The English Tutor

by Sara Seale

  “I shouldn’t think I would. What is it?”

  She looked a little shy.

  “I wonder if I might call you Mark like Clodagh does.”

  His smile was tender.

  “No, Clancy, I wouldn’t think it cheek at all. I should like it very much. Is this supposed to be a seal on our friendship?”

  “Well, not exactly,” she said, “only it does stick in my throat every time I have to say Cromwell.”

  It was new for Clancy to be the focus for sympathy, and Mark was interested to see how she blossomed under the attentions of her family. Kevin, a little shaken by the Englishman’s flash of anger, tried to make clumsy amends by visiting his daughter and shouting apologetically at her from the foot of the bed. Aunt Bea hovered vaguely with anxious inquiries, and even Agnes left her other nursling to administer practical aid and sharp lectures not unmixed with a grudging concern.

  For the next few days Clancy basked in the warmth of unfamiliar solicitude. She enjoyed having her meat cut up for her and being let off lessons by Mark. She even enjoyed Brian’s sulks, so seldom were they caused by her father’s lack of attention. Only Conn did not join in the general concern. Perhaps he had not heard that she had been hurt.

  It was a week later that Mark drove her down to the village to have the stitches taken out.

  “Will it hurt much?” she asked a little apprehensively.

  “Not much if he’s quick and neat,” said Mark.

  But it did hurt. Doctor Boyle was old and a remote country practice had not taught him much skill or gentleness. Clancy looked rather white when he had finished with her, and Mark had to stop the car on the way home to allow her to be sick behind a bank.

  She lay back beside him with her eyes closed, looking very like Brian, and he thought with slight disquiet, that in a severe illness, she might have the least resistance of the two, despite the boy’s avowed delicacy. There was a fine-drawn tension in her face that should not have been there at seventeen, and Mark realized that all her life she had probably lived under an unconscious strain.

  “Relax,” he said gently, slowing down the car to minimize the roughness of the road.

  Her eyes flew open and she looked apologetic.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have to hold on to my stomach.”

  “Not just your stomach, silly child,” he said, “relax your mind. You’re always one jump ahead of something.”

  “Am I?” She sighed and slipped further down in her seat. “Sometimes it’s hard not to be. It’s very difficult being my age. Conn can’t have heard about my arm. He hasn’t been to see us for ages.”

  “I expect he’s busy.”

  “He would have come if he had known. That time last year I got kicked, he used to row across the loch at night and shout good night under my window to cheer me up. Oh, look! There’s his old car outside that cottage. Do stop, Mark, and I can tell him.”

  Mark pulled up at the side of the road at the same moment as Conn came out of the cottage.

  “Conn! Conn!” shouted Clancy, her sickness forgotten. “We’ve just been to the doctor and he hurt like anything, but it’s all right now, and there were five stitches—just imagine! You didn’t know, did you, that I fell off my bicycle a week ago and cut my arm right open and bled and bled?”

  Conn came over to the car and leant in at the window. “Of course I knew,” he laughed. “You don’t imagine that sort of news doesn’t get round at once?”

  She stared at him.

  “You knew?”

  “Of course. Micky-the-post told me when he brought the letters the next morning.”

  Her eyes looked enormous, lifted to his teasing face.

  “But you never came,” she said.

  “Ah, sure, I’ve been busy. What’s a little cut anyway? You’re always falling off something, you hooligan.”

  Her lips trembled.

  “It wasn’t a little cut. It had five stitches, didn’t it, Mark?”

  Mark was watching her thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” he said. “It was quite nasty, and having the stitches out hasn’t been very pleasant. I think we’ll get on, Clancy.”

  “You never came,” she said again.

  Conn straightened up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said a little impatiently, “but there’s been one thing or another. Anyway, you’re all right now. Come over tomorrow and see how Sunrise’s foal has grown.”

  Mark switched on his engine.

  “It will be a little time before Clancy can row again,” he remarked. “Five stitches in your arm takes a bit of healing.”

