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birthday had taken place the week before she arrived at Kilneagh. She told me that it was her father, a farrier in Fermoy, who had arranged for her to go into service. He had received a letter from my mother, who had heard of Josephine’s existence from Mr Derenzy, he having heard of it through Mrs Sweeney of the public house. My mother had gone to Fermoy to interview the family. ‘She’s quick to learn,’ Josephine’s father assured her, and having asked a question or two my mother declared herself satisfied.
    Three weeks later, on the morning of her leaving home, her father talked to her for an hour and then sent her to see their priest, who told her to take care in a Protestant household. ‘If there’s no fish served on a Friday,’ he said, ‘see if they’d supply you with an egg.’ But this predicament never arose because everyone in Kilneagh had fish on Fridays, that being the simplest arrangement: Mrs Flynn and O’Neill and Tim Paddy could not eat Friday meat either.
    Josephine had liked Kilneagh from the start. She hadn’t minded Geraldine and Deirdre giggling at teatime and she considered my father easygoing, even though she wasn’t allowed to rattle the crockery in his presence. He was nice, she thought, sitting there at the breakfast table wondering how he should dress himself for the day. But it was my mother who made her feel at home in a world she did not know and in a house that seemed enormous to her. Its landings and half-landings, front staircase and back one, the kitchen passages, the Chinese carpet in the scarlet drawing-room, the Waterford vases in the hall, endless porcelain figures in the morning-room, the silver pheasants, the rosewood trays: all this was a strangeness that whirled about her, like colours in a kaleidoscope. Soup-spoons were round, dessert-spoons oval, the larger fork must be placed on the left, the smaller accompanied the dessertspoon at the top. Kindling was kept near the range, gravy boats and soup tureens on the first shelf of the cupboard in the wall. Meat must be covered in the larder, milk jugs placed on the cold slate slab.
    Wash both night and morning, Mrs Flynn commanded, rise at six-fifteen. Do not speak in the dining-room unless invited to, carry the vegetable dishes to the left of the person being served. She warned Josephine against Johnny Lacy, who had upset Kilneagh girls before and was older than he looked, besides having a short leg. ‘Yes, Mrs Flynn,’ Josephine endlessly repeated during her first few days of awkwardness and bewilderment. She blacked grates and shone brass, and seemed for ever to be sweeping floors. Her own small attic room, with its white enamel bowl and pitcher, was as strange as anywhere else.
    On Josephine’s first Sunday afternoon Tim Paddy took her down to the mill, allocated this duty by Mrs Flynn, who presumably considered him too much of a youth to be a nuisance in the way Johnny Lacy might have been. The water tumbled in the mill-race, the Virginia creeper on the walls was dotted with specks of springtime growth. Tim Paddy drew attention to the green-faced clock of the central gable, one minute fast, the date on it 1801. Together they peered through the bars of the office windows, and Tim Paddy pointed out Mr Derenzy’s stool and my father’s desk and his swivel chair. They returned to Kilneagh the long way, round by the road, through the tall white gates and up the avenue of beeches. They took a path to the right before they reached the gravel sweep, ending up at the back of the house. ‘On a day off you don’t walk in front of the windows,’ Tim Paddy explained, ‘although I go by them maybe a hundred times on an ordinary day.’ Josephine understood that. It was like my mother showing her the garden on the afternoon she arrived: for a quarter of an hour she had been a visitor at Kilneagh, and she knew she would never feel so again. On that Sunday evening she and Mrs Flynn and O’Neill and Tim Paddy sat down to their