The English Tutor

by Sara Seale

  “I tell you what,” Kevin said. “Later on you can take them both to Dublin for a couple of nights—go to a theatre, see the shops. Part of their education, and a bit of a break for you. How would that be?”

  Mark agreed that it would be a change, but he privately thought that from Clancy’s point of view it would not be the same thing at all.

  He asked her one day on a return visit to Kinross Sands if she would not like to have gone home with Clodagh.

  “Not really,” she said, wrinkling up her forehead.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t quite explain. Here, at Kilmallin, we’re all of us as we used to be as children. We’re the same. In Dublin Clodagh has a lot of new friends, and she’s different somehow. We don’t fit in in Dublin. Conn went last year and he didn’t like it either. He said Aunt Kate looked down her nose at him, and made him feel rustic.”

  “Yet he’s going again in a week or so. I heard him tell your cousin.”

  “Is he?” For a moment’ Clancy looked a little hurt that they had neither of them troubled to tell her. “Conn has to go up on business now and again. He’ll be glad enough to be back.”

  They had arranged a last picnic for the day preceding Clodagh’s departure, and Mark had granted another holiday. But the fine weather broke by the afternoon and heavy rain kept them all in the schoolroom. Mark left them to play nursery games until tea-time, when he rejoined them at Clodagh’s express invitation.

  He thought they all seemed a little disgruntled, and Brian looked as if he was starting a cold.

  “Happy Families,” said Mark, looking at the well-worn cards flung on to the floor, “I used to have a passion for that.”

  “You should have stayed and played with us,” Clodagh said.

  “It’s no fun if you cheat,” said Clancy from the window-seat.

  “Clodagh always cheats.” Conn, lying full length in an easy chair, spoke with lazy malice.

  “Clodagh always did, and I was never allowed to. Bother my nose, it’s starting to run.” Brian spoke fretfully.

  Clodagh powdered her face and looked with satisfaction at her reflection in the mirror.

  “Tomorrow night I’m going to a dance,” she observed; “I shall wear white and a flower in my hair.”

  “I wish we had dances here,” said Clancy, and Mark gave her an amused glance.

  “I didn’t know you had leanings towards the social life,” he said.

  “Oh, I haven’t. But I’d like to see Clodagh all dressed up,” she replied simply.

  He found her disinterested admiration for Conn and her cousin a little touching.

  “How sweet,” said Clodagh, putting on lipstick. “Mark, do make Brian blow his nose.”

  “I haven’t got a handkerchief,” complained Brian.

  Mark sat down beside Clancy on the window-seat.

  “Then you’d better fetch one,” he observed.

  “Oh, all right. Only the more I blow, the more I have to blow. It’s much better to sniff.” Brian banged out of the room.

  “Agnes will have your blood if he’s really got a cold,” remarked Clancy.

  “How can it be Mark’s fault?” asked Clodagh, still plying her lipstick. “Conn, you’re awfully dull. You just sit and gloom. Can’t you say something?”

  “What I want to say,” returned Conn sourly, “is for goodness’ sake stop putting all that muck on your face. You make me sick.”

  “Don’t look, then,” Clodagh retorted, quite unmoved. “Why are you so fed up today?”

  Conn slouched lower in his chair.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The weather, I expect, and things generally. Breeding horses is a terribly chancy business.”

  “But everyone feels like that, sometimes,” said Clancy, her voice coaxing. “It’s just the luck of the game, and you’re doing quite well.”

  “I’ll never do well at Slievaun, the soil’s too poor. Daley was right. I should sell up and go.”

  “But where would you go? There are no farms going this side of the loch.”

  Conn looked straight ahead, frowning at Clodagh. “Sometimes I think I’ll give up horses altogether and start afresh,” he said, and Mark felt Clancy stiffen beside him.

  “But, Conn, what would you do? Horses are your life,” she said in a shocked voice.

  Conn moved impatiently.

  “Ah, that’s nonsense. I’m young, I could start again. Go to the cities perhaps, or even America.”

