The Hunger Page 5

  “I think it is some air-borne parasite,” Anthony said. “A fungus. It has to be.”

  “Gentlemen, I must leave you.” The doctor pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at it short-sightedly. “I have calls to make on the sick. Not to mention the deaf, the blind, the halt and the dumb.” They raised their hats to each other.

  He went off with Mr Peacock; Father Quinlan and Anthony walked up the road in the opposite direction. “Now we are by ourselves,” the priest said, “there is a little something I should like to discuss with you. It concerns Michael.”

  “Yes?” Anthony was on his guard at once, and hoped he was betraying no interest that might be construed as out of the ordinary.

  “I was talking to his mother last week. Ladies, as I’m sure you’re aware, often fuss about details that do not worry you and me; I listen in my confession box to many sins that are not sins at all.” He laughed his most man-of-the-world laugh, thinking of Mrs Tangney who often wasted his time on a Saturday morning whispering peccadilloes that were not errors of taste, let alone sins even of the venial kind. “This is not, however, a secret of the confessional. No, she is bothered about her son. He attends Mass as punctiliously as she does, knows his Bible better, and, once upon a time she thought, might have considered entering the priesthood. But he has not received Holy Communion in four years, which is, I have to say it, a very long while. I wondered if you could throw any light on the matter.”

  “The religious practices and beliefs of my servants,” Anthony said, “are none of my business.”

  “There are people, however, who think the health of the souls they employ as much their business as the health of the bodies.”

  “I am not one of them.”

  “I see. But… perhaps you could find out? Tactfully, of course. His mother, you understand, is worried.”

  And you are an interfering busybody, Anthony said to himself. “I would consider it an impertinence,” he said.

  “Oh.” The priest rubbed his stone knob of a nose. “Good-day to you, sir. I have a call to make here on the Kearneys; old Mrs Kearney is dying.”

  Anthony returned to Eagle Lodge, unaware that two people who didn’t like him very much ― the clergymen of both persuasions ― after this morning’s events liked him even less.

  MICHAEL sang as he cleared away the remains of their evening meal:

  “ ‘Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming alone;

  All her lovely companions are faded and gone;

  No flower of her kindred, no rose-bud is nigh,

  To reflect back her blushes, or give sigh for sigh.”

  Anthony looked up from the table where he was working, and said “Why are all Irish songs so sad?”

  “It is a sad country,” Michael answered. “Our only songs are of martyrs and death in battle and broken lovers’ vows. ‘For they’re hanging men and women for a-wearing of the green.’ ”

  “That’s right. That’s right. They did.” Anthony bent over his work: the table was covered in paper, pencils, compasses, rulers, protractors. “You were singing one of Tom Moore’s Irish Melodies. He also wrote ‘There’s nothing half so sweet in life as love’s young dream.’ ”

  “Your people would hang us still, given the chance. I heard in town today that some Irishmen would prefer armed rebellion to hunger.”

  “Talk.”

  “Yes, we are fond of talk. My father spends his day gossiping in that forge of his; business is bad since the praties rotted.” He took his empty wine glass out to the kitchen.

  “Is that so?”

  “If a man cannot buy a loaf of bread he cannot have his horse shod.”

  “Before we leave the subject of hanging, I have told all our tenants that I’ll waive half the year’s rent. Let it hang; isn’t that the phrase you use? So they can eat till the next year’s potato crop is dug.”

  Michael came back from the kitchen and stared at him. “You’ve done that? What will your brother say?”

  “He won’t know.” Anthony drew some lines on his map, slowly and carefully. “I was awake last night, worrying about it. I shall have to pay him out of my own pocket.”

  “I thought you were restless.” He went up behind Anthony’s chair and put his arms around his lover. “You are a good man,” he said, softly. “I will compose a false set of figures and put it in the mail to India.”

  Anthony laughed. “You’re devious.”

  “We’re devious and secretive; we’re liars and dissemblers. Isn’t that what is said of us? The English made us so; it was how we survived the penal days.”

