‘I really feel it might. Last week I thought we were stuck in winter for ever. You can smell the river.’

He sniffed.

‘I can’t.’

‘You must have a rotten nose.’

‘My nose is OK.’

‘Not if you can’t smell spring coming.’

He sniffed again.

‘Dust and smoke. That’s all.’

‘And you say you’re a poet.’

‘I have to be home by eight,’ he said, as they reached her door.

‘That’s all right. I’ll walk round with you.’

‘You needn’t bother.’

‘It’s no bother. I’d like to and I’m sure your mother would want me to.’

She bent down and lit the fire.

‘There now. The room’ll warm up in a few minutes. I thought we’d have fried chicken and chips. Is that all right?’

‘Great.’

‘Well, sit down and talk to me while I get on with it.’

‘How are the exams going?’

‘That we won’t talk about. I have mountains of papers to correct. I hate it. I hate it. I’ll be delighted to give the whole thing up. Shoving useless bits of information into the young and innocent.’

She took a knife out of a drawer and began to cut up an onion. The smell reached over to Joe and made his nose twitch. Nothing wrong with that nose. ‘Are you going to give it up?’

‘Yes. Here anyway. At the end of this year.’

‘What’ll you do then?’

‘Oh hoohooh oooh.’ Tears were pouring down her cheeks. ‘They always make me cry.’ She pushed at the onions with her thumb. ‘I hope you like them, otherwise I’m torturing myself for nothing.’

‘Fried?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right on. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to England.’

‘Why ever?’

She dumped the onion rings in the pan and turned on the tap. She held her hands under the running water, watching the water hit them and splay off into the basin. After a few moments she smelled them carefully and then dried them on the dish cloth.

‘You have to have an open mind,’ she said. ‘I’m not a very rooted person. I could live anywhere. At least I think I could. You’ve got to get along with people. That’s important. That’s all part of having an open mind. I love Ireland … a sort of earth love … rather than anything else. I don’t feel committed to teach Ireland’s snotty-nosed young. English snotty-nosed young will do me just as well. Or Chinese, if it comes to that.’

She stirred the onions vigorously with a wooden spoon. He thought about what she had said.

‘I might travel about a bit,’ he said, eventually.

‘You might.’

‘I don’t know though. I can’t see how I’d ever get out of here.’

‘You have to want to, then it’s easy. I’m getting married, so it’s very easy.’

‘Oh.’