The Hunger

by David Rees

  CHAPTER TWO

  _______________________________

  THE English reader who has the stereotypical notion of the Irishman as suited only to navvy’s work, fighting, and getting drunk, may think it odd that an Irish blacksmith in 1845 should own a piano, serve on a committee, and have a son who read Shakespeare. But the English have never known much about their western neighbour. “The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned,” said Sydney Smith, “the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.”

  Another stereotypical idea has to be knocked on the head, this time from the other party: that all Anglo-Irish landlords were monsters and tyrants, concerned only with collecting rents. Most of them, it is true, fitted this description, but there were others the Marquess of Sligo, the Duke of Leinster, Arthur Lee Guinness, Lord Courtown and Colonel Vaughan Jackson are examples ― who, during the Famine, gave generously of their own money to feed their tenants; they served indefatigably on relief committees, fever committees and Boards of Guardians; they employed the destitute to drain land and to build roads and houses. Such a person was Anthony Altarnun, though his finances and the estate he managed were nowhere near the size of the Duke of Leinster’s or indeed those of any of the people mentioned above.

  Eagle Lodge and its three hundred acres belonged, in fact, to his elder brother Richard. The Altarnuns also had an estate in Cornwall, which was owned by the second brother, Charles. Anthony, the youngest, had inherited no property. He had decided on a career in the army and served as a lieutenant in a regiment in India, where Richard also lived, working for the East India Company. Eagle Lodge had been run for years by an agent, with the result that the Altarnuns had a generally bad reputation for absenteeism, a reputation that changed when Anthony came to live there.

  After only two years with his regiment, Anthony had abruptly resigned his commission and announced to an astonished Richard that he would like to manage the Clasheen estate. Richard had tried to dissuade him ― he could not understand why anyone in their right senses should want to give up the officers’ mess for a solitary existence in a backward, primitive, barbaric country. However, he had eventually agreed, though he neither liked nor approved of Anthony. Richard was a conventional product of his period and class: cautious, prim, genteel, a Victorian paterfamilias and a devout Christian of the high Anglican persuasion.

  His brother, in his opinion, was rakish, restless, and reckless; Anthony thought Richard profoundly dull. Other people saw Anthony as intelligent, free thinking, an attractive breaker of orthodoxy. He wanted to go to Ireland, he said, to do something more useful with his life than taking potshots at Afghan bandits and getting drunk. He would stay there only a year or so, for he would not be happy for long in isolation; but his relationship with Michael was to change that.

  Anthony had always been a confident man, sure of his own capacities, though he had not yet found the right slot in the world; Ireland, maybe, would show him what that was. Self-confidence had led him at the age of twenty to a position where he felt it quite easy to abandon his religious faith ― well before the publication of The Origin of Species might have influenced his thinking, as it did many later Victorian agnostics. He loved reading anything that came to hand ― novels, plays, philosophy, mathematics, scientific books, poetry. He was a more voracious reader than Mrs Peacock (whom he detested: a nasty-minded busybody) though not so discriminating. She never opened a book she thought might be the least improper. Unlike her, he loathed writing letters, particularly to Richard, who was always anxious to know if the rents, down to the last penny, had been collected, and to hear of the minutest details of expenditure: repairs, paint, seed, even how much had been spent on nails and screws. Michael wrote these letters for him.

  He was physically confident, too, good at all games and an expert horseman. The word that summed him up best was enthusiast ― in his appetite for whatever he was doing: reading, eating, drinking, talking, listening; even stillness. Energy is eternal delight; the spell he cast over Michael was total. His tenants, suspicious at first, were rapidly won over. His body was the opposite of Michael’s; a big man, over six foot, big-boned, with a tough, well co-ordinated sportsman’s physique. In middle age he would grow fat, whereas Michael would always be lean. He had a pale skin, hair the colour of straw, and brilliant blue eyes: despite his Cornish origins, his face and build were as Saxon as Michael’s were Celt.

