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The woman sits me on her lap through it all and idly strokes my bare feet.

‘You have nice long toes,’ she says. ‘Nice feet.’

Later, she makes me lie down on the bed before I go to sleep and cleans the wax out of my ears with a hair clip.

‘You could have planted a geranium in what was there,’ she says. ‘Does your mammy not clean out your ears?’

‘She hasn’t always time,’ I say, guarded.

‘I suppose the poor woman doesn’t,’ she says. ‘What with all of ye.’

She takes the hairbrush then and I can hear her counting under her breath to a hundred and then she stops and plaits it loosely.

I fall asleep fast that night and when I wake, the old feeling is not there.

Later that morning, when Mrs Kinsella is making the bed, she looks at me, pleased.

‘Your complexion is better already, see?’ she says. ‘All you need is minding.’

4

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with porridge and toast for breakfast. Kinsella puts on his cap and goes back out to the yard. Myself and the woman make a list out loud of jobs that need to be done, and just do them: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot press and hoover out the spider webs and put all the clean clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, pull the weeds out of the flower beds and then, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it’s a matter of supper and the walk across the fields and to the well. Every evening the television is turned on for the nine o’clock news and then, after the forecast, I’m told it is time for bed."

"Sometimes people come into the house at night. I can hear them playing cards and talking.

They curse and accuse each other of reneging and dealing off the bottom, and coins are thrown into what sounds like a tin dish, and sometimes all the coins are emptied out into what sounds like a stash that’s already there. Once somebody came in and played the spoons. Once there was something that sounded just like a donkey, and the woman came up to fetch me, saying I may as well come down, as nobody could get a wink of sleep with the Ass Casey in the house.