The Hunger

by David Rees

  Michael took all the coins out of his pocket and scattered them in a wide arc. The few people who could still walk hobbled after the money, falling on each coin like so many gulls greedy for bits of bread.

  “Now why in God’s name did you do that?” Mrs Scannell asked. She was amazed: her breath, she said to Mrs O’Leary that evening, was quite taken from her.

  “Blood money,” Michael answered.

  “You could have given us sixpence!”

  “You’re not worth a ha’penny!” he shouted. “It would serve you right if I left you here!” But he pulled at the reins, clicked his tongue at the horse, and drove the Scannells back to Eagle Lodge.

  “I SOMETIMES think this is the most canting, dissembling country of liars in the whole world,” Michael said to Anthony. He was digging the garden, preparing it for summer. His favourite job: though it was as purposeless as painting a mural on a wall that is being knocked down; they would be in America before anything had grown to fruition. But, he said, it was rewarding to do after the long, frustrating months of winter; they could at least put right one part of the estate for Richard.

  “I was in the soup kitchen this morning, talking to my mother, and an old woman complained that the stirabout was cold. I tasted it myself: cold as a stone it was. Mrs Peacock took a sip, sucked on it a moment, then said ‘I wouldn’t say it was cold. It’s just not as hot as you would wish it.’ ”

  Anthony laughed. “But it would be difficult to outdo the English for hypocrisy,” he said.

  “Then in the street I saw a man arguing with Dr Lenehan.

  ‘You owe me three pounds,’ the man says. ‘I sent you the bill two months ago.’ ‘I am about due to pay it,’ the doctor says, very loftily. ‘No,’ says the man. ‘You were due to pay it when you received it.’ ‘That,’ answers the doctor, ‘depends on what you mean by due.’ ”

  “You have a way with words,” Anthony said. “You twist them very skilfully. But you don’t protest, with every appearance of complete sincerity, that black is white when it patently is black. The British are the world’s experts. They have deluded themselves into thinking there is no fever epidemic in Ireland. A minister of the Government is quoted in last week’s Mayo Telegraph ― ‘The accounts given to the contrary are,’ he says, ‘to a very great extent undoubtedly inaccurate.’ Inaccurate! Where is his evidence?”

  Michael leaned on his spade. The soil was hard; under the surface, it was still frost-bound. “They could give me some seed to plant,” he said, “but that will happen when pigs fly.”

  “It would interfere with the operation of natural causes; such would be their argument. They don’t like to interfere with natural causes ― particularly famine, disease, and death.”

  “They’d interfere with us if they found out. They’d say you and I are not caused by nature, though we are.”

  “As the doctor and his man were at odds over the meaning of ‘due.’ Nature is a word invented by someone to pinpoint something, but ten people might pinpoint that something in ten different ways.”

  “It is so,” Michael agreed. Anthony walked up to the flowerbeds by the house, and began to prune the roses. Soft spring weather. A warm sun that would quickly wake the few seeds Michael was about to plant: Richard, or the agent he might employ, would have the benefit of some vegetables this year. If Richard decided to leave the house empty, then the tenants could help themselves. Someone, in that case, would be kept from starving, and have a bunch of red roses to decorate his windowsill too.

  Michael worked on in silence; he could feel in his legs and his back that he was working, and he was glad. In America they would, he was certain, have a plot as big as this, and he’d grow vegetables and flowers just for the two of them. Did fuschias, cone flowers and montbretias, bulbs like tulips and daffodils, trees such as the larches on this lawn, exist in the United States? Cone flowers did; they were brought from there in the first place. On the other side of the Atlantic there were oleanders. He did not know what an oleander looked like, but the name sounded good. He would also like a strawberry tree; an arbutus. There were strawberry trees in Ireland, but he had never seen one. They did not flourish in cold windy Galway; you had to go south to find them, to the wet sub-tropical woods of Kerry.