  “That is not my fault.”

  “True for you. But the sins of the fathers are inflicted on the children, even unto the seventh generation.” He kissed Anthony on the top of his head and stroked his arms. “You know what is best about yourself? Your hair. That straw colour drives me wild. I never see wheat growing without your image in my eyes.”

  “My hair?” Anthony laughed again. “Not my goodness of character?”

  “I said you are a good man.” The expression on Michael’s face was serious, almost doleful. “We have each other. That is all that counts.”

  “Yes. Love’s young dream.”

  “It is not a dream! Though I’ve fallen asleep five nights now without you. I woke last night and still you had not come to bed; I thought for a minute I was back in my father’s house, a young lad and a virgin. What is this marriage when one of us stays up poring over plans and maps and calculations? It is no marriage at all.”

  “I’m sorry. Another two hours and I think I’ll be done with it.”

  “In that case,” Michael said, “I will wash the dishes, sweep the room, bolt the doors, and sew the missing button on your shirt. And wait up for you: it’s freezing out ― there’s frost on the grass already. I don’t fancy the cold white sheets of the bed without a body to keep me warm.”

  “I’ll finish as soon as I can. And be your bed-warmer. I promise.”

  “My obedient servant.”

  “Tomorrow,” Anthony said, “I think I shall visit the Kelihers. I haven’t seen him since our altercation at Flanagan’s last week. It was his wife I spoke to about hanging the rent. Will you come with me?”

  “If I must.”

  “Now, may I work?”

  “Sir.” Michael bowed to him mockingly, then left him alone and started on some of the chores. When he had finished, he sat by the fire and read. Midnight struck; he glanced at Anthony who was still adding up columns of figures. He returned to his book, The Rights of Man. “Every generation is equal in rights to the generation which preceded it, by the same rule that every individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary … All men are born equal.” Powerful, seditious stuff, he thought; Mr Peacock would certainly not approve, and even Father Quinlan would be lukewarm.

  It was also difficult to read … not perhaps relevant, or only in part. Relevant to what, he wondered, surprised that he had fished up the word from the recesses of his mind. To himself, perhaps: and it occurred to him that when he read these days he was always looking for something ― an authority that would give him blessing, a licence to be Michael. Thomas Paine, however libertarian and correct in his argument, was not that authority. Some weeks later he mentioned this to Anthony, who said “I have just the books for you” and gave him copies of Blake’s Songs of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

  Michael loved Eagle Lodge, more than Anthony did. A house to Anthony was a place where one slept, ate, talked, put things; though, when Michael protested at such an attitude, he said “If I owned it I might feel differently.” He then unpacked his Indian souvenirs, which had been lying in boxes in a spare room for months ― paintings, sculptures, rugs, animal skins ― and let Michael transform the parlour. Grandfather Altarnun’s hunting prints, faded and dispiriting, were banished to the cellar. The Indian effect, Mrs Peacock said on one of her visits, was “most unusual”, though, later, to her husband, she describ
ed it as “foreign”, “savage”, and “not at all the kind of taste one expects in a gentleman.”

  In fact the parlour was pleasant, comfortable, lived in, as were the other areas Michael and Anthony inhabited ― the kitchen, the main bedroom. The size of the house was obviously excessive for just two people. The dining room was never used, nor were most of the bedrooms and the servants’ quarters. Here furniture gathered dust; wallpaper unstuck itself, and spiders and woodworm enjoyed a field day. Michael fantasized new colour schemes, curtains, carpets, furniture, and often said it was a great pity they did not own Eagle Lodge. “And if we did,” Anthony said, “where would the money come from to carry out such plans?”

  “There is no harm, surely, in dreaming.”

  “One day we will buy a house of our own. Smaller than this.”

  “There is a beautiful house for sale in Coolcaslig. It has pink walls, bow windows, and it overlooks the sea.”

  “Yes. I know it, and I’d love it too. But the price is out of this world.”