  “Ah, of course,” said Conn quickly. “I’ll be over one of these days. Good-bye, now.”

  She was very silent as they drove home in the early evening of a soft September day. Mist was already rising from the loch, and summer was nearly gone. Leaves had begun to sprinkle the lawns and a gentle melancholy lay upon Kilmallin.

  “The summer’s gone,” Clancy said with weary surprise, as though the seasons had subtly changed between the morning and the evening.

  Inside the house too, there was change. The stove in the hall had been lighted, and as they entered, the acrid smell of smoke and hot iron greeted them.

  “Is that you, Bea?” shouted Kevin’s voice from the library.

  He came and stood in the doorway, the whisky decanter in one hand and a half-empty glass in the other. “Ah, it’s you, Cromwell. I hope, now, this is the last visit to Boyle. Running up bills and the like for a tat of an accident that wouldn’t have happened if this girl had been more careful.”

  “Yes, it should be the last visit, if the arm goes on all right,” Mark said quietly. “But the doctor was not very gentle. Clancy doesn’t feel too well.”

  “You’re starting to pamper her,” Kevin said. His eyes were very bloodshot. It was clear that he had already drank enough. “Agnes has sent the boy to bed. He has a slight cold, and you had given him too much homework to do.”

  Mark’s light eyebrows shot up.

  “I hardly think so,” he said. “Has he been complaining to his nurse?”

  Kevin splashed whisky into his glass and drank it off neat. “Och, you know what women are. She thinks Clancy has been having too much attention, but you’re all right now, aren’t you, my girl?”

  “Yes, Kilmallin,” said Clancy wearily, “quite all right.”

  “Then go and keep your brother company. He’s been alone all the afternoon, but don’t catch his cold, mind. I don’t want two of you sniffing round the place. Come in and have a drink, Cromwell. It’s chilly in the evenings now.”

  “No, thanks,” said Mark, “but a weak drink wouldn’t hurt Clancy before she goes upstairs.”

  “What!” cried Kevin, “waste my good whisky on a female! Tell Agnes to give her a dose of sal volatile if you think she needs bucking up. You’d think the girl was a fine lady the way you carry on.”

  “I don’t want anything,” said Clancy, and walked slowly up the stairs.

  Kevin stood in the doorway swaying a little and looking at Mark under angry, tufted brows.

  “Go on, then!” he said. “Look at me the way you looked when the accident happened! Favour the girl when I got you here for the boy’s sake! Ah, blast with the lot of you!” He crossed the hall a little unsteadily, carrying the decanter and the glass, and kicked his study door to behind him.

  He did not appear for dinner and, since Brian was in bed, there were only the three of them. Mark tried to make conversation but Aunt Bea was vague and abstracted, and Clancy sat, trying unsuccessfully to eat, and looking very tired. It was an uncomfortable meal, and Mark was glad to go to his room as soon as it was over.

  He had been there perhaps half an hour, comfortably relaxed, with his pipe in his mouth and Trevelyan’s English Social History on his knee, when he heard someone on the stairs.

  “Come in,” he called, as someone knocked.

  He looked with surprise at Clancy standing in the doorway. She had never before
ventured to the tower room.

  “Hullo,” he said, “anything I can do for you?”

  She came in and shut the door. She had an exercise book tucked under her good arm.

  “It’s something in my homework I can’t understand,” she said in a tired little voice.

  He got up and took the book from her.

  “I didn’t mean you to work tonight,” he said gently. “You ought to be in bed.”

  She stood in the middle of the room looking at him a little uncertainly.

  “I thought I might as well,” she said. “It’s better if you’ve got something to do.”

  “Arm hurting?”

  “A bit. I suppose it’s bound to.”

  “Well, since you’re here, come and sit by the fire and talk for a little while.”

  He turned back to his chair, and after a moment’s hesitation, she came and sat on the fine Persian rug which was stretched on the hearth.

