The Hunger Read online

  Inhalation, exhalation of breath. Mutterings, murmurs. Michael looked up and saw his father’s appalled face. Then a slight commotion in the pews: Mrs Tangney had fainted. He turned, and the men stepped back, parted, leaving an avenue to the door, as the sea for Israel. As he walked unsteadily between the lines of hostile male bodies, each man, he felt, wanted to hit him, stab him. Someone said “Whore!”; another said “Girl!”; a third said “Bastard!”. But Ty Keliher’s face was fellow-feeling, sympathy, almost torment. Ty moved his hands half an inch in Michael’s direction, then withdrew them. Pontius Pilate, Michael thought; then, no, no, no, I’m not being fair.

  He reached the door and walked out, past the few men who had decided to give the sermon a miss as usual, who were unaware of what had happened. He walked on into the street, then up the Clifden road, out of town, towards Eagle Lodge. The rain washed him, cleaned him a little, cooled his hot face. The clouds still rushed in from the sea; the fields were still that extraordinary wet green. They should be different, he said to himself; should register their shame too, their hate. Why are they not red?

  There is Anthony. America. We must leave at once.

  He did not look back. This was the first time, except for days when he was ill, that he had not heard Mass to its end. He never went to Mass again, anywhere.

  A shout came from behind him. The first stone? He recognized the voice, and stopped.

  Eugene Tangney was out of breath. “Did you not once think of the dishonour and sorrow,” he panted, “that you would bring on your poor mother and me?”

  “I… did not wish it.” Michael’s mouth was parched, his lips dry; the words came with great difficulty.

  “You did not wish it. It did not make you think before you … We will never hold up our heads again!” Silence. “You are not my child. Not now.” Silence. “You enjoy a man’s instrument in … in the place of filth and disease. Or is it that you put yours in his? What… are you?”

  “Your only beloved son.”

  “You may wander over the whole world, but you are not my only beloved son, not here nor anywhere! A girl in a man’s body. What freak of nature did we fashion and bring to light? It is worse than deafness, a dumb tongue! It is a total deformity! You will not come near us again. Nor speak to us. Nor write letters.” He raised his hands to the sky, and, looking out to sea as if the ship taking Madge to America was still there like an enigmatic word, said “Your poor sister is beyond the reach of us now, thank God, and the little one she will give birth to will never know.”

  He spat in Michael’s face. The saliva hit the lashes of the left eye, then ran down the cheek to the mouth.

  “So the first stone is from you,” Michael said. “I should have guessed.” He walked off, then stopped and turned. “May God keep you always,” he said. Mr Tangney was walking in the opposite direction.

  ON the way home Michael experienced an asthma attack, his first in ten years. It lasted only a few minutes, was mild, just an echo of what he had endured as a boy and an adolescent. But the inability to breathe, the fluttering of his heart as if it was fragile like a butterfly’s wings, frightened him, was too much of a memento: those very real fears of death from asphyxiation.

  AT Eagle Lodge his emotions overwhelmed him. He wept as much, was as hysterical as Mrs Peacock after she had witnessed the awful act. Anthony cradled him, rocked him as he would a tiny child. “We’re together,” he said. “We’re safe.”

  “I’m not. ‘We’re not. We must leave. At once!”

  “Our tickets are for five weeks’ time.’

  “Change them.”

  “Michael… I understand… I know what you’ve been through, but…”

  “You don’t understand! This is Ireland, not some civilized part of London, where people play out the game according to rules! They will… do things.”

  “What things? Not that I feel we should venture into the town just yet. If at all. But no one can hurt us in our own home. At Eagle Lodge!”

  “Oh, how upper-class and British you are! The Englishman’s home is his castle! The sanctity ― the sanctuary ― of private property!”

  “What are you afraid of?” This was all mere reaction, Anthony thought. They would leave Eagle Lodge in their own good time, and with dignity. Ostracized, cut dead, yes ― but not physically assaulted. People might loathe what they had been told; nevertheless they would not organize some skirmish, some affray. Impossible!