  “My love is an arbutus,” he sang. Anthony snorted: the idea was absurd. Yes, Michael said to himself, one of those clapboard houses you see in pictures, with a big veranda, and drinking wine on that veranda at sunset in weather that was warmer and less damp than here; a long day’s work in the garden just finished. Me and him. Dan, Madge and the children on a nearby plot: going to their house for supper. Dan wearing good clothes. The children laughing, playing in the trees.

  Travel broadened the mind, so people said. Anthony could hold Michael spellbound with stories of far-away places. The Taj Mahal by moonlight. A concert in Vienna, the theatre in London. St Peter’s cathedral in Rome. How curious that Anthony was content to give it all up, was pleased to rot in this primitive backwater! Fulfilled in other ways: seeing the tenants through the hunger. Loving and being loved; that had not happened in India or Europe. “Don’t you ever miss the plays and the concerts?” Michael asked. “The power of the grand people you saw there?”

  “The grand people! They were not so grand as you like to think. The greater part of the audience at a concert doesn’t even hear the music. They are, most of them, old ladies dressed in what once was fashionable ― old ladies who want to be seen by their friends, who are bored to death by their humdrum lives. As soon as the overture begins, they fall fast asleep.”

  “What does the orchestra think of that?”

  “Not much.”

  “I have never heard an orchestra. I should like to listen to the symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart, their piano concertos too.” He had often said this, so Anthony had obtained the music of some of the Mozart concertos from a firm in Dublin. They were technically quite out of Michael’s range, except for the slow movements; he could perform the piano part of these, tra-la-la-ing his way through the orchestral bits. The slow movement of the twenty-third was his favourite: its F sharp minor melancholy reminded him of the sadness of Irish songs. “I imagine there are concerts in New York,” he said.

  “I doubt it,” Anthony replied. He had finished with the roses, and was now pulling up dandelions. “A blessing of this winter is the weeds have had little chance to grow. But my back, all the same! New York is a rough place. You would have more opportunity in Boston.”

  “Then why do we not go there?”

  “The tickets are for New York. Few boats sail for Boston now; the quarantine regulations are so tight. In Boston ships full of starving people, the fever upon, them, have been turned away and forced to go elsewhere, back to Ireland in some cases. Massachusetts thinks its commonwealth will be the cesspool of the civilized world if it allows in too many Irish paupers. The Irish in Ireland are helpless victims, but as soon as they arrive in America, they miraculously change into the dregs of society and a burden on the poor rates. More twisting of words.”

  These comments, however, did not alter Michael’s belief in his vision of the wooden house and the garden with the strawberry tree. America was huge and most of it empty; he and Anthony would not have to live in either the rough cities or the snob cities. “I’ll do without my orchestra,” he said. “I’ll settle for a piece of land in the wilds.”

  “You think we should become farmers?”

  “Why not?”

  “We know nothing of it.”

  “We can learn.”

  “I had imagined employment in some business,” Anthony said. “In the offices of a respectable company. That would suit us. We can read, write, add figures a great deal better than most.”

  “And are there men in New York like us?”

  “Would you want to meet them?”

  Michael thought about that. “It would be interesting to hear their experiences. Are we… thousands? Or millions? Or just you and me and a few others? Ther
e is no way of knowing, I suppose. We are not visible, as if we had a black skin on us or a green face.”

  “Which is just as well,” Anthony said. “Imagine what our lives would be like if people knew! We would not even be allowed to exist, perhaps; all men with green faces to be hanged, drawn and quartered.”

  “There. I have done.” Ground had been turned over and levelled: he had sown carrots, onions, cabbage. He was satisfied, and knew how much more satisfied he would feel the day he was tilling land they both owned. It was not a childish dream, he thought; certainly they would have to struggle before they obtained what they wanted, begin as Anthony said by earning money in the city: but it was all possible. No hell on earth such as the scenes he had witnessed in Coolcaslig could exist in America: a man holding up a child, its stomach distended, its match-thin legs bent stalks ― it had looked like a chicken, plucked and ready for the oven. The woman with the grey hair screaming noiselessly on the other side of the window. All there was in Ireland for him and Anthony was a similar fate.

