J. Donleavy - The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman

Darcy Dancer pressing back into a bedroom doorway. Foxy crouching next to a large glass fronted cabinet. Stored with stacks of dishes of patterns and styles disused over the years. Crooks arriving at the top of the stairs dimly silhouetted by the moonlit landing window below. Until the light of a candle held high in the hand of von B wrapped in a towel throws more shadows down the hall. And illumines to Crooks the sight of Foxy pressed up to the side of the dresser.

‘I’ve got you, you brazen hooligan.’

‘Like hell you have you ould crippled cunt.’

Foxy springing up and out with a growl. Colliding with Crooks’s and the two of them in a whirl engripped, falling backwards against the dish cabinet. Crooks hanging on for dear life. Foxy dragging him back and forth on the clamouring floorboards as Crooks loses and regains his hold and in one grand embracement locking his arms around Foxy as the two fall with a massive thump against the cabinet which smashes against the handrail of the banister and breaks it from its anchorage in the wall.

‘You ould stupid eegit let loose or I’ll fucking well brain you.’

‘I’ve got you now.’

Crooks’s strange shrieking grunts with his arms grabbed around Foxy as the pair of them again and again crash into the cabinet. Von B raising her candle higher over a nicely rounded pair of shoulders. The tall dark shadow of the piece of furniture and its entire breakable contents slowly moves, creaking, breaking and with a splintering of wood pitches through the balustrade. A female screech as the cabinet plummets. A moment’s silence before it crashes. And a thunder as dishes, bowls, sauce boats and egg cups shatter in pieces everywhere down the flight of stairs below. With Crooks still bellowing and holding on.

‘You’ll not get away from me this time you blackguard.’

From my redoubt I had a rear view of the silhouetted bifurcation of Miss von B’s legs. Wondering when she was going to shout stop. As she did the day out on the bogs. While Foxy tore at Crooks’s grip and dragged him thumping down the stairs to the landing. Where with one massive wrench Foxy broke free. Sending Crooks flying and momentarily stunned against the clanking rusting metal of a suit of armour from which as a tiny boy I always thought I saw eyes peering out. As Foxy stood with all his escape routes blocked. The cabinet wedged between wall and banister. Von B above and sounds of more feet coming up the servants’ stairs.

‘You’ll none of you get me you bunch of cunts.’

Foxy turning and facing the casement window, took two steps backwards and with his arms and elbows held up in front of his face, leaped crashing through. To descend three storeys down into the darkness. With the sound of breaking branches followed by a thud and thump. With Miss von B suddenly apoplexed bare arsed without her towel. And Crooks surfacing from his dazed condition on the floor.

‘That should be final good riddance to that blackguard. Bury him we will. And be delivered forever of his infernal nuisance.’

Crooks getting to his feet. Turning to pick up and hang back the metal codpiece knocked off the suit of armour. And carefully stepping over the pieces of glass from the smashed casement as he wrings his hands in the fresh breeze blowing in this recently widely opened window. And slowly raising his head to look up. To see the apparition standing in its candle light at the top of the stairs.

‘Jesus Mary and Joseph. As if death out the window isn’t enough. Haven’t we got up there the kraut herself in the buff.’

Naked

As the day

The

Almighty

Made her

Foxy following his jump from the window had a broken finger. And his jacket hung caught between the branches of a yew and ash tree high above the deep impression he left of his feet arse and hands in the soil of a flower bed where he landed. Miss von B had shrieked and grabbed up her towel, rushing away back down the hall. Leaving Crooks, lame as he was, dancing over the broken glass in circles of joy. Till he fell groaning with a twisted ankle. To be escorted under the armpits by Norah and Sheila back to his chambers.

And I had made my way along past the bedroom door where von B had taken her bath. Foxy said it was the room where the hottest water came up from the kitchen range. And where, after a day’s hunting my father used to come to bathe in the medicinally beneficial big copper tub.

For some time after her impromptu nudity Miss von B was bundled in shapeless sweaters and often took till noontime to appear at all. And when she did I found my trousers poking out nearly popping my fly buttons. While I disported myself with an academic air carrying about my person books Mr Arland recommended I read from the library. And he gave me promiscuous exercises in Syntactical Parsing.

‘Kildare, take this down. To live long, ought not to be our favourite wish, so much as to live well. By continuing too long on earth, we might only live to witness a greater number of melancholy scenes, and to expose ourselves to a wider compass of human woe. Got it.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Good. Resolve syntactically into its elements, analyse and describe.’

Mr Arland’s quoted exercise seemed to me to make much sense, especially since the next night after the débâcle, Foxy’s father chased him all around their cottage pounding him with his fists. Until Foxy grabbed a hammer and clouted his dada senseless. To then run back across the fields to the farmyard and go up to the tiny bedroom loft over the stables, from where watch was kept on foaling mares. And there he jumped upon Luke the sleeping groom, who had been one of the four upon whom he had sworn vengeance. Punching his face black and blue and tearing one of his ears half off.

Next morning Foxy was gone. The rumour was he’d run away to join the circus. And then one late afternoon a week later I was out galloping my pony up over and down the other side of spy glass hill. When I heard this shout. Coming from behind an entanglement of gorse and brambles. And as I reined round there was Foxy cold and shivering, a big old macintosh over his shoulders.

‘Ah is there no sign yet of his funeral.’

‘No, he woke up this afternoon.’

‘Ah I’m glad to hear that. I was sure he was murdered with the guards out after me. But I didn’t want to do me poor old father any permanent harm, just to keep him quiet a bit so’s the whorer wouldn’t always be after landing punches on me.’

By darkness accompanied by Kern and Olav, I brought Foxy butter bread cheese and turnip slices. And watched him over a fire, burn the feathers off a chicken he caught the night before roosting in the barn.

‘The doctor said you put dents in your father’s head. And he still doesn’t know where he is. He may be invalided to bed.’

‘Ah sure after a while they will clear up and he’ll feel the better for it. I’ve had them dents all over me skull and it only would make you that bit giddy now and again. Sure half the time I don’t know where I am meself.’

In mild moist westerly breezes the white snowdrops were poking up in the long sheltery grass under the chestnut trees. Foxy was again back milking and making himself as his father said, useless around the farmyard. And just before Christmas my father sent a wire that he was detained in Dublin. My two sisters now taken from school and sent to live with an elderly maiden aunt in Devon. From them came a stamped and addressed photograph. Where they stood wearing wide straw hats by a beehive in a winterish landscape in an orchard, holding between them a comb of honey. On the back of the picture a message scrawled.

WE MISS OUR SMALLEST DEAREST BROTHER

Early on Christmas eve, Uncle Willie came. In a black glistening gilt trimmed brougham drawn by two splendid black mares. The top hatted coachman’s face reddened by the wind and Uncle Willie’s by the indoor consumption of malt. And I saw him from the whim room walking back across the front lawn where I knew he’d been visiting my mother’s grave. Foxy told me he’d handed out half crowns round the household and gave him a pound. And that it was grand that there was such a decent skin as my uncle and didn’t his race horses deserve winning races everywhere across the countryside so that his pockets were stuffed with stacks of them big hundred pound notes that farmers peeled off at the markets.