  Musing over the pink house and the life they would have in it, Michael fell asleep, The Rights of Man on his lap. Anthony, at two o’clock in the morning, lifted him out of the chair and carried him upstairs; when Michael woke he discovered himself in bed in the pitch dark, warm from Anthony’s skin touching his. The only sound was Anthony’s deep, even breathing. He searched for his lover’s hand, felt it close round his, then slept again.

  The tenants’ cabins, particularly the Kelihers’, were disgusting, a moral blot on his family’s name, Anthony thought. They should be pulled to the ground and new houses built, but he had neither the authority nor the means to do this. His brother owned them. He had already written twice to Richard in some indignation about the way the Kelihers in particular were forced to live, but Richard felt the matter was of little importance. “They are no worse off than many Irish,” he wrote in reply. “Indeed, I imagine better off, for you say every one of the children is healthy. I have not the money to dash around rebuilding cabins. You tell me the rents barely cover the costs of running the estate and your own expenses and needs; so how should I find the wherewithal? My salary would not run to it, and asking the East India Company for a loan would be laughed at.”

  At least the Kelihers had windows, which half the population of rural Ireland did not, but that was their only advantage. Ten children, ranging in age from a girl three months old to a lad of fifteen, who, it was said, was a bit simple-minded, lived in one room that contained almost no furniture; they had no beds, no table, only two chairs, and almost no cooking utensils. Their clothes were rags, and they did not possess a single shoe. In this cabin a pig slept, and outside the door was a muckheap as high as the house. There were of course no toilet facilities, nor any way they could wash themselves or their rags. They drew water from the stream or the Widow O’Gorman’s well, both of which were half a mile off.

  Yet, until the potato failed, they were happy enough. The pig and growing a little oats paid the rent, and they kept warm ― throughout the winter they huddled around a peat fire which, even on the coldest days, stopped them from shivering. They were sociable people and enjoyed the company of their neighbours, spending a great deal of their time just talking, telling stories, or joining the throng at the cross-roads that danced to Patrick O’Callaghan’s fiddle. They liked markets, fairs and horse races, and would often travel great distances to attend such functions. Work did not tire them out: cultivating potatoes and looking after a pig took very little of their time. Most of rural Ireland, until the Famine, lived existences like the Kelihers’.

  Anthony walked up to the cabin, the smell of the muck-heap making him choke. Michael stood fifty yards off: he had no urge to chat with tenants-at-will. Anthony’s influence during the past four years may have changed some of his attitudes to those at the foot of the ladder, but Michael still felt uneasy in the proximity of Sullivans, Cronins, Kelihers, Scannells, Leahys and O’Learys. Once he had loved Dan Leahy ― or, at any rate, lusted after him, dressing desire in romantic clothes so that it was made to look permissible ― but Dan, he thought, like Mr and Mrs Keliher, would never think of him as other than the blacksmith’s educated boy, above them, nose in the air, a snob. Michael may have shifted a little; they had not. So he kept his distance.

  Keliher, surrounded by his entire family, fell to his knees the moment Anthony appeared (like an inverse jack-in-the-box, Anthony thought) and no amount of protest or command could get him up again until he had finished his speech: a torrent of gratitude for your honour allowing the rent to hang, and a score of invocations to the Blessed Virgin and various saints in Heaven to protect your honour’s soul and remember your honour’s goodness when your honour would be dying. Anthony laughed.

  Keliher stood up and said “What in the Devil’s name are you laughing at?”

  “Because I’m pleased,” Anthony replied. Which wasn’t true; the grotesquery he had just been forced to witness had made him laugh. “Pleased that you bear no ill will for what occurred at Flanagan’s.”

  “It was the drink in him, your honour,” said Mrs Keliher. “It was unpardonable, shouting at yourself and yourself so good to us and ten hungry little children at home.”

  They didn’t look, Anthony thought, as if they were hungry ― yet. The eldest was an albino, a tall, slim boy with a shock of white hair that flopped over his forehead. In a few years’ time he would be beautiful. If there were enough potatoes between now and then.

  “She beat me for it,” Keliher said, almost proudly.