  Nevertheless, it was hard to leave.

  He thought of his parents. They should come with us, he said to himself; I neglect them. It was out of the question, of course; he and Anthony with his parents! The secret would be impossible to hide. His mother’s horror, his father’s disgust: the proof the blacksmith always wanted that his son was a very imperfect paradigm of the Tangney original. Better his parents stayed in Clasheen, ignorant, short of food. He would write from America, send them money.

  It was time Mr and Mrs Tangney were told they were going; he had been putting that off. It was bound to be distressful.

  “Will you cook tonight, or shall I?” Anthony asked.

  “What is there?”

  “Carrots. Eggs. Bread. A little milk. Not a Parisian dinner.”

  “I will disguise it with herbs you brought back from Dublin. Fricasee Eagle Lodge.”

  Anthony smiled, a bit sadly. “I wish I could give you a better life,” he said.

  “I am happy enough,” Michael answered.

  TY Keliher, after many disappointments, was at last watching what he for so long had hoped to see. Though he resisted the temptation ― possible insanity was still a worry ― for a few minutes, he soon allowed his fingers to slip between his legs. His indulgence in two pleasures at once, what his eyes showed him and what his hand touched, led to his being taken off guard for the first time in his life. The spy was being spied on. Mrs Peacock, taking advantage of the superb weather, had been walking along the beach, and as she approached the gates of Eagle Lodge she thought she would call on Mr Altarnun to thank him for his generous gift to the running costs of the soup kitchen. Ty should have heard the footsteps on the gravel, but his back was to her, and he was far too engrossed.

  Mrs Peacock paused, and wondered what on earth was happening. Then she decided to shout at this trespasser, a ragged boy who clearly had no business to be there. But before she could do so, some instinct whispered to Ty that all was not well; he turned, saw her, and fled. He ran round the house ― an uncomfortable experience, as he was hugely erect and close to ejaculation ― then disappeared down the garden and into the bushes. He didn’t stop running until he reached the waterfall, where he judged he was sufficiently safe to stop and bring events with himself to a satisfactory conclusion. Mrs Peacock continued on up the drive as far as the front door. If she had not seen Ty Keliher she would not have acted as she did now. She would have rung the bell and waited for Anthony or Michael to answer it; she would probably have had to wait for some considerable time.

  She was not in the habit of peering through people’s windows, indeed would have thought it quite reprehensible; such had been her response to young Timothy doing just that. But Mrs Peacock was as frail as any of us, and if we are aware of something of interest on the far side of a window, we might all, if we imagine we will be undetected, take a quick peep. That is what she did. Her first thought was the same as Ty’s had been on that other occasion: two men were wrestling. Then it occurred to her that they were both stark naked. They were Michael and Anthony. And she realized.

  Although it had not dawned on her in her whole life that persons of the same sex would do such a thing, she knew exactly what it was that she was witnessing; she was not wholly innocent or ignorant: she had noticed the brute beasts of the fields ― colts and bullocks ― doing or attempting to do this, and she had averted her eyes in disgust. What she felt now was disgust, but it was a great deal more than that ― anger, incredulity, shame, outrage: it was as if she had been physically assaulted, hit round the head, battered. Her feelings were not unlike those of a woman who has just been raped.

  There are always her opposites, of course ― men and women who think that the sight of two people making love is aesthetically beautiful, erotically stimulating, enunciative of what is finest, most tender, most human in every one of us. But appreciation, arousal, and the sympathetic emotions are frequently blocked by a learned morality, and Mrs Peacock’s morality was such that what others might have seen as beautiful she saw as despicably ugly. What they would consider erotic she found revolting, and what sympathetic identification they could experience with Michael and Anthony she labelled as squalid, odious, nauseous and bestial.