  “I remember, when I was young, nine or ten… I wasn’t supposed to look; I disobeyed my parents… who does not?… A woman, Maggie Lynch, not so old as I am now. The girl who never said no; they are rare in Ireland but exist they surely do. She was a thing of the gypsies and tinkers, the men from the bogs; it was said they all fucked her. When she found she was pregnant she accused some man of the town, a man of standing. I don’t remember who it was. Father Quinlan preached a sermon on the text of the woman taken in adultery, but he did not denounce her; he did not name her from the altar as he did us. One night her hair was cut off and she was stripped nearly naked. She was left in the street, her hands tied to a post, a placard around her neck, until Father Quinlan, the doctor, and some others were told what was happening. They untied her, gave her clothes to wear, and bundled her off, out of Clasheen.”

  “I hardly think the same would be done to us!” .

  “It might be worse.”

  “What worse?”

  “I don’t know. Not cut off our hair…”

  “Oh, nonsense!” Anthony scoffed. “That is too wild! Your imagination!”

  However, to reassure Michael he checked that all the doors and windows of the house were fastened at night, and he kept a loaded pistol beside their bed. They lived in a state of siege. Michael tiptoed about, listening to every unexplained noise. Nothing happened. Nobody came to the house, not even the tenants, though Anthony saw Ty Keliher once, standing in the garden. Ty let himself be seen, and waved. Anthony waved back.

  Nothing happened.

  “IT is not unknown to medical science,” Dr Lenehan said to his wife, “but I haven’t come across a case of it myself. In rural Ireland, we … I doubt if the cause is known. Or a cure, come to that. Now, the Ancient Greeks ― ”

  “We are not in Ancient Greece!” Mrs Lenehan answered. “Which is just as well, is it not? The decline of the Greeks, indeed the fall of the Roman Empire, is attributed to that… grossness.”

  Dr Lenehan was surprised. “What do you know of such things?” he asked.

  “I can read, husband. Gibbon was recommended as suitable in my school.”

  “An expurgated edition, no doubt.”

  “Yes. So I went to the trouble of finding the complete work.”

  The doctor laughed. “With what result?”

  “I was… somewhat shocked by Caligula,” Mrs Lenehan admitted.

  In no other household in Clasheen was such a risqué conversation taking place that Sunday afternoon. The doctor, though he was born in County Galway, had not lived there all his life. He had attended medical school in Dublin, and practised in the capital for some years afterwards, until the appeal of roots pulled him back home. Mrs Lenehan was a Dubliner. She had travelled with her husband, seen London, Paris, Madrid. She was on the whole content with her lot; it was a happy marriage.

  “I wish Father Quinlan had not spoken of it at all,” the doctor said. “A denunciation, the naming of names … it is all barbaric, in my opinion. People should be left to themselves. If they indulge in their own choice of imperfection in the privacy of their homes, what hurt is done to others? The Bishop of Clogher was removed from his see because he was caught in such an act; it was said at the time that the scandal drove Lord Castlereagh to commit suicide: he was being blackmailed for something similar. Why should such men be made to suffer? However distasteful you or I might think it, it harms neither party nor anyone else. A little girl stopped me in the street, just now before lunch; she asked me what was the sin of Sodom. Can you imagine that? I was
most embarrassed… in the street too … Father Quinlan has put ideas into people’s heads that would never have lodged there in a whole month of Sundays! All of it at Mass, in front of children and babies! It is not right.”

  “I sometimes think he is ashamed of his own Christian goodness,” Mrs Lenehan said. “As if the Old Testament and the New were at war in him. He works his fingers to the bone for the starving; speaks volumes of encouragement to them which he probably realizes are false. Then he makes amends to himself by preaching brimstone and hellfire.”

  “Typhus, scurvy, yellow fever, and what the Government is not doing to feed the country are much greater obscenities than anything that may go on at Eagle Lodge.” Dr Lenehan stood up and put on his coat. “Where is my hat?”

  “On your head.”

