MOONEY'S opposite the Rotunda has an immense bar, stretching along two sides of a huge room. Insufficient sad barmen work behind it, resigned to being incapable of dealing with their allotted footage. Sadder waiters chassé between railed tables trying to make a poor living by serving drinks which customers would rather fetch themselves.
Miceal and his father-in-law were sitting on a long green leather settle just inside the door.
"Glass of stout ?" said Miceal, rising. "This is Paddy."
"Hullo, boy," said the old man. We shook hands; firmly. I knew him to be seventy-four. His eyes were unbloomed sloes. His farmer's face was neither tanned nor weatherbeaten, but candle white where there were no small veins close to the surface of the skin; he had little hair on the top of his head, but his sidewiskers reached below his lobes. His old serge suit was shiny and slightly aeruginous, and he wore a light blue shirt splayed lopsidedly open at the neck.
At three o'clock he was flying with his son-in-law to London, to visit his daughter Maire. This was the second time he had been in Dublin, and the third outside County Waterford.
"His name really is Paddy," said Miceal quietly and unnecessarily as he passed me, "and he's more than a bit deaf."
I sat down on the hard polished leather. After a moment Paddy looked across at me, and I at him; then we both looked away again. I could sense again that hostility to the English that I had felt before in Dublin. A long pause. Our eyes met again. I smiled, a gesture towards conversation. Miceal came back and set down a glass of heady stout in front of me.
"Well, what d'you make of Dublin ?" he asked me.
Miceal left Ireland fifteen years ago to live and work in England, and has become thoroughly anglicised with few traces of even his accent left. On his last visit to the small town just outside Dublin where he was born, the local tradesmen did not recognise him and took him for an English tourist; he had worked for the butcher, too.
I told him of the peaceful, stimulating summer I had spent in Dublin. Paddy sat looking at me with his eyes just perceptibly narrowed. I could see that my delight in the city was interesting him, and lessening his outspoken aggression. I remembered being told by Maire of his own first visit to the capital not long before, and of how he had stood in O'Connell Street looking up at the propylaeum of the GPO.as though it were a shrine.
This led me to speak of what I had read or been told of the Trouble; and to explain my disgust and horror at what the English had done in Ireland, and, seemingly unable to learn from their catastrophic stubbornness, had repeated elsewhere. I was just mentioning a recent book about the Black and Tans when Paddy interrupted me.
"The Tans would come into a place like this, boy," he said, indicating Mooney's magnificent expanse of bar with a short upward and outward thrust of his right forearm, "and just take anything they wanted, and anyone who tried to stop them would get a rifle-butt across his jaw, and sometimes a bullet in him."
I sat back to listen again, as I thought, to the Irishman's stories of the atrocities committed by the Tans: of the innocents shot down in the courtyard of Our Lady of the Assumption in Rathmines, for instance, or of the rape of children; but this old man's war had not been fought in the city but down in the south where life was far less urbanised; and it had been interrupted because he had had to look after a mother slowly dying, which meant that he had observed the murderous activities of the English with some degree of enforced detachedness in his non-participation.
Then, very suddenly, Paddy's mind left the past. His slow eyes moved across the room, and settled on a group of three women and a man. Miceal saw him looking at them and said with a grin:
"All you can do is look, Paddy."
"I'd show you something, boy," he replied.
Miceal had told me of how the old man had wanted to go dancing the last time they were drinking together in Waterford, and of how he still had a great eye for the women.
The airport coach left at three, and it was now nearly two; Miceal left me with his father-in-law while he went to do some final shopping.
I went and fetched two more glasses of stout. Paddy and I looked at one another as we set them down after drinkíng; most of the hostility seemed gone now.
"Fine fellow my daughter married," he said, "He can drink, too. It's very difficult not to have another jar with him when he asks you even if you've had enough."
"Yes," I agreed, generally, with everything he had said.
"Which of those women would you have ?" Paddy said, after a pause, his eyes on the farther table again.
They were all about fifty. I avoided giving a direct answer.
"Tell me," I said, hesitantly, seeking to avoid an obscenity of diction that might possibly ofl'end him, "Do you . . . can . . . are you still . . . active with women ?"
I have been curious ever since reading of the ninety-year-old negro in Kinsey.
"Why not, boy ?" He stared at me, amused; and, relieved, for both reasons, I grinned back at him. His eyes returned to the women, who were towards drunkenness, giggling and talking loudly.
"Did you know my son ?" he said, suddenly and ünexpectedly. It took me several moments to recollect, to work out the new relationship: Maire's brother . . . yes, that would be his son. He had been drowned whilst swimming in the Thames at Richmond four years before. He had been living with Maire and Miceal at the time. I had been with him two days before he died.
"Yes, I knew John," I said.
Paddy looked at me for a long time in silence, all signs of unfriendliness completely gone now, and then seemed to expel his recalled grief from his mind.