  Mark glanced down at the girl, and the sudden anguish in her face made him say quickly:

  “I don’t suppose Conn is really serious. We all like to have a grouse and consider other possibilities, you know.”

  Clancy hardly heard him.

  “Oh, no,” she cried, “no, Conn! You could never like cities, and America’s so far away. Conn, you won’t—you won’t, will you?”

  “Ah, why should you care?” he said crossly.

  Clodagh put her lipstick and compact away at last.

  “It would be the same anywhere, Conn darling,” she said sweetly. “You’re just lazy.”

  Conn’s blue eyes flashed.

  “And how do you suppose I’ve made such money as I have?” he said in a raised voice.

  “Not by working. When you were young you spent all your time being an Irish patriot and filling us up with a lot of wild ideas, and who did the mucking out? Who took horses to be shod? Who did all the dirty jobs you never had time for yourself? Clancy’s been your stooge all your life, and the poor little idiot is grateful for it.”

  Clancy sprang to her feet.

  “Stop it, Clodagh! Stop it!” she cried, and her voice shook. “Why are you so beastly to Conn these days? What’s happened to us all? Nothing’s the same now, nothing, and I hate the both of you!”

  With the tears pouring down her face, she ran out of the room, slamming the door violently behind her.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Clodagh threw her cigarette end into the grate and remarked with a sigh: “You’ll get used to our quarrels, Mark, they soon blow over, although they usually end with Clancy being sick.”

  “I should have thought in that case you might have tried to avoid them,” said Mark mildly.

  “Och, she never minded really. That’s one good thing about Clancy, she soon gets over things. All families quarrel, anyway, and we’re practically one family.”

  “Of course all families quarrel,” said Mark, “but perhaps you sometimes forget that Clancy is a good bit younger than either of you, and rather more sensitive, I think. Ah, here’s the tea. I’ll go and see if Clancy wants some.”

  They came back to the schoolroom together, their arms entwined. Clancy’s eyes were swollen but she smiled cheerfully upon the company.

  “Have you been sick?” asked Conn.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I’m hungry now. Conn, you won’t really—”

  “Och, forget the whole thing, you silly child,” he said, pulling up a chair for her. “Pit down now and butter my baps for me, like you always do.”

  With a little sigh, she slipped into the chair beside him and began to butter a bap.

  Mark and Clancy took Clodagh to the station the next morning. It was raining again, although the night before had been one of bright stars. The beauty of it still remained with Clancy, just as music sometimes remained with her, colouring the everyday hours of daylight.

  She had gone to Clodagh’s room to say good night, and had sat at the open window watching the stars as they talked over the past week. She could see a light in the tower room and wondered vaguely what Mark did when he got away from them all. There was a light, too, in Conn’s farmhouse across the loch. It moved from room to room like a small firefly. That would be Bridie turning down the beds while Conn made his last rounds of the stables.

  “Clodagh, do you think Conn was serious this afternoon—about selling up, I mean?” she asked in a thin, disembodied little voice.

  Clodagh, already in bed, was leaning towards the
lamp, filing her nails.

  “Oh, you know Conn. He talks a lot,” she said carelessly. “At one time it was republican nonsense, now it’s a fortune he wants.”

  Clancy drew her old dressing-gown closer round her slight body.

  “I don’t think Conn wants a fortune,” she said, watching the light. “He never was very ambitious, except for Ireland, and even that’s all gone.”

  “And a good thing, too,” said Clodagh briskly. “Ireland’s found her independence and young hot-heads, like Conn used to be, only make for trouble. Damn these lamps! I can’t see a thing.”

  The light across the loch remained steady. Conn would be coming to bed now.

  “We seem to be different,” Clancy said. “This visit specially. Things have changed.”

  Clodagh seemed concentrated on her nails.

  “We’re growing up, Clancy.”

  “I know. I don’t like it.”