  He had the impression that the homework was only an excuse. She was lonely and for the first time she had sought him out.

  “Clancy,” he asked, “you aren’t really upset because Conn didn’t come to see you?”

  Her face in the firelight was soft and childish and hurt. “He would have come last year,” she said.

  “You must allow for your ages,” he told her with gentleness. “Conn is a young man now. He has other things on his mind.”

  She stared into the fire.

  “Like selling the farm?”

  “Perhaps. I think things have altered for him since his father’s death.”

  “Yes. Why do people have to change?”

  “They grow up, Clancy.”

  “That’s what Clodagh said. She said I hadn’t caught up yet.”

  “But you will. You’re catching up fast already. You understand a great deal more than either Conn or Clodagh.”

  “I don’t think I understand anything,” she said, “except Kilmallin’s annoyance with me.”

  He felt impatience with these two people who could so carelessly hurt her.

  “He wasn’t himself tonight,” he said.

  In the leaping light from the turfs her face changed to sudden maturity.

  “Oh, Kilmallin’s often a little drunk,” she said, “but drunk or sober, he doesn’t really want me. He only wants Brian.”

  It was true, but it hurt him that she should know it. “When you’re older, he’ll see you differently,” he said. “No, he’ll never see me differently.” She turned her face suddenly towards him and he saw the deep smudges of weariness under her eyes. “When my mother was killed he said to me: ‘If it had to be one of you, Clancy, God help me, it should not have been her. She should have given me another son.’ I was nine, and I’ve never forgotten.”

  He felt a little helpless in dealing with her. She had lived too long with this bitter truth to have it erased by the soothing, coaxing words one would use to a child.

  “One day, it will no longer matter,” he said.

  “One day? When?”

  “When you marry. When some man thanks heaven that you were born a girl and not a boy.”

  She considered this gravely, turning her head away again and looking into the fire.

  “It would depend on the man, wouldn’t it?” she said at last. “Conn, you see, still treats me like a boy. I think I prefer it, really. He’s always jeering at Clodagh’s feminine tricks, as he calls them.”

  “I think,” Mark said with firm conviction, “that you should go away from here.”

  She looked up at him in surprise.

  “Away from Kilmallin? But where would I go?”

  “To school—well, perhaps not to school now. But to friends, relations, away from these surroundings until you find your feet.”

  “Kilmallin would never hear of it,” she said. “And I don’t, think I really want to go—not now.”

  “Why not now?”

  “I don’t know. Conn and the farm—even you.”

  “Even me?”

  She said a little shyly: “You’ve really been very nice, Mark. I’m afraid I was very rude to you.”

  “You were—very, and I expect you will be again when the mood takes you,” he told her lightly. “You’re meek from suffering now, Clancy. I’ve no doubt when that arm has quite healed you’ll revert to your usual truculent self.”

  “Am I truculent?”

  “When you think you have a grievance. But that’s very Irish, isn’t it?”

  For a moment she took his teasing seriously and her chin went up, then she caught his eye and laughed.

  “I suppose we do harbour grudges,” she admitted, “but then the British are so awfully dispassionate. It’s very puzzling. I’m glad they gave you the tower room now, it sort of fits.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “I don’t know. Dependable—a little remote.”

  “You’re a queer girl.”

  “Am I? Do you know when we first heard you were coming we thought you were old—some old professor, Conn said. And we hoped the tower stairs would weaken you. Michael John said if they didn’t, something surely would. But nothing has, has it?”

  He laughed outright.

  “Now you’re just being a child. How absurd you are, Clancy. Did you really think the stairs would give me heart failure?”

  “N-no,” she said honestly, “not after I’d seen your legs.”

  He reached out a hand for her exercise book and idly began turning the pages.

  “You’d better leave me this to correct and get to bed. We’ll go through it together in the morning.”

  She scrambled to her feet and stood looking at him a little awkwardly.

