J. Donleavy - The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman

And a day later his father had come on the train from Dublin where during the yearling sales he’d been staying at his club. A large gloomy establishment through which once after seeing my first rugby match, I was led. Thawing my chill in front of an orange glowing turf fire and watching members like my father, stand at the great polished gleaming drawing room windows safely surveying over cigars and port the flat green velvet playing fields of Trinity College many of them had attended across the street. And I slept there in an attic room hearing the trams screeching and roaring along the road and in the morning could see the moist glossy rhododendrons and evergreen leaves that grew up from the college grounds the other side of the spear topped iron fence. And midday sat in a smoky carriage pulled by a throbbing puffing steam engine which sputtered and wheezed across a Liffey bridge and gathered speed by the blackened slate roof tops and tiny back gardens. Till out between the furze and heather covered bog lands it raced, whistle wailing along by the banks of the Canal to finally, after two hours chug into the little familiar grey and black painted station with its carefully tended always blossoming flower beds.

And all those other days I knew my father was home, when he could be heard shouting for Crooks that his boiled egg was too soft or hard or the fire to be mended and kept blazing or his newspaper found or that he would not speak to some caller who demanded to see him. And once, his monocle flashing at the bottom of the stairs, he said to me as he saw me at one of my daydreaming spots at the great window on the large landing watching out to the grove of beeches where each evening, black hundreds of wing flapping barking rooks gathered.

‘There you are, you bastard.’

Now to see on the thin narrow reddened face his lips drawn tightly as he took his long leather motoring coat from his shoulders, nodded at the members of the household who lurked genuflecting and then blessing themselves as their master entered his study. A whole day passed with his door closed on this shuttered panelled room where he sat in front of the fire drinking whiskey and listening to solemn symphonies on the gramophone. Crooks stationing a stable boy inside the door of the salon across the hall to steal forward as the music began to fade and to wind up the gramophone again and again. And the visitors in the faded blue walled parlour looking down and paying their last respects to the alabaster face cushioned by the soft black waves of hair and those vanished strange gems, the gently closed eyes of my mother.

That fifth day of spring like the first day after the end of the world had come. A storm the night before sending slates flying off the roofs and they lay scattered and broken around the house, some stuck like arrows deep in the front lawn where ancient oaks were blown over, their roots sticking up and their boughs breaking the fence. I came awake as the shutters and window frames shook and a giant stone falling from a chimney sent a great bang trembling throughout the house. The pounding gusts of the gale poured billows of turf smoke into rooms and out into the halls where it gathered high up beneath the skylights. And now heavy rain swept in wave after wave out of racing dark clouds from the west. Crooks bracing with his shoulder and needing help to slam closed the front door. The entrance hall covered in puddles from the dripping coats and umbrellas. With mourners standing backsides to the roaring fire with their dark clothing steaming and some of their chilled blue hands holding brimming glasses of brandy.

Outside lost birds knocked backwards in the sky. Floods of water shining silver below in the fresh green field where the banks of the river overflowed. Motor cars had blocked the entrance drive and wheels were churning and skidding deep into the lawn. His mother’s coffin taken from the darkly furnished north east front parlour where the smooth gleaming elm box had reposed two days on an oak wake table under the hunting portraits of my mother’s pink coated father and black habited mother. And now borne down the front steps by grooms through a way made between the vehicles and placed upon a black velvet covered cart. The voice of the head groom repeating over and over again.

‘Gently lads gently.’

All walked and the dark line of people strung out from the apron of stones fronting the house. To follow the horse drawn coffin a short way down the drive and left on to a farm road which entered the park and wound under a giant oak and down a steep hill to the dell surrounded by a grove of walnut trees. In the small walled cemetery where were buried her mother and father and two of her brothers, the musty mausoleum held coffins of Darcys and Thormonds back through generations and my sister Sybilla. The men had dug my mother’s grave by the ruins of the ancient chapel whose thousand year old arched entrance and stone foundations still stood heaped up and roofed over by ivy vines. A place where I had so many times come in summers to sit cooled and shaded by the great yew tree to watch the wasps go and come from their hole in the ground.

Shielding the pages of their bibles from the rain, a priest and a parson in attendance. The first a strange friend of my mother’s, whose elegant clerical garments were tailored in Paris, and the latter an even stranger friend, an amateur astronomer and botanist who spoke with the high pitched voice of a woman and who with his long blond curling hair was rumoured to be living in his parsonage with a man. Both usually called for tea and always brought presents, mother of pearl shells, copper boxes, and sometimes statuettes of Wedgwood and Meissen. All placed on tables and admired as the butters melted between the halved scones, and voices ranged upon vases, paintings and opera. My mother as she held the silver pot to pour, reeling off dates manners schools and motifs. And hear the refrain from her gently chewing ecclesiastic friends.

‘Yes yes superb I do most certainly agree exactly.’

Standing around the mound of mud and sods were the Master of Foxhounds, twenty three members of the hunt and four neighbouring farmers and their wives. The gombeen man of the village, whose bald black browed wife wore a blonde wig, was sheepishly rubbing his hands. And from the town, six Irish miles away, came six of the biggest shopkeepers. One near by Earl and two Barons stood under their black umbrellas with their black bowler hats in hand. A Marquis, a widowed Countess, one well known bookie and further, their backs against the cemetery wall, nine members of the household, my two red eyed sisters and twenty working men with their big fingers grasping their caps, as all these heads dripped with rain.

And my blue eyed Uncle Willie, his broad shoulders folded forward, standing next to me behind my father, was sobbing like a child. His big hand reaching up again and again to brush at the tears and rain rolling down his cheeks. And I could hear him say. As the same words were choking up against my silent lips.

I love you

Nettie

I loved you

Two days following the funeral Darcy Dancer’s father sold ten big bullocks at the street market in the village and without an ounce of petrol for the motor cars he left again by horse and trap-clip clopping three miles on the hilly winding road to the station. His two big thick heavy leather cases waiting that morning in the hall and I traced on the tooled large black initials of R.C.S.K. While Ruby my nurse, who had moved in semi retirement to the top floor, was packed and weeping clutching me, was gone with my sisters minutes later.

The next day a cable came from Dublin. The pale green envelope emblazoned with a black harp. Crooks solemnly brought it on a tray. Standing above me in the whim room intoning.

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