  “You can’t fight it. Everybody’s got to do it.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I don’t think I’ve changed. It’s you and Conn who are different.”

  “You haven’t caught us up, that’s all.”

  The light in the tower room went out.

  “You like our tutor, don’t you?” said Clancy, changing the subject.

  “Of course. Why, don’t you?”

  “He’s—he’s so English.”

  Clodagh laughed, put her nail-file away, and snuggled down under the bedclothes.

  Clancy turned her head from the window to regard her cousin and suddenly had the quite preposterous notion that they might fall in love with one another. Mark was just the sort of man Aunt Kate would consider suitable for Clodagh. “What are you smiling at?” Clodagh asked curiously.

  “Nothing. Are you in love with anyone, Clodagh?”

  “Now what makes you ask that?”

  “I only wondered. You meet so many young men.”

  “You’d better go to bed. You’ll get cold hanging out of the window.”

  “It’s such a lovely night. I don’t know how you can bear Dublin, really.”

  “I should go melancholy mad if I was stuck here all the year round,” said Clodagh simply. “It’s like a prison.”

  “A prison! Kilmallin?”

  “You’ve never known anything else, but after all, you don’t have much of a life, do you?”

  Clancy turned from the window and crossed to the bed to turn out the lamp.

  “I have all I want, Conn and Kilmallin,” she said. “Good night, Clodagh. Come again soon.”

  They kissed in the new, soft darkness, then Clancy felt her way out of the room.

  She was thinking of this as she stood beside Mark, waving to Clodagh as the Dublin train pulled out. I have Conn, and I have Kilmallin, and I have Clodagh, she was thinking, and everything is just as it used to be.

  Mark was looking at her quizzically.

  “Shall we make a day of it, and give work a miss,” he said unexpectedly.

  She looked inquiring and a little alarmed.

  “We might have lunch in the town and go to a movie as it’s wet. How would you like that?”

  She thought she would like it very much, although a day alone with the English tutor had its drawbacks, but she and Brian seldom went to cinemas.

  They had lunch at the same hotel where Kevin had taken her on market day, and she remembered vividly how he had given her five whole pounds to spend on a fairing.

  She found it a little difficult to talk to Mark until he made it easy for her by asking questions about Conn and Clodagh. She was always willing and eager to talk about them.

  “You did like Clodagh, didn’t you?” she said, watching him anxiously. You never could be sure what was going on behind that rather expressionless English mask of his.

  “She seemed very charming, and very pretty,” he said obligingly.

  “She liked you, too.”

  His firm lips twitched.

  “You’re not turning match-maker, by any chance, are you?” he said.

  She looked abashed.

  “Oh, no,” she said hastily, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Besides,” he said, “it wouldn’t really get rid of me. It would only bring me into the family, so to speak, and you wouldn’t like an English cousin.”

  Her eyes were bright with confusion.

  “I never thought—I mean, I wasn’t trying to get rid of you. I’ve got over that. I mean, if I’ve still got to have a governess, I’d rather have you because you do know how to teach.”

  His eyes twinkled.

  “Thank you. That, I suppose, is quite a concession coming from you.”

  “It is so. And about the English—I’m trying to like the English. If only they weren’t so darned sure of themselves!”

  His smile was tender.

  “And you’re not at all sure of yourself, are you, Clancy?”

  She looked at him gravely.

  “I don’t know. I’m in-between, aren’t I? I’m not a child, but nobody thinks I’m grown-up.”

  He beckoned for his bill.

  “Never mind. You’re growing. There’s no hurry,” he said. They visited the one cinema in the town and sat in a stuffy atmosphere of wet mackintoshes and strong tobacco. The film was an old one which Mark had already seen in England, but Clancy sat through it, entranced, and hardly stirring. They had a late tea in the town, and by the time they were in the ear again Clancy’s constraint with him had gone.

  “You know, you really are quite nice to go out with,” she confided to him ingenuously. “When our governesses took us, they were always improving our minds, just as if it was lessons.”