  “I hope you didn’t mind me coming,” she said. “Aunt Bea said we weren’t to disturb you up here.”

  She still looked tired, but her expression was happier than when she had arrived.

  “Not at all,” he said kindly. ‘You wanted someone to talk to, didn’t you?”

  She pushed the hair back from her forehead.

  “Yes, I think I did. May I come again?”

  He looked a little surprised.

  “Yes, of course, whenever you like. Are you going to be friends with me now, Clancy?”

  She stood there in the lamplight with that unconscious coltish grace which always touched him.

  “You can’t very well refuse to be friends with someone on whose bosom you’ve wept,” she said with quaint solemnity. “Good night, Mark.”

  She put out her hand and he gravely shook it.

  “Good night, Clancy,” he said. “Sleep well.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OCTOBER was wet and cold, and turf fires burned in all the rooms, filling the damp old house with the scent of bog and heather. The hills were more often than not blotted out with mist, and a gentle melancholy seemed to settle on the loch.

  “We’ll have a long winter this year,” Kevin said, “and a hard one after Christmas, if I’m not mistaken. I’ve never seen the rowan so red.”

  Mark began unending skirmishes with Agnes, who would not let Brian go out in the bad weather, and although he won his point by insisting on daily exercise for the boy, even though it be brief and conducted in gum-boots and many wraps, it was Clancy who accompanied him on long tramps in the afternoons when they would both return wet and hungry and eat an enormous schoolroom tea, watched sulkily by Brian.

  Once she had made up her mind to be sociable, Mark found Clancy a charming companion. Sometimes they walked in silence, thinking their own thoughts, but often she was full of inconsequent chatter embracing such a mixture of fact and fable that he was sometimes at a loss to keep pace with her. There was a truth and simplicity in Clancy which no one had ever bothered to appreciate, and he thought, too, that she had a capacity for suffering which had mercifully been denied to the rest of the O’Shanes.

  “Have you ever thought what you’re going to do with your life?” he asked her on one occasion.

  “The women of our house don’t thi
nk,” she replied gravely. “Kilmallin arranges things.”

  “But that’s a very old-fashioned idea,” he said indulgently. “Most girls today have their own ideas of what they eventually want to do.”

  She walked beside him, the wind in her face, and her eyes looked steadily ahead.

  “But what is there for me to do,” she asked simply, “except get married?”

  “Have you ever thought,” he asked a little impatiently, “what would happen if you didn’t get married?”

  “I’d just stay on here at Kilmallin, I suppose.”

  “And become in time like your aunt? Keeping house for Brian when he’s grown up and perhaps married?”

  She turned towards him, and her lifted face was pinched with dismay.

  “But what could I do?” she said. “I’m not fitted for any job. I haven’t any brains, as you ought to know, Mark.”

  “On the contrary,” he retorted, “you’ve got quite a good brain when you like to use it. You should get your father to let you train for something.”

  She smiled, and the tension went out of her face.

  “Oh, Kilmallin would never hear of that,” she said, and started to walk on again. “No, I’ll just wait and get married like Aunt Bea says I will—some neighbour possibly. Kilmallin will arrange it.”

  Mark wondered if she was thinking of Conn. He never felt too happy about the girl’s attachment to Conn. She was only a child still in many ways, but it often struck him that it was a one-sided affair. He walked on in silence, but resolved to speak to Kevin at the earliest opportunity.

  Kevin, however, was adamant and quite genuinely astonished.

  “You seriously ask me to consider giving the girl some training in order to leave home?” he said.

  “Yes,” Mark replied gravely, “I do. In these days all girls should be fitted to earn their own living if necessary. I understood you to say that the estate will go to Brian eventually. Clancy should have some opportunity to make her own life.”

  “And what should her life be if not here at Kilmallin? The girl will no doubt marry, but if she doesn’t, then her home is here. She can run Brian’s house for him when I’m gone, just as Bea runs mine, only I hope she’ll do it more efficiently.”