  “I did so,” his wife confessed.

  “But my father is nimble and dashed out of the cabin,” the albino said. Keliher aimed a swipe at him, but the boy was nimble too and ran off, gurgling with laughter.

  “Here’s a shilling for you,” Anthony said. “Spend it on the children.”

  Keliher stared at it on his outstretched palm, and the whole family crowded round to look. Some of them had never seen a silver coin before. “How do we… spend it?” one of the younger girls asked.

  “You take it into a shop and buy things.”

  “It’s a few years since I did that,” said Mrs Keliher. “But I’ll make sure, your honour, it is not given over to Mrs Flanagan. It will not cause liquid to pour down Mr Keliher’s throat. Not that he often has the means to do it; drunk he is not since my brother’s wake, and that was, let me see, seven years last March. I will buy things for the little ones, and may the saints preserve you.”

  Anthony rejoined Michael, and when they were out of sight of the waterfall, Anthony pushed Michael against a tree-trunk and kissed him passionately.

  “Hey, hey!” Michael said, after he had regained his breath. “What is this, then?”

  “You were grumbling yesterday that your conjugal rights had been neglected.”

  “Do you want me to prance about naked here? On a frosty November morning? I would freeze to death and the whole process watched, and listened to, no doubt, by the peeping eyes and flapping ears of little Kelihers.”

  Anthony looked round. “I see no Kelihers. Hear no Kelihers. But, I thought, back at the house …”

  Michael’s eyes lit up. “Back at the house,” he said, tracing a finger along Anthony’s eyebrows, “You may do with me as you please.”

  “I may? You are an abandoned sinner.”

  “ ‘Necessity knows no laws,’ Saint Augustine says.”

  “This is necessity?”

  “It is. I love you.”

  But, though not heard, they had been seen. Timothy, the eldest Keliher ― Ty he was nicknamed ― had tracked them, just for fun, for something to do to pass the time: he was imagining he was a king in ancient Ireland, stalking two prehistoric elks. Bare feet gave him the advantage of silence. What he observed he could make nothing of: he had never been told of such things ― not as a warning or a joke or a simple fact. Fifteen he might be, but his ignorance was as total as Mrs Peacock’s though a lot more innocent. He simply saw what he saw, and had no atti
tudes to it. The picture was filed away in his head, and there it remained, for the time being.

  IRELAND struggled through the winter of 1845 and the spring of 1846 as best it could. The failure of the potato had been patchy; there were many parts of the country unaffected by the blight. This, and the Government’s relief schemes, staved off a widespread famine. Though distress and poverty were much more acute than usual, not many people actually died of hunger. There were cases of severe hardship in Clasheen, but no deaths.

  Anthony’s plans for the new road were passed by the Board of Works, and employment for eightpence a day was given to people who would have otherwise found themselves totally destitute. The subscriptions collected by Mr Peacock’s and Father Quinlan’s committee did not amount to a great deal, but they helped to buy some essential food. The Government’s Indian corn was distributed: those who ate it loathed it. It was so hard it was nearly inedible, and it sometimes caused vomiting and internal bleeding. The trouble was that there were no mills in Ireland that could grind it properly and, even if there had been, the peasant women, used for a lifetime to cooking nothing but potatoes, did not know how to prepare it. Peel’s brimstone it was called. Anthony and Michael tried it on one occasion, and pronounced it revolting.

  Other places with leadership less able than that of Dr Lenehan, Mr Peacock, Father Quinlan and Anthony Altarnun, fared much worse. An example of the horrifying reality experienced elsewhere came to Clasheen’s attention at the beginning of April. Mrs Peacock, out walking along the strand near Eagle Lodge, saw a boat making for the shore; there were half a dozen people on board who waved “frantically” (she said later), “with gesticulations of despair”, though she did not interpret their behaviour as such at the time. She thought it had something to do with the weather. A breeze was blowing up strongly and dark clouds were building on the horizon; she was on the point of turning for home as she feared it would snow. It was certainly cold enough.