Reverend Mother Brigid wrapped her cloak around her as she walked around the perimeter stone wall of the cloister. She was spending Christmas in the Order’s Mother House on the outskirts of Paris. Dusk was falling, the sky turning deep indigo as the tangerine glow of sunset faded and was doused mercilessly by triumphant night. A Holy Night.

Brigid did not like Christmas Eve, never had since . . . Oh well, that was a long time ago, she chided herself, dismissing the memory. She wasn’t alone in disliking this particular eve. She remembered as a young nun, on her first posting out on the Missions in Africa, one of the older Sisters, crying, after imbibing some of the local brew – following midnight Mass – when the villagers had gone home.

‘I wish I was at home, with a man’s arms around me, and a baby to hold. And none of your Virgin birth nonsense. I want it all, the rub of the relic, everything, and now it’s too late. I’m nearly a dried up old crone,’ Sister Pius had exclaimed, distraught, taking another swig of her drink before bursting into tears.

‘Jesus, that’s blasphemy!’ one of the other nuns, Sister Francis, had blurted. Brigid had been so gobsmacked she’d been rendered speechless.

‘Stop it, Pius,’ the Almoner, Mother Veronica, ordered sternly.

‘Well, it’s true. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t wish for it. I’m sick of this place. Sick of pretending to be holy. I didn’t want to be a nun. My father made me become one because I’ve a squinty eye and he said no man would marry me and he couldn’t afford to keep me.’ Pius was howling by this time, snorting and sniffling, and Francis had looked over at Brigid and thrown her eyes up to heaven and said, ‘We’d better get her to bed.’

They had led their truculent, weeping colleague to her spartan room, with much hushing and ‘don’t wake the children’ from Francis.

‘Lord save us,’ the other nun said later when Pius was tucked up in bed weeping inconsolably into her hard pillow. ‘She’s having a fierce hard menopause. I’m at my wits’ end with her.’ Francis was from the west of Ireland too, and still had her Connemara twang. ‘I hate Christmas Eve here, too. It’s too hot, and sad and lonely. Goodnight, Sister Brigid.’

Now, all these years later, when she’d gone through such longings and utter loneliness herself, she was glad she’d crossed the turbulent seas of life and was almost in safe harbour.

But next week she would return to Ireland, and retirement. Her sister nuns at home had suggested a small celebratory tea in the Four Winds, knowing how much she loved the sturdy old house by the sea, and she was touched by their thoughtfulness.