  He was in his element that afternoon with the tenants. The news from Clasheen had reached both him and them. Every man, woman and child was out of doors, anxiously inspecting the plants still in the fields and prodding the potatoes that had already been dug and stored in pits. Not a trace of blight was to be found on any of them. “I shall not see you starve,” he said to the Widow O’Gorman. “If it does fail and you cannot pay the rent,” he told Mr and Mrs Keliher and the ten young Kelihers ― the most fragile family on the estate; they had only three acres and lived in a one-roomed cabin with a pig and six chickens ― “well, you cannot pay the rent. The crop next year will be good, and then you can pay.” (My brother be damned, he said to himself.)

  “God’s blessings on you, your honour,” said Keliher, going down on his knees. “May the Lord and the Holy Virgin herself see you in Heaven.”

  “Get up, man! Get up!” Anthony replied, acutely embarrassed. “I will not have people kneeling in front of me. Who do you think I am? Prince Albert? Chance, fate ― call it what you will ― has put you there and me here. It could easily have been the other way round.”

  “May God spare your health,” Keliher said, not understanding more than a word or two of this line of argument. He shuffled himself into an upright position.

  “Dig up all your potatoes now and keep them indoors. That is my advice,” he said as he rode away. He gave similar advice to the Scannells, the Sullivans, the Leahys, the O’Learys, the Cronins, everyone. His last visit was to Patrick O’Callaghan, the oldest tenant, and in his opinion the wisest and most sensible.

  “What do you think?” he asked the old man, unable to conceal the worry in his voice.

  O’Callaghan took off his cap and scratched his skull. He was bald; his brown skin was leathery, like the binding of an ancient book, and his voice creaked with age. “The crop was scarce in the Thirties three years running; that was the curl and the dry rot. In 1807 praties were after being ruined by frost; I remember it well. But this ― this, I have seen nothing like it. Never.”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you notice, your honour, in the fields in Clasheen this morning before they went black, a kind of whitish dust? Dust, but not dust. It settled on the plants. A seed, maybe.”

  “I have not been in town today.”

  “It’s a seed I’m thinking, blown on the air. A monstrous, evil thing of a seed. It does not come out of the earth. The earth is good; it is rich ― we have all been fed by this land and our fathers and our grandfathers before us.”

  “Do you think the crop will fail here?”

  “Why, if the wind blows this way, it surely must!”

  Anthony thought for a while. “I have an idea,” he said. “And I’d like your opinion of it. If the blight is airborne, then the safest place for the crop is indoors ― in a cellar that has no windows and no vents. I have such a cellar at Eagle Lodge, and it’s free of damp. If everyone on the estate brought their potatoes up to the house while we still have time, well then, the crop might be rescued.”

  The old man was silent. He stared at the sun, in and out of clouds. “Saving your presence, your honour, it will not do.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your honour … no one will know whose praties are which.”

  “Does that matter, man? We are facing starvation, disease and death!”

  “The Sullivans will think the O’Learys are taking more than their own. The O’Learys will not trust the Kelihers. Everyone says the Widow O’Gorman
is as greedy as a pig. The Cronins will not care to traipse in and out of the Lodge; they think they are too grand to ask favours. The Scannells will say their pit is as sound as your cellar.”

  “This is childish. Absurd!”

  “It is.” The old man sighed, and replaced his cap. “It is so, surely.”

  “Will you ask them? See what they think.”

  Some hours later, when Michael had returned from Clasheen and he and Anthony were exchanging the afternoon’s gossip over a meal ― roast lamb cooked by Michael, and a bottle of red wine ― Patrick O’Callaghan came to the back door of Eagle Lodge. Not one of the tenants liked the Altarnun’s idea, he said to Anthony, who answered his knock. Ah, sure, they were the soul of politeness; it was kind, it was generous, and they were grateful they were in the Altarnun’s thoughts, but for the present they would look to themselves, thank you all the same.

  Ireland in 1845 was clearly not ready for an experiment in socialist co-operatives.

  Four days afterwards the entire potato crop at Eagle Lodge ― except for Anthony’s and Michael’s, which they dug that Saturday evening and put in the cellar ― was a dark, evil-smelling, pulpy mass of putrefaction.