  She asked him to drop her at the crossroads.

  “I think I’ll go and see Conn,” she said. He slowed up, but he did not stop.

  “I shouldn’t if I were you. He’s probably busy with the horses at this hour.”

  “Of course he is. I can help him feed. Besides, I want to tell him about the film. He’d like that bit where the horse died. It made me cry.”

  “All the same, I think you’d better leave it till tomorrow. Time’s getting on and you’ll be late for dinner,” he said, and turned off past the crossroads for home.

  “Now,” said Clancy disgustedly, “you’ve spoilt it all.”

  He glanced at her angry profile with a faint smile.

  “No,” he replied, “if anyone spoilt things, it will be you.”

  She drew away from him and sat in silence, biting her lips until they reached Kilmallin, where, barely remembering to thank him for her day, she raced into the house and up the stairs to Brian.

  The rest of July was inclined to be wet and there were not many days when they could picnic at Kinross Sands. Kevin and Mark fished the river on many afternoons, and sometimes they would take the boat and troll the loch with Clancy rowing them. At these times she seemed completely happy, quite uncaring when Kevin bellowed at her, and even accepting Mark with a good grace, since her father desired his company.

  Mark’s own relations with her did not seem greatly to improve, although there were times when she appeared quite glad of his companionship, but she lived in an odd world of her own, made happy by trivial things, rather than people, unless it were Conn or her father. Moods fell from her as lightly as summer rain. She would have a wordy, and often tearful battle with him in the schoolroom, and ten minutes later he would hear her sweet, untroubled whistling as she rowed herself on the loch.

  At the beginning of August Clodagh paid them a weekend visit, bringing a parcel of clothes for Clancy.

  “Mother sent them,” she said, “so they may be awful. I believe some of them are things I had in my teens and outgrew—but give them to Biddy if they’re no good. Let’s go and try them on.”

  She made Clancy wear one of the frocks for dinner, and insisted on doing her hair in a chignon and fixing it with jewelled combs.

  “Don’t you think that’s effective?” she asked Mark, standing back to admire her hand
iwork.

  “The frock is charming,” he said. “That smoky blue is a good colour for her—goes with her eyes. But I should never dare haul you over the coals in the schoolroom with your hair done like that, Clancy.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Does it make me look very old?” she asked, feeling her head gingerly.

  “Very old, and very dignified,” said Mark solemnly.

  “Oh, you’re laughing at me!”

  “Never mind, the result is very fetching.”

  But the result did not please Kevin when he saw it at dinner. He frowned across the table and demanded to know what in the world she had done to her hair. She turned her head swiftly at his sharpness, and in the lamplight, Mark caught the pure clean line of her jaw, the smoky eyes wide with inquiry, the delicate planes of the temples swept free of the dark hair.

  Kevin stared at her for a full minute without speaking, then his hand crashed down upon the table.

  “Go and put yourself right,” he shouted, “and never come to this table like that again!”

  The tears sprang to her eyes and she got up, kicking her chair back clumsily.

  “Ah, Kilmallin, don’t be such an old bear,” said Clodagh. “I did Clancy’s hair for her. I think it’s nice, even if it is a bit old for her now.”

  “Then don’t go giving her ideas of that sort again,” Kevin thundered. “And while I think of it, you can take some of that paint off your lips while you’re staying in my house. Brian get on with your dinner and don’t sit there gaping at me like a scared rabbit.”

  “You’re enough to scare anyone when you shout like that, you cross old man,” Clodagh said, and pouted at him.

  The two girls made their escape to the schoolroom as soon as the meal was over, and Mark lighted his pipe and strolled out on to the terrace.

  It was one of those gentle summer nights with mist rising from the loch and the hills blue in the distance. It was so still that the sound of Aunt Bea’s knitting-needles came sharp and distinct from her solitary corner of the terrace.

  Mark sat down in the deck-chair beside her and puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. He had not liked that little scene at dinner, or the strain in Clancy’s small face.