The English Tutor

by Sara Seale

  One morning, Mark closed his books at half-past twelve and told Brian he could go out in the garden for half an hour before lunch.

  “No, not you, Clancy,” he said, as she jumped up thankfully. “I want to have a talk with you. Sit down, and pay attention.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully and when Brian had gone, said quietly:

  “I’ve had enough.”

  Her face lit up with expectation.

  “You mean you’ve decided to go—you’ve thrown your hand in?” she said quite affably.

  He did not smile, but continued to regard her steadily. “Certainly not,” he replied. “When I said I’d had enough, I meant I’d had enough of your present behaviour and it’s got to stop.”

  “I don’t do anything,” she said.

  “Exactly—you don’t do anything. You don’t attempt to show any normal intelligence, let alone do any work.” He clasped his hands on the table before him and leant forward. “Now, listen to me, Clancy. I’ve stood a good deal from you for your family’s sake and also because I wanted to give you time to settle down, but I’m not going to put up with things as they are any longer. If you have no inclination to learn that’s your affair, and I can perfectly well arrange matters so that you won’t hold up my classes with idiotic questions, but I’m not going to have Brian’s studies upset in this fashion any longer. He wants to learn and he at least is entitled to some consideration. In future, when you deliberately obstruct a lesson it will be counted as impertinence and will be punished by an appropriate number of lines in the usual manner. You will write these lines in the afternoon and that will effectively put a stop to things you would much rather be doing. Do I make myself clear?”

  A slow flush stained her cheeks.

  “You can’t punish me for asking questions,” she said.

  “Oh yes I can, when the questions and your general attitude are simply designed to upset my classes. I seem to remember telling you before that I’m quite used to the ways of tiresome pupils and quite capable of dealing with them accordingly. You don’t want to force me to speak to your father, do you? He might put a stop to these visits to Slievaun if I told him they unsettled your work.”

  “You wouldn’t do that!”

  “Not unless you make it necessary.” Mark relaxed and leant back in his chair, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “Why do you behave in this unintelligent fashion, Clancy? It’s so ridiculous to be obliged to treat you like some little prep-school scallywag. Why can’t you try to remember you are seventeen and a girl, and act accordingly?”

  Her thin face held a sudden bleakness.

  “What’s the use of being a girl?” she said.

  Mark regarded her thoughtfully. It was a pity, he thought, that Kevin had given the girl such a foolish complex about her sex. It could be responsible for so much which seemed retarded and difficult in her nature.

  “Clancy,” he said, “because your father wanted sons, there’s no good reason why you should grow up without grace.”

  Her eyes were startled.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that trying to be a son to your father isn’t going to win him over. I think you’re not without charm when you like, even now. You’re seventeen—in a year or so you’ll be a young woman, and you’ll feel differently about many things. In the meantime, don’t resent your sex. One day it will be your strongest weapon.”

  She stared at him, the faint colour coming and going in her face, and all at once she had a vulnerableness that left her defenceless.

  “No one’s ever talked like this to me before,” she said slowly.

  “No? Well, I think that’s a pity.”

  “Even Conn treats me like a boy. He always says Brian should have been the girl.”

  Mark got up and walked round the table.

  “Try to grow up a little,” he said, and rested his hands on her shoulders for a moment. “And what about trying to make friends with me instead of continually fighting me? You have the makings of quite a good mind, I think, if you’d only let yourself learn. I can help you quite a bit.”

  She did not jerk away from him as she would have done had he touched her before, and he gave her shoulder an encouraging pat and walked to the door.

  “You’d better get tidy for lunch,” he said. “I’ll go and call Brian.”

  After that, things were easier for Mark. Clancy could hardly be said to go out of her way to be friendly, but she was civil and she ceased giving trouble in the schoolroom.

  Mark was a good teacher, and once she had made up her mind to learn, Clancy enjoyed his classes. She still asked questions, many of them, for she had an inquiring mind, but for the most part they were intelligent and soon showed a quick grasp of her subject.

  In July the weather turned suddenly hot and Clodagh came to stay. She arrived one afternoon, heralded only by a brief telegram, and Mark, accompanied by Clancy and Brian, drove Kevin’s Ford into Duneen to meet the Dublin train.

  He watched with amusement as they raced down the platform to greet their cousin, flinging themselves upon her and knocking her smart little hat over one eye.

  “This is Clodagh,” they said with simple pride. “Isn’t she pretty?”

  She was very pretty. Her face was round and soft with none of the bone structure of Clancy’s, and her eyes were round, too, with the wide innocent stare of a kitten. She was rather like a kitten altogether, Mark thought, as he shook hands with her, smiling, as she said in a soft little voice:

  “I simply had to come and see the English tutor for myself. Clancy, darling, you didn’t do him justice in your letter—you didn’t do him justice at all.”

  Miss Clodagh Desmond had a very nice sense of flattery. They piled the luggage on the front seat beside Mark, and all three squeezed into the back of the car. Eager questions flew backwards and forwards and Brian announced:

  “Mr. Cromwell says we can have a holiday tomorrow as the weather’s so hot.”