  IMAGINE that same Saturday in Clasheen at ― roughly ― half past eleven at night. It is pitch dark, for the moon has been obscured by thickening cloud. There is a lamp or a candle burning in a bedroom here and there, for not everyone is asleep. Anthony and Michael are two who are very much awake. The only noises are those of animals ― the clop of a horse’s hoof, two cats fighting, the howl of Mrs O’Leary’s dog ― and the wind, which is growing restless.

  Mrs Peacock, disturbed by her husband’s snores, opens one eye but she soon falls asleep again. Eugene Tangney is sleeping the sleep of the just and righteous, but Margaret is awake, praying that the Lord will listen to her and avert all catastrophes to come, particularly starvation. Madge Tangney did not drop off as easily as usual; she, too, was thinking disquieting thoughts on the subject of potatoes, though she is sleeping now. Dan Leahy is doing nice things with her in her dreams.

  Father Quinlan is dreaming of brimstone and rotten potatoes; he will soon sit up in bed with a shout, then light his candle and read Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus for an hour to solace himself. He is a little unusual among Irish priests, for he is not the twinkling curmudgeon of American films or the type who enjoys kicking a football with the lads; he is rather a thirsty idealist, a Victorian Reverend Hale ― that seventeenth-century connoisseur of Massachusetts witchcraft. His background is educated intelligentsia and comfortable living for more than twenty years in England, where he lost his Irish speech rhythms and some of the accent, though not the peculiar brand of Catholicism of his heritage. He would make an intrepid hunter of witches.

  In cabins and hovels there are many people lying awake ― those whose entire means of feeding themselves has vanished in a single day: distraught women, unquiet men tossing fretfully, husbands and wives staring at the future, at hunger and workhouses, at fever and begging. A few couples are making love. Despite the Irish detestation of the body, there are those in Clasheen who at this moment are enjoying ― up to a point ― the pleasures of the flesh. The teeming millions of the country bear witness to that fact.

  In the master bedroom at Eagle Lodge two people of the same sex are making love; Anthony, having penetrated Michael fifteen minutes ago, is very near climax. It is a scenario that has been repeated almost every night these past four years, with Anthony invariably taking the “active” role. Their orgasms come at more or less the same moment, for they have long since perfected their technique. Anthony then stays inside Michael for a while, and whispers “I love you. I don’t think I could go on living without you.” He withdraws, and Michael turns over, so that he is facing his lover, who enfolds him in his arms. “I love you too,” Michael says. They fall asleep like two adjacent question marks, Anthony’s breath moist on Michael’s skin.

  Anthony sleeps first because he has an untroubled conscience; Michael, for a few minutes, thinks of what he has done and what it means. I was expressing my love, he says to himself; how can that be wicked, filthy, deserving of hell-fire? He pushes thoughts of Sodom and Gomorrah out of his mind (he can quote those bits of Genesis by heart) and searches instead for more reassuring texts. His mind picks on a verse from the New Testament ― “The Father himself loveth you, as you have loved me.” God is love. Sometimes he has felt that making love with Anthony has brought him nearer to God than he has ever been. Anthony just looked bewildered when Michael once told him. “The Father himself loveth you, as you have loved me.” He sleeps, profoundly, without dreams.

  Just as there are no registers that spell out the names of the Famine dead, so there are no documents to read on the subject of Irish gay life in the mid-nineteenth century. Anthony’s and Michael’s behaviour was probably very unusual, but homosexuals there surely were, though they would not have known that word or used it to describe themselves. Considering Irish attitudes to the body, the majority of them would have repressed their tendencies, particularly in the rural west; quite possibly they would have married. But, if you recognized you were of that inclination, had to some extent given it room inside yourself, had met another such, and you fell deeply in love: what then?

