Clancy, you will for sure.”

  They wandered home by the south pasture, where they found Conn inspecting his young stock.

  “They’re looking better, aren’t they?” Clancy said, stroking the neck of the horse he was riding with loving fingers.

  “A little.” He sounded depressed. “Those two fillies haven’t picked up as I’d hoped. The grass is poor this spring.”

  “Ah, well, it’s early yet. They’ve all the summer before them,” she replied, and remembered the dealer in Duneen who had said that if Conn wanted to make money he should move his stable.

  “Conn, you wouldn’t ever leave Slievaun, would you?” she asked anxiously.

  He glanced down at her curiously.

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Oh, something that man Daley said to me in Duneen the other day. He said the land your side was unsuited for horsebreeding, and if you wanted to make money you should move.”

  He shifted a little impatiently in the saddle.

  “So he’s always telling me. Well, so I might, one day.”

  “Oh, Conn, no!”

  “Don’t you want me to make money?”

  “I’d rather have you across the water at Slievaun. If you went—oh, Conn, what would become of me?”

  He laughed and put a careless hand on her head.

  “You’ll be married and away from Kilmallin by that time, I shouldn’t be surprised,” he answered with amusement.

  “Clancy married!” Brian exclaimed in disbelief.

  Conn surveyed her slight body and tangled hair.

  “Well, some time in the next ten years,” he amended laughingly.

  Clancy took her hand from the horse’s neck and smoothed her hair.

  “In ten year’s time I shall be twenty-seven,” she said severely, “and that’s getting on for a woman.”

  “So you will,” Conn said with surprise. “I keep forgetting how old you are.”

  “Yes, you do,” she replied sedately. “Everyone does. Let me have a ride, Conn. Just once round the field. Kilmallin’s away to Castledrum.”

  He dismounted and she swung herself up in his place. He watched her approvingly as she cantered round the field, straight and firm in the saddle as he had taught her, her skirt hitched high above her bare knees.

  “It’s a pity Kilmallin won’t allow you a horse,” he remarked, as she handed the reins over to him again. “You’d make a good horsewoman. Micky-the-post tells me the new tutor arrives the day after tomorrow. Are you getting all your slings and arrows polished up, Clancy?

  “Did he tell you his name?” asked Brian eagerly.

  “No. I didn’t ask him. Is it something peculiar?”

  “We don’t know. Kilmallin just roared with laughter and wouldn’t tell us. Clancy says it’s probably something awful like Smelly, or Feather—Feather—what did you call it, Clancy?”

  “Ah, who cares what his silly old name is? Well find out soon enough,” she said. “Will you come back to tea, Conn? There’s nobody there. Aunt Bea’s locked in the tower room, getting it ready for the English lord. Such a fuss.”

  The English tutor was due to arrive at Duneen at half-past five the following day and Mulligan’s car had been detailed to meet the train. Brian worked it out that he should be at Kilmallin by six-thirty at the latest, allowing for Mulligan’s Ford’s erratic behaviour, and soon after six he was on the landing, hanging over the banisters waiting for the front-door bell to ring. Clancy remained in the schoolroom.

  “I don’t want to see him until I have to,” she said firmly. “Are you sure Kilmallin’s not in, Brian?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” he replied cheerfully. “He went down to the farm and won’t be back till seven. He said to offer the lord the good whisky if he looked the kind, and the other if he didn’t. Would you know if he looked the kind, Clancy?”

  “I don’t know. The English are a closed book to me,” she replied coldly. “We must clear the library before Kilmallin comes back. We must push
him in the drawing-room with Aunt Bea as soon as he’s had a smell of the library. I hope Mulligan’s car doesn’t break down.”

  But Mulligan’s car must have broken down, for it was nearly seven o’clock when they heard it coming up the drive, and by this time Clancy had joined her brother on the landing in a fever of impatience.

  “There’ll just be time,” she said, waiting for the bell to ring.

  Instead, however, the heavy doors were pushed open from outside, and they could hear their father’s voice bidding the stranger welcome.

  “Kilmallin!” said Clancy. “They must have met in the drive.”

  Brian went a little white.

  “What’ll we do now?” he whispered. “He’ll take him straight to the library for a drink.”

  “Go on down,” she said quickly. “Try and get them into the drawing-room.”

  “No,” said Brian.

  “Go on. You’ve a much better chance of side-tracking them than I have. Kilmallin will be showing you off. Tell them the drinks are in the drawing-room or something, only get them in there.”

  She gave him a push, and he began to descend the stairs as Kilmallin entered, giving instructions to Mulligan over his shoulder about luggage.

  Brian was at the first bend, and Clancy craned forward to get a glimpse of the stranger, but in the dim fight of the hall lamps it was difficult to distinguish anything clearly. The man who had come in with her father stood with his back to her. He had removed his hat, but was still wearing his thick overcoat, and it was quite impossible to tell what manner of man he might be.

  “Well, now,” Kilmallin was saying, “take off your coat, my dear fellow, and come into the library for a tot. You must be needing it after that long journey.”

  Kilmallin liked him. It would be the good whisky, without a doubt. Transfixed, she watched them move towards the closed library door, then she heard Brian’s voice, gallant, but a little quavery, call their father’s name. Both men turned, and Clancy drew back not wishing to be seen.

  “Well, here’s Brian,” she heard Kilmallin say, and knew that he was pleased that the boy had not waited to be sent for. “This is Brian—this is my son.” Even in the anxiety of the moment, she knew a pang at the pride in Kilmallin’s voice.