  “And Conn’s arranged a picnic for Kinross Sands, like we used to do,” Clancy said. “Aren’t you longing to see Conn again?”

  “Oh, Conn!” Clodagh’s voice was amused and slightly scoffing. “Is he still trying to scratch a living out of that poor little farm?”

  “He does very well,” Clancy said, in quick defence. “He had bad luck this year with the grey mare blemishing herself just when he had a good price for her, but Sunrise has foaled—a filly, too. Conn has a flair for horses. One day he’ll make his fortune.”

  They bickered amicably until they reached Kilmallin, when they immediately sat down to an enormous tea and ate until the plates were cleared.

  That very first evening, Clodagh announced that she was not going to call Mark Mr. Cromwell.

  “I think I shall call you Mark,” she said, with her head on one side. “After all, you’re quite young really, and you don’t have to teach me. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” said Mark, amused.

  “You’re a baggage, always were,” said Kevin, with mock severity. “What are you trying to do, pussycat? Undermine the poor man’s influence with his pupils?”

  “I’m sure I could never do that, could I,—Mark?” She wrinkled her nose at him.

  Clancy listened with faint scorn. Clodagh evidently liked Mark and proposed to flirt with him. She looked at Mark, seeing him in perspective for perhaps the first time. She supposed he wasn’t really very old, and he looked quite human, smiling across at Clodagh.

  “I think it’s all very silly,” she remarked coldly.

  “What’s silly, my pet?” asked Clodagh innocently.

  “Calling our tutor by his Christian name.”

  “As far as I know,” said Mark slyly, “you don’t address me by any name at all.”

  “Because it’s Cromwell!” Clodagh laughed. “Haven’t you grown out of all that stuff Com taught you yet, Clancy?”

  “No,” said Clancy childishly, “and I don’t suppose I ever will.”


  The next day was still fine and hot, and before they started for the picnic, Mark had a brief passage of arms with Agnes, who decreed that Brian was not to be allowed to bathe.

  “Oh, I think that’s nonsense,” Mark said, smiling. “The water will be quite warm. It’ll do the boy good.”

  “It will not, then!” Agnes’s eyes flashed. “That boy takes cold easily and I’ll not have him brought back to me with a fever on him.”

  Mark’s eyes were cold.

  “I have already spoken to Mr. O’Shane,” he said curtly. “He entirely agrees with me, so will you kindly leave such matters in my hands and don’t interfere.”

  “Good for you,” said Clodagh, popping out of her bedroom as the nursery door closed on Agnes’s angry back. “She’s an awful old so-and-so and used to rule us with a rod of iron. Come on, let’s make a start.”

  Conn was already waiting for them at Kinross Sands. His and Clodagh’s greetings to one another had an offhand air, but soon they were all talking and laughing with the old familiarity of childhood in common. Brian, thought Mark, would have been too young to have shared much m those early days, but the other three, growing up together, still retained the old easy ways of childhood.

  “Clancy, unpack the baskets like a good child. I want to show Clodagh some shells, if she isn’t too grand to get her feet wet,” said Conn. Brian had already gone off on his own to explore a cave.

  “You come, too, Mark, and stop Conn from putting wet seaweed down my neck,” said Clodagh.

  “I’ll stay and give Clancy a hand,” Mark replied, and began to undo one of the baskets.

  “In that case, I don’t think—” began Clodagh, pouting charmingly, but Conn seized her by the hand and ran her off along the sands.

  “I wish,” said Clancy, looking distressed, “Clodagh would be nicer to Conn. I don’t think she’s ever liked him very much.”

  Mark looked at her kindly.

  “I shouldn’t let superficialities worry you,” he said; “Clodagh’s approach and yours wouldn’t be at all the same, you know.”

  “Well, if I like a person, I can’t help showing it, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

  “And equally when you don’t like them.”

  She smiled unwillingly.

  “I suppose I was very rude to you,” she said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have called you exactly cordial. Your cousin would have dissembled a lot better.”

  “Clodagh likes you, that’s why she’s nice.”

  “And if she didn’t like me, she’d still be nice. That’s the whole point.”

  Clancy pushed the hair out of her eyes, leaving a sandy streak across her broad forehead.

  “I don’t think I quite understand you,” she said. “She is pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes, though I prefer bone-structure to mere prettiness, myself.”

  She felt her own well-defined bones.

  “How queer,” she said.

  Conn and Clodagh were walking back along the shore, their red heads gleaming in the sunlight. They both looked a little cross. Conn flung himself down on the rug beside Clancy and brushed the sand off her forehead with a careless gesture.

  “After lunch,” he said, “I’ll take you to see shells, my child. You aren’t afraid of salt water on your frock.”

  Clancy looked absurdly happy.

  “I never have the sort of frocks that matter,” she said.

  “You oughtn’t to wear ‘em at all,” Conn laughed, pulling her hair. “Shorts and shirts for you, you little tomboy. She’s delightfully unfeminine, isn’t she, Cromwell?”

  Mark regarded him gravely.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he replied.