  You would, most likely, have stayed with him/her for life. Or tried to. Where would you find another? They would certainly have tried to be very discreet, to merge into the indistinct background. But Anthony and Michael were not as discreet as they could have been. Anthony had already caused some eyebrows to be raised by employing just one “servant,” and Mrs Peacock this morning had found that “servant” lolling on the sofa with his feet up on a table, while his boss read a Shakespeare sonnet to him. (One of the sonnets that refers to a male lover, but Mrs Peacock didn’t know that.)

  Such carelessness in the 1980s would have led outsiders to put two and two together and arrive at the correct answer, but in 1845 it would not have done. Mrs Peacock, like many respectable ― and indeed not so respectable ― men and women of that time wouldn’t have imagined in a million years that people of the same sex screwed with each other. Her attitude, if such things had been suggested to her, would have been like Queen Victoria’s when she struck from the infamous Labouchère amendment of 1885 the clause that proposed fines or imprisonment for women who indulged in lesbian activities; or perhaps Judge Brack’s remark when he heard that Hedda Gabler had committed suicide ― “People don’t do that sort of thing.” Or maybe what it is rumoured that King George the Fifth said when he was told an acquaintance of his was homosexual: “Good God, I thought men like that shot themselves!”

  Anthony and Michael had both been, when they found each other, lonely almost to the point of desperation. Anthony had had an easier life coming to terms with himself; after the age of seventeen he had had no worries about why he preferred men, nor any wish to straighten himself out ― he simply wanted to meet homosexual men. He was educated at an English public school, an institution in which it was not difficult to find other males to have sex with ― and his teenage years were over before Dr Arnold’s reforms infused the public schools with the spirit of muscular Christianity. Nor was it a problem in London or the big cities of India. There was always a supply of young men willing to offer their bodies for a few coins; but it was not so easy to meet someone he could love.

  Michael, when he had met Anthony, had had no sexual experience at all. He recognized the nature of his desires, however ― at seventeen he had fallen madly in love with Joseph Lenehan, the doctor’s son, a year older than he was. This boy, like Anthony, was fair-haired and blue-eyed. They rarely spoke; Michael’s feelings made him stammer and go red with blushes. Joseph, as a result, thought him a little stupid. To love this boy was extremely painful: he haunted every hour of Michael’s life, and to say one word about the situation to anyone at all, let alone to his beloved, was obviously out of the question. Should he confess to Father Quinlan? He was on the point of doing so mo
re than once, but he did not. It wasn’t a sin. It became a sin if they touched, if they kissed, but that, clearly, would never happen. There was no need, therefore, to confess. So Michael argued with himself.

  And it was not a sin to walk past Dr Lenehan’s house at night, hoping Joseph would look out of the window; nor a sin to be in a street, accidentally on purpose, where he knew the object of his affections would be strolling by. But loving weighed on him as heavily and as wearily as the sailor on Sinbad’s back, and his prayers before he slept were the same as Christ’s in the Garden of Gethsemane: that this cup might be taken from him.

  It was taken from him. But only because he fell for another boy, Dan, the eldest son of the Leahys, a hefty, tough, good-looking peasant and Clasheen’s hurling champion. It was the same thing all over again ― affections bottled up, not a word said to anyone. Michael was twenty-three when he met Anthony, and by then he had learned to live, sulkily and unwillingly, with this aspect of himself. Though he had never felt the slightest prick of desire for a girl, he was at ease in female company ― he had grown up with two sisters ― and thought that one day he might get married. To be alone all his life was pointless, absurd; he was fond of children, liked the idea of having his own, and marriage might “cure” him ― the pleasures of sex with his wife might push these devils of other men from his thoughts.

  But when he imagined himself making love with a woman he shuddered. Why am I like this, he asked frequently. Am I really “girlish” as my father once said? Is there something about my body that is different from the bodies of other men? I’m less hairy, perhaps. Is that a sign? Is it an affliction of unknown cause, like a cleft palate, a club foot? An indication that God is displeased with me? But I’ve done nothing to displease Him so much that He’d give me this as a penance. Michael felt he was unique. What other men were like him? The last of them were destroyed in Sodom and Gomorrah, or were found only in the pages of books written long ago.