  “I have to visit the workhouse in Coolcaslig now; their doctor is still sick. Perhaps I shall call in at Eagle Lodge on my way, and offer my… condolences.” He did not do so, however: as he neared the end of the new, paved section of the road he decided against it. I would not know what to say, he thought. But the real reason was that if one of those lesser obscenities was being enacted he did not want, any more than Mrs Peacock had wanted, to be aware of it.

  Two miles further on he met Mr Peacock. The Protestant clergyman had, of course, been holding his own service at the time Father Quinlan was fulminating, so his knowledge of what had been said was entirely second-hand. Both men, when they saw each other, reined in their horses. “Is it true?” Mr Peacock asked.

  “If you mean the drama at Mass this morning,” the doctor replied, “then, yes, it is true.”

  “It is no more than they deserve, don’t you think?”

  Dr Lenehan patted his horse’s neck. “As a medical man, I have no view on the case, sir. It is outside my province.”

  “But as a private man?”

  “As a private man, I keep my view private.”

  Such an effective trump annoyed Mr Peacock; he was not always so easily outwitted. “I have heard rumours,” he said, “that some kind of physical attack may be contemplated on the persons or the property of Mr Altarnun and his … his…”

  “That,” said the doctor, “must be stopped!”

  “I would not interfere myself; it is none of my business. But an assault on Eagle Lodge would be an outrage!”

  “I do not catch your drift, sir. Assailing the man you would let pass, but aggression against his property you would condemn.” He frowned. “You are eccentric.”

  “Private property is sacrosanct!” Mr Peacock said, raising his voice. “It cannot be touched with impunity! That is one of the fundamental laws on which our whole civilization is founded!”

  “To whose civilization do you allude? That law has been the blight of this country since the English conquered us in the twelfth century! A fig to your private property, that is what I say, sir, and a fig to you, sir, as well!” Dr Lenehan galloped off, annoyed and amused; Mr Peacock, he thought, was such a ridiculous little ass. The cleric was left staring after him, quite astonished. Such an outburst was remarkable, Mr Peacock said to himself, unheard of! Perhaps he had some sorrow, some grave problem at home. His wife? Mrs Lenehan had been saying to Mrs Peacock only the other day that she felt like a widow since the onset of the fever; she hardly saw her husband now. She was not a happy woman, Mrs Peacock decided.

  THE wind that had blown the cloud and drizzle in from the sea that morning was driving itself into a tremendous gale. It howled round corners, rattled windows and doors, lifted carpets and rugs. Mr Tangney, looking up from his armchair, saw a woman in the street, her head covered in a piece of cloth to keep out the wet, being thrust along as if by a hand. But she had a second, nevertheless, in which to glance at the house, as if, he said to himself, she were saying “That is the place where the bum-boy was born.”

  “There is, in every barrel, a rotten apple,” he said to Margaret, who was sitting at the parlour table.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she replied.

  “It is not our fault.”

  “I try to think so. Dear God, I do try! I have been mulling it over, again and again … when he was a baby, then his first tiny steps … teaching him … I don’t have the words, but you surely know what I am saying.”

  “I do not,” Eugene said, wishing his wife would not talk in riddles.

  “The … functions of his body.”

  “Oh.”

  “My mother said … I can see her now, in a white dress, standing in this room. ‘You are too hard on him,’ she warned me. ‘You will do that child a great mischief. Let him learn in his own sweet time.’ A good woman, my mother was. I worshipped the ground she walked on.”

  A long silence followed this. Eugene drummed his fingers and sighed; Margaret sniffed, blew her nose, then rubbed her face, which was swollen from hours of crying. “I do not see what the Devil that has to do with it,” he said, at last. “I am telling you it is not our fault! It does not come from us. His sisters were reared in the same way as he, and there is nothing the matter with them. That man corrupted him.”

  “What man?”

  “Altarnun, of course! Oh, I could blast his head off! I would too … if I thought I could get away with it. He has seduced Michael with … I don’t know what… the promise of a fortune, a life of luxury, a gentleman’s existence. That is it; you may depend on it.”

