The monastery had been converted into luxury holiday flats. A placard said that up until 1983 one of the wings had been a boarding school for boys. The monks taught in the school and tended their vegetable garden and fished. With time, the number of priests dropped, the school shut down and hundreds of years of dedicated worship came to an end. Salma walked past a cemetery where the priests were buried. She tried to imagine their daily life: worship, work, fasting, fishing. It was a way of living that her own religion condemned. Instead men should love women, have children, beat the dusty track of work, profit and loss. It was an indulgence to give all that up, ungrateful to disdain the messiness and hide in this beautiful spot. They called it austerity and sacrifice, but she wasn’t fooled.

Gothic architecture, long stained-glass windows, even a gargoyle. She stepped into the cloister. Tranquil deep purple and a sudden coolness so that she shivered in her sweat-soaked clothes. She had read about the converted monastery online and expected to find a café where she could get a bottle of water and maybe a coffee. The stone walls made the atmosphere solemn, arches after arches. But there were people around. A man and his daughter played ping-pong on a table placed under the columns. Salma wandered around and read the signs. The chapel pool. The church atrium ideal for weddings and concerts. What she knew about Christianity she had learnt from the Qur’an. Sometimes David explained things, or Norma, his mother, would answer one of her questions. Norma usually went to church on Christmas Eve but not every Sunday. When David converted to Islam, she neither opposed nor joined him, but it seemed to have dented her confidence in some way. That was how she came across to Salma, at any rate, as if she was not confident in her religious beliefs. Her answers to Salma’s questions were often tentative. Words like ‘scriptorium’ and ‘sacristy’ meant nothing to Salma. She walked through the arches until she reached a grand staircase. Upstairs presumably would be the flats.