  Clodagh stuck out her tongue at Conn and said: “Snubs!” and Clancy, looking a little bewildered, turned her attention to the lunch and avoided Mark’s eye.

  After they had eaten, they lay about in somnolent attitudes until it should be time to bathe. Clodagh said she wanted a fire on which to boil shrimps for tea, and Conn sent Brian and Clancy to collect driftwood. Brian soon tired of this occupation, however, and retired to his cave again.

  Mark, propped against a rock a little apart, watched them lazily; Conn and Clodagh stretched out side by side, sparring indolently as they had probably done in childhood. Mark could imagine them as children, the two elder ones lording it together while the young Clancy fetched and carried for them both.

  She came back now with another load of driftwood and flung it down on the first pile.

  “What about showing me the shells?” she said.

  “Not now,” Conn replied. “I’m too lazy. Why don’t you go and find them yourself?”

  She stood for a moment, a slight, uncertain figure with a moment’s fleeting grace, then she turned and wandered away by herself along the shore.

  Mark did not know what prompted him to get up and follow her, unless it was something a little forlorn about that small figure in the faded cotton frock. For no adequate reason he felt annoyed with Conn and Clodagh.

  “Will you show me where these shells are?” he said, catching her up.

  She looked surprised to see him and a little of the earlier radiance of the day had gone out of her face.

  “Conn knows,” she said indifferently. “There are a lot of little pools further along. They’re quite often there.”

  They walked on together in silence, Clancy a little embarrassed by his company. But she forgot him in the delight of exploring the warm rock pools which had been left by the receding tide. He watched her with interest. Unwonted colour flushed her high cheek-bones, and her young unpainted mouth was tender with delight. Her face had a quality, he reflected idly, which her prettier cousin’s entirely lacked. In a year or two there would be no need for her to feel her bones and remark: “How queer.”

  She began to whistle, true, effortless notes as clear as a blackbird’s.

  “Do you know what that is?” he asked with surprise.

  “What? Oh, the tune. I heard it on the wireless.”

  “It’s the third movement from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.”

  “Is it? I’ve never learnt music.” She sounded uninterested.

  “You remember it perfectly. Do you listen much to good music?”

  “Oh, yes—in the evenings, often. I like the English proms.”

  His eyes twinkled.

  “So you do admit to liking something English.”

  “Music,” she said severely, “is international. Do you think we could bathe now?”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “I should think so. Let’s go back to the others.”

  “It was nice of you,” she said unexpectedly as they walked back along the sands, “to let us have this holiday.”

  “We’ll have another while your cousin is still here,” he replied kindly.

  Clodagh had already changed into her smart green bathing suit when they returned. She and Conn looked as though they had been quarrelling.

  Conn tossed Clancy’s bathing things over to her.

  “Go and change,” he ordered. “I see you still favour that striped atrocity you had when you were fourteen. Ask Cousin Clodagh to hand you one of her cast-offs. Hurry up and get your things off—I’ll race you to the breakwater. You were always a better swimmer than Clodagh.”

  “And a better rider, too, I suppose,” said Clodagh.

  “And a better rider, too. Besides, she can look after herself, which is always a help.”

  “A great help. Mark will look after me,” said Clodagh sweetly, “won’t you, Mark?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE fine weather held for the entire week of Clodagh’s visit, and there were more picnics, sometimes with Mark, and sometimes with the three of them alone. Agnes had put her foot down on the matter of Brian joining these expeditions unless his tutor was present, and although the boy had taken no harm from his first day’s bathing, she was always on the watch for chills.

  Sometimes, whe
n Mark and his charges were doing their work in the schoolroom, Clodagh would row herself over the loch to Slievaun, but she was too lazy to go very often, and bored with no one to talk to, she would come to the schoolroom and listen to Mark teaching, until he politely but firmly turned her out.

  “Even you, pussycat, can’t divert the excellent Mr. Cromwell from his duty.” Kevin chuckled.

  He was fond of his niece. She had pretty ways and he was more indulgent to her than he ever would have been with his daughter.

  “A bit of a minx,” he told Mark. “Clodagh’s more of an O’Shane than either of my two. They take after their mother and all the Macnamara crowd.”

  Yes, Mark reflected, Clodagh should have been Kevin’s daughter. He would have understood her far better than he did his own.

  “Why don’t you let Clancy go back to Dublin with her for a while?” Mark suggested. “The change would do her good.”

  “Clancy go to Dublin?” exclaimed Kevin with surprise. “And why on earth should I send the girl to Dublin? The last time she went up for Horse Show week, my sister Kate bought her a lot of fine clothes and nearly ruined me, and look at them now. Not a thing fit to put on, as I’m always telling her.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “How long ago? Let me see, it must have been two years.”

  Mark suppressed a smile.

  “Two years. Clancy would have been fifteen. I think she may possibly have grown out of those clothes, Mr. O’Shane.”

  But Kevin would not hear of it. It would be an extra expense, and time wasted just as the child was beginning to get on with her studies, and Clancy herself did not like Dublin. He was not going to have the girl running round with a pack of strange young men and coming home discontented, and, like her cousin, unable to make up her mind to settle down.