  “Michael would never fall to such lures. He knows right from wrong; why, he nearly became a priest!”

  “No, he did not. That is your imagination. And he did fall, as you put it, to such lures. We heard it today … at Holy Mass! Oh, the shame of it! My heart will break!”

  “I am thinking … with yourself so busy in the forge and he with no liking for horses and having no brothers. Growing up in a household of women.”

  “Prut, Margaret! Dr Lenehan had nothing but sisters and a widowed mother, old Mr Lenehan being killed in that accident on the Castlebar road, and the boy kept in skirts till he was nine years of age. It did not cause him to be niminy-piminy.”

  “I cannot believe,” Margaret said, “that Michael is entirely to blame.”

  “Of course he is not. Altarnun is to blame! I shall go to Galway tomorrow, to consult Mr Hanrahan, the attorney.”

  “Is it punishable by law?”

  “If it is not, why, dammit to God, it should be!”

  “Then, Eugene, you will have the law down so on Michael’s head.”

  This argument reduced the blacksmith to silence. Eventually he stood up, and walked over to the window. “This gale will bring down chimney pots,” he muttered.

  “Perhaps we should have encouraged him to take more interest in girls.”

  “Do young men need encouragement? They follow the scent, as dogs do bitches.”

  “You are not in the forge now with some conacre man!” Margaret said, wincing at the indelicacy.

  “Isn’t it so? When I was seventeen ― ”

  “I do not want to listen to this!” She covered her ears, but when she saw Eugene begin to speak she removed her hands.

  “All I have to say is we do not know what girls he may have had eyes for. A boy at seventeen, eighteen, dances at the cross-roads on Saturday nights. He comes home, he goes to bed, he does not say next morning where he has been, merely that he has enjoyed himself. His parents do not ask him prying questions. I did not; you did not. We wait for the day he tells us he is courting Kathleen or Maureen or Eileen, and wishes to bring her home. Because Michael said nothing does not mean Kathleen or Maureen or Eileen do not exist. They jilted him; to be sure they broke his poor heart.”

  “As he has broken ours.”

  Eugene nodded. “How do we talk to the people we have lived with all our lives? Hold up our heads?” On the mantelpiece was a miniature of his son, drawn when Michael was twenty. He turned it face down. “Shame and ruin! I never want to see him. Never.”

  She made a little gesture of hopelessness, and said “God will answer our prayers.”r />
  “God is not in the habit of answering prayers. Particularly Irish prayers.”

  “Eugene, that is blasphemous!”

  “I shall not go outside this house again.”

  He did, but weeks later. Mrs Tangney also could not bear to look at her friends and neighbours, so she, too, stayed indoors. She sent a message to Mrs Peacock that she could not help in the soup kitchen; she was indisposed. The charitable Protestant lady found she had to deal with all the work herself. “I have become a domestic, a menial, a skivvy,” she grumbled to her husband.

  A LETTER from Richard was never welcome, but the most recent was even less welcome than usual. It was mailed from Dublin. “I have come to see conditions here,” he wrote, “and it is obvious that reports reaching India, indeed London, to a very great extent gloss over the magnitude of the catastrophe that has overwhelmed Ireland.”

  “Yes, we do know,” Anthony said.

  “I have seen for myself,” the letter went on, “the hordes of starving beggars on the pavements of this city; wretched scarecrows that were once men and women in the prime of life and health; children and babies with the faces of old hags, their stomachs grotesquely swollen, their limbs so thin one could break them with one’s little finger. I have seen the ravages fever has caused, the darkened complexions, the hideous yellow skin, the agonized sufferings of innocent people, and I am moved more than words can say, more than tears can express. The crowds that throng the port are patient beyond belief as they line up for the Liverpool ships, though they must be desperate to abandon the stricken country before the Great Reaper mows them down with the scythes of hunger and disease.”

  “He is good with the florid phrase,” Anthony said. “The purple metaphor.”