"D'you know my daughters as well ?"
"I've not met Bridie," I said, "But I met Peg when she was over in London with Maire."
He looked keenly at me when I mentioned Peg, to see whether perhaps I was a disappointed suitor of his youngest daughter. I tried to make my eyes return a negative impression without revealing my coolness about Peg's largeboned Celtic angularity and red hair.
"Have you any other sons ?" I asked.
Paddy's face set, and then he drank from his glass.
"Yes, but . . . unofficially, you know what I mean ? I started early . . . this was before I was married . . . I don't talk about him," he said, looking straight past my eyes.
I felt honoured by his confidence, and pleased that he had surviving male issue.
"You go after the women," he went on, as if in explanation, "but then in a few months you get a little surprise."
I half smiled at his euphemism, and inwardly remarked again upon the revolution in moral retribution that contraception has brought about.
"But God punished me more than that," he said.
He had caught his wife, who was fifteen years younger, with another man.
"I nearly killed him," he said, "but it pleased God I should not. But to catch your man in the act . . . I nearly killed him. . . ."
He was silent. His thoughts led him to a simple acceptance of the inscrutability of God and the future, and he made a statement, perhaps for his own self assurance, of his resignation towards the unknown dangers of his flight to London that afternoon.
"None of knows what's coming, boy," he said. The platitude assumed a profundity on his lips.
He stood up.
"I'm going to lose some water, boy," he announced, and walked off slowly towards the lavatory which the thoughtful Mr. Mooney had provided of dimensions commensurate with those of his bar. On his way, Paddy made careful scrutiny of the three women, to the resentment of their companion.
He was a long time gone; Miceal was back before him, burdened with dutiable objects.
"He gets talking to people in there," said Miceal when I told him where Paddy was.
When the old man did come out he was in conversation with a tall man with the heavy complexion of a stout drinker, and it was some minutes before he came back to our table.
"Come on, Paddy," said Miceal, "We should be moving."
"All right, boy," said the old man. He picked up his old suitc,ase, which was strapped with sashcord.
We went into another bar situated strategically close to the Air Terminal, and ordered stout once more.
Returning from a lavatory where the machine fed a roller towel dirty all the way through, I found Miceal supervising the winnowing of Irish coins from Paddy's loose change : the fact that the English would not accept his coinage whilst their own circulated freely in Ireland seemed to the old man most inequitable, and he protested about this to me as though I was solely responsible. He was still muttering about it as we crossed the road to the Air Terminal.
The coach was almost ready to leave, but Paddy must needs lose yet more water: when they started calling for the last two passengers over the loudspeakers, Miceal swore and plunged down after him. He reappeared shortly with his father-in-law still doing up his flies.
"Yapping away down there he was," said Miceal, and we hurried out. "What's the rush, boy ?" said Paddy, as he was climbing into the coach, "What's the rush ?"

***

I heard about Paddy's visit from Miceal and Maire when I returned some months later.
He seemed to have been content in their neat suburban house, and, whilst missing his stout, had rather taken to Scotch ale; English licensing laws he sensibly resented, and the first night he had been in a pub he had almost forcibly to be removed at closing time.
The old man being a farmer, Miceal and Maire had hoped that he would pay their garden some skilled attention; but this Paddy had refused to do, not because he did not wish to work, but because he would not touch English soil with his hands.
He had been taken on a tour of the west end. They walked down Whitehall towards the Houses of Parliament; but the sight of the neo-gothic outline seemed to stand for something so repellent to Paddy that he quickly suggested they go back to the ponds in Trafalgar Square.
They finished the evening in Snow's in Piccadilly, where Paddy's incontinence again manifested itself.
"D'you know where to go, Paddy ?" asked Miceal.
"I can read, boy," the old man had replied, and walked straight into the ladies'.
That night he had lost Maire and Miceal at Waterloo, and caught a non-stop train to Southampton; but had returned, unabashed, in the early hours of the next morning, having paid no extra fare since he had persuaded the railway authorities that it was their mistake in sending the train to Southampton when it stated quite clearly on his ticket that he intended to travel to Kingston.
On another evening in London he seemed equally disturbed by a coloured speaker and a woman heckler at Speaker's Corner: both of them seemed to him to belong to a class of persons from whom he hardly expected such behaviour.
Two days before the old man was due to go back, the three of them went to Chessington Zoo; a humorous tiger relieved his incarcerated feelings over Paddy and Miceal.
"What'd he want to do that for, boy ?" Paddy said, "Just like a hose, just like a hose!"
The old man died five months after returning to Waterford from his visit to England. Feeling that his death had released me from the keeping of his confidence, I mentioned his unofficial son to Miceal one day, and was surprised to find he knew.
"Did he tell you as well about nearly killing a man he caught with his wife ?" said Miceal, "He used to tell everyone that. Everyone."