J. Donleavy: The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman

Blue strips of sky between bleak clouds this chill day before Christmas as winter entrenched across the remote midlands of Ireland. With darkness descending at tea time in the north east bedroom of a grey cut stone manor, an ample horsey woman who had the day before been riding to the hounds, groaned giving birth. The news was whispered from servant to servant down through the house and more loudly into the kitchens and louder still out across the lantern lit stable yards.

The husband of this woman, a man as well known for his gambling as he was for his generosity among cronies, had married for money and was, as he was mostly, away in England for the racing. And upon that birth day he had waged one hundred pounds on a rank outsider at one hundred to one, which had come waltzing in by eight lengths, a winner. And upon hearing the news of a boy sent a cable

NAME HIM DANCER

And with this among other names a child was christened in the small chapel at the top of the stairs. Reginald Darcy Thormond Dancer Kildare.

Reached by a mile long winding drive through vast entanglements of ancient rhododendrons, Andromeda Park stood a weather worn cold edifice three storeys tall over a basement on a hill surveying lonely standing oak, beech and chestnut trees in a forty Irish acre field inclining down to a small river. Here three children, two sisters and their baby brother played along the grassy banks of these trout waters and ran as cowboys and Indians up into the higher hills of forest hiding other distant fields and meadows. And when recaptured for meals by nurses and nannies, were led, sometimes by the ears, up wide granite steps through an oak bulletproof door fitted with a small iron barred grill out which the cross eyed butler Crooks asked visitors their business so it could be discerned as to whether they were friend or foe. The latter always being those with a bill who wanted to be paid.

His nurse called this alabaster skinned, blue eyed and black haired boy Darcy Dancer and swaddled, dressed, fed and minded him in his nursery till he was six years old when a groom taught him to ride. And sometimes at the open stained glass chapel casement, with his older sisters each holding a hand, he watched the cattle stampeding as the hunt assembled on their front lawn. Later as darkness fell he saw them through a blue tinted pane of a north east parlour window come straggling back, scarlet coats, black coats and breeches, mud spattered, horses steaming, a few lamed some maimed and all, as Uncle Willie said, relieved to be alive.

He counted from the shortest winter’s day right into early spring the lengthening minutes of light. Till on midsummer nights a cold glow lurked in the northern sky way past bedtime when in the illumined sunset darkness he listened to the donkeys braying. To be always finally lulled to sleep by the chiming bells of the clock tower from which his mother’s father had removed the hands when too many of the locals trespassed to a neighbouring hill to be told the time of day by a man who owned a spy glass. And just beyond this hill he often dreamt there were green and white bearded little fairies with angels’ wings who lived and played joyously there in the lonely grassy beyonds and would one day come and bring him into their hidden warm wonderful kingdom where nice little boys could sit with them mending shoes.

His games were to ride the hay top of ricks as they were drawn to the barns at harvest time. And his chores were picking summer berries for winter jam in the hedgerows. He grew taller amid the smells of drying saddles and the whinny of horses and the pounding of their hooves in springtimes out across the surrounding pastures. All moments of this tiny world golden within petals of a buttercup. Till one early morning dawn, falling out of bed, breaking a collarbone and rolling in agony where a rocking chair rocked, I was carried sobbing and trembling in my nannie’s arms to her bedroom further down the hall to mend and convalesce. And learn to know that just as poison lurked in the beauteous soft tissue of yellow meadow flowers, so too did pain and sorrow lie before all one’s footsteps.

And only

Some knowing

Loving hand

Could

Guide you

By

His sisters gone away to school in Dublin, Darcy Dancer was taught reading writing and arithmetic by Mr Arland, a tall, thin, grey suited gentleman who often said between his deep sniffs of snuff, that that was what he was, a gentleman. Who although disowned by his aristocratic father as a child borne by a serving girl, was educated at proper schools in England and later at Trinity College Dublin where he was a sizar and scholar. And often on his lips were his favourite words he used to a disputatious Darcy Dancer.

‘Please do not Kildare, be miserably negatory.’

Mr Arland came fetched each day and they sat at ten o’clock for three hours in the tiny schoolroom tucked in under the servants’ staircase. And always Mr Arland as he took his cane from the front hall and shoved it up under his arm also took his last pinch of snuff which he sucked from the tip of the back of his hand up each nostril as he stood on the front steps waiting to be ferried by pony and trap back to the village where he stayed in a grim damp room over the pub.

Following lessons, and free to run, explore and hide, Darcy Dancer often climbed up upon the massive bough of a tree where he lay stretched out holding his head in his fists, elbows on the rough bark listening to the creaking cartwheels and trudging horses heading for the underground tunnel which led from the stable yards behind and under the back of the house and way out to the light of day again in the fields. And his horse trading visiting Uncle Willie when shouting to find him there would always smilingly say.

‘Ah child, it will soon be for the likes of yourself that you’ll be inside looking out over your madeira upon the vistas that do be displaying from this house, and that the beauty and peace of your daydreaming can not be disturbed by the rough movements and noises of carts and men.’

And it was one year later on the third day of spring in the late sunny afternoon, his mother, carried in strange foot shuffling silence by the linked arms of farm hands, was lifted up the steps and through the front door. Her long dark brown riding habit bloodied and tresses of her hair hanging while she was laid upon the horsehair chaise longue, her one green and one blue eye staring at the ceiling of the north east parlour, dead. The smell of baking scones for tea in the air and on the floor of the whim room next to the chapel I had been playing with my trains, lifting the locomotive with a derrick back on the track. I heard a loud scream and choking sobs and went to the balustrade and saw down into the front hall the men standing hunched and silent, caps in their hands, the mud broken away in lumps from their boots and scattered on the black and white tiles. They held me away till I ran in between and around them into the room. And when I looked and looked at her. Her slender ankles and white satins closed by a gold pin around her throat. The blue veins at her temples and the way she always swept through the house, casting friendly orders to the adoring servants over her shoulder, her voice so clear so certain and kind, a pleased smile always ready on her lips. And all had said that although before her marriage she was plump and plain, that following the birth of her last child, she became slender rarefied and beautiful.

The coffin made by the village butcher arrived by the farm road and was brought in through the ivy shrouded basement entrance.