J. Donleavy: The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman

And a

Beauty

Only

To me

As the autumn days shortened, cobwebs were getting thicker and darker on the ceilings of the house. The crack where the bees made honey in the wall of my mother’s bedroom grew wider. And each time I came there to see where she lived and touch the things she owned I found a turf fire glowing in the grate. With Crooks still entering her door with trays and once passing in the hall I heard his voice which suddenly made me stop and shiver.

‘Madam I do believe there is a little sun this morning, shall I part the drapes further for you. And I do hope Catherine is making the coffee more to madam’s preference, ah allow me, madam to freshen your water decanter. I understand madam it’s twenty eight instead of thirty to dinner. The smoked salmon will be at the station at three. Certainly madam, the Sèvres. And the blue candles, of course.’

I tiptoed to the next door down the hall to enter my mother’s ablution room to listen. And could see through the half open door Crooks reflected in the dressing table mirror as he stood at the foot of my mother’s lace canopied bed. His right hand clasping his left, his chin held high and his head inclined to the side. He stepped forward touching the counterpane, his voice still full of urgent ministration, and a fear crept up my spine. That all in this house had died. And dwelled in an eternal world like heaven or hell.

At nights it took Darcy Dancer hours to sleep. Feet chilled under the damp blankets. Alone, with his sisters and nurse gone away. And now every day to go down the hall and with no one near, to go into my mother’s room. See myself in the painting picnicking under our greatest oak tree, my sisters and I seated around our mother. The colours matching the fresh flowers put each day on her writing desk and the tables by her bedside. And in the ablution room her toothbrushes laid out on the pink marble wash stand. The glass shelves of her soaps and bath salts waiting ready for her hand. Her scent bottles wiped and polished gleaming and once even her tub filled with hot steaming water. When I heard Crooks’s voice again.

‘Norah how many times must I tell you to air madam’s towels.’

Pastures growing soft again with rain and grazing cattle shortening the grass, leaving only the clumps of stiff stemmed sharp ended rushes. To walk early mornings wandering with Olav and Kern by foxes’ coverts and watch the big dogs bark and dig furiously only to suddenly whirl and chase a zig zagging bounding hare, the great hounds stretching across the turf pounding furiously in pursuit. And wandering back up the hill towards the house I’d detour down into the servants’ entrance. To find Sexton cutting stems and filling vases in the basement flower room.

‘Why does Crooks draw my mother’s bath.’

‘Ah Crooks doesn’t know he’s half gone daft. The man’s sine dubio as mad as a hatter. But your mother, Master Darcy is with us nevertheless, living and breathing like life and any man who doubts that will have to reckon with a fist in the gob from me.’

A lead drain around the domed skylight of the front hall began to leak and in the worst rain storms would make floods on the black and white tiles. Until basins and finally buckets were all over the floor. And with water seeping in, mushrooms were flowering up from skirting boards and carpets in the cloakroom. Where when Mr Arland was hanging his coat I asked him what he meant by his Latin remark about Sexton, insanus omnis furere credit ceteros.

‘Kildare does it not ever dawn on your lazy head to refer yourself to your dictionary if, as is clearly the case, you cannot translate even the most simple of phrases.’

‘My mind goes blank at the thought of Latin.’

‘Pity.’

And Mr Arland smiled as I presented my sheet of paper.

EVERY MADMAN THINKS EVERYONE ELSE MAD

‘Good for you Kildare.’

I found Sexton in the kitchen gardens coming out of his potting shed where inside the Latin names of flowers were pinned up on sheets of paper. And inscriptions were written under a little altar on which stood a statue of a blue robed woman. Holding it up to his tall face, I showed him the Latin. He peered at it. And I said now you know what it means.

‘Ah now I’m not going to bother meself about translating another man’s Latin.’

‘I translated it. And do you want to hear what it says.’

‘Sure if you’ve nothing better to do, I’m not against encouraging scholarship. Life is short art is long, and the beauty of the siprepedium lasts forever, if you understand me.’

‘It means every madman thinks everyone else mad.’

‘Is that fact.’

‘Yes and it’s what Mr Arland says about you.’

‘He what. The insolence of him. Shoot me down would he. Make a mockery of a poor old horticulturist, would he. Madman is it. And he is the sane one is he. I’ll soon teach that cheeky pup to address his intellectual betters with more respect.’

‘I thought you might have something in Latin to say back to him.’

‘In Latin is it. It’ll be in English delivered on the end of an Irish boot that that sasanach bastard will hear from me.’

‘But you said Crooks was as mad as a hatter.’

‘And so he is, completely demented.’

‘And now you are angry that someone has said something about you.’

‘I am by God I am.’

And then as I stood there, Sexton’s one eye grew moist and brimming and suddenly, from under his eye patch, tears streaming down his face. As the giant man bent and broke into convulsive sobs.

‘O God almighty I’m not mad, don’t say that, never say I’m mad. I’m not that. I only love the flowers and nature and the beauties of the world with my whole heart, my whole soul. And I conscientiously do my religious duty. And any man who would say I was mad has no charity. O God and his only begotten son, save me.’

Darcy Dancer reached forward to touch Sexton’s arm to comfort him and he drew away. His hands pushing up over his face and his whole body racked with more sobs as his shoulder leaned in against the wooden panels of the shed wall knocking a stack of clay flowerpots from the shelf which broke hitting the ground. His voice came muffled out between his moans.

‘Leave me be. Leave me be.’

Day after day Catherine the cook scraped together chicken scraps and boiling turnips and dished out cauldrons of potatoes covered in slabs of melted butter for the men to eat who had too far to travel back to their cottages for lunch. And Darcy Dancer still sniffed the smell of freshly baked bread coming up the stairwells. But slowly the bacon sides and hams hanging and curing from the basement ceilings vanished. Sexton now left the apples, pears, damsons and plums falling from the orchard trees for the birds to peck till they were rotting brown on the ground. The clock chimes stopped sounding in the stable tower. And the one bell outside the kitchen that all watched and listened for. Hoping to hear it ring, jangling back and forth on its curled spring. Its brass turning green. And its unused wire through the house, grown stiff with rust. Where it went turning corners on little wheels under floorboards and joists to the pearl inlaid ebony knob in my mother’s silent room.

Crooks who read his bible aloud each evening in his quarters, shuttered the ballroom and closed up half the top floor, locking off chambers where he said the chill would snuff out a candle. He would sit, on the cold evenings, thick woollen dressing gown pulled over his livery and a heavy pair of white boot stockings pulled up over his trouser cuffs. And once when I came to his room to ask him for the hot bottle that was usually there warming my bed, there was a strong smell of whiskey and I pointed to a door bolted with a large padlock which he said was the hanging room and haunted by a previous butler who had hung himself from the ceiling.