  Mr Peacock was reading One Corinthians thirteen ― love is not perverse, etcetera ― when his wife rushed in on him. He banged his Bible to in mid-sentence as it was immediately obvious that something dreadful had happened to her. She was hysterical and incoherent, at one moment yelling, at another sobbing, so much so that he feared for a while that she had been physically assaulted. It was a good half hour of commotion before he could begin to piece together her tale; tea and laudanum had to be administered first, and Bridget was sent to find Dr Lenehan ― he was to stop whatever he was doing, Mr Peacock said, and come at once: this was an emergency.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “They had no clothes on, and ― ”

  “Yes! Don’t keep reminding me of it!”

  “I’m sorry. But I’m still not clear about what it was you saw.” “They … he … Mr Altarnun …”

  “Yes?”

  “Was … inserting …”

  “What?”

  “You surely cannot wish me to say it out loud! The filth of such an act! The vileness! The most wicked women on the streets of Dublin ― ”

  “Never mind the women on the streets of Dublin! Was it… in the rear? Michael Tangney’s… ?”

  She shivered, then covered her face with her hands and wept again. Mr Peacock waited for the outburst to subside, then said “I cannot imagine … It is astonishing! A crime against nature!” He paced up and down. “A crime in the eyes of the law as well,” he added. “Were they doing anything else?”

  “Is not that enough?” she shouted.

  “They were on the sofa, you say.”

  “Yes … they were … kissing. Can you think of anything more horrible? Stroking each others … flesh.” She shivered again, as if she had just touched rancid meat.

  Mr Peacock sat down behind his desk. “My dear… I am deeply sorry, deeply sorry that you of all women should have been a witness to these… monstrous depravities!” One such depravity was that both men were nude. She had never before seen a naked adult body, male or female, not even her husband’s. That side of their marriage had always been performed in discreet darkness, the pair of them in night-clothes. Mrs Peacock had never found it enjoyable, but she knew it was an affliction women had to endure, the nature of men being what it was.

  The Reverend, fortunately, had stopped bothering her years ago, from which she concluded that men got over wanting to do that kind of thing quite quickly. Not that she asked her husband’s opinion ― one didn’t discuss such topics with anybody. Now she had seen a man naked, two men naked, two men naked and erect! And what was perhaps more extraordinary than anything else, they seemed to be enjoying each other’s and their own nakedness. When she thought about that, she also realized that Michael and
Anthony seemed to be enjoying everything that they were doing. It was worse than the brute beasts of the fields: colts and bullocks could be absolved ― they had no understanding. “But it explains it all,” Mr Peacock said.

  “How can you say it explains anything? It is inexplicable?”

  “You said yourself there was something queer about him. The Shakespeare sonnet. The servant whom we know now for sure is not a servant… the insolent boy with his feet on the table … the fact that there are no servants. We always thought that odd, didn’t we? There would have to be nobody else in the house for them to …”

  Mrs Peacock stared. “You are quite right. Quite right. It is beginning to make sense.”

  “The question is … what do we do with this information?”

  “Do with it? Why, they must be ripped out of the community! Denounced! Branded! Horse-whipping is too good for them! We cannot allow such corruption … such a stench… to remain! Here, in Clasheen! You should go to the peelers. Have them clapped in irons!”

  Mr Peacock squirmed, just a little. His disgust was as strong as his wife’s ― he was all condemnation, ready to strike out against what he, too, would agree was odious, nauseous and bestial, but the vindictive harridan that was part of her nature was not part of his. “I do not think horse-whipping is appropriate,” he said.

  “It is a crime in the eyes of God! A sin that demands vengeance! You surely know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah!” Mr Peacock was nettled. “My dear, there is no need to teach the Bible to me! I am quite well aware of events in Sodom and Gomorrah. And do not you forget that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt because she looked!”

  “Now you are being ridiculous.”

  “I do not think it a matter for the peelers,” he went on. “Though it may eventually become one. We should remember Mr Altarnun’s many acts of kindness. Without his help, the soup kitchen would not be operating now and his tenants would be starving. Another man, and doubtless a practising Christian which he is not, would have thrown those families out and tumbled their cabins. He has spared no expense. He has saved people from the workhouse and the hospital, from death itself.”