The woman showed me into a narrow passageway and directed me to a row of plastic chairs placed against the left-hand wall. Then, without a word, she disappeared through a second larger door, and locked it behind her. The passageway looked like a recent addition. A weather protector? Or a security measure? More likely the latter, I reckoned. Their centuries-old raison d’être meant that the nuns couldn’t close their doors to callers – but they could be sensible. These were tough streets, had been since the Act of Union had abolished the Irish parliament and led the moneyed classes to London. Their great houses had become slum tenements, entering a cycle of dereliction, demolition and replacement with council flats, the poverty of the local residents the only constant. Convents in areas like this had been socially radical, educating the children of the poor. But these were less respectful times and it looked like the nuns had had to beef up their security as a result.

I checked my watch. I had been waiting more than forty-five minutes, which might mean that I’d been forgotten. Then I heard the Angelus bell toll. Presumably the nuns had prayers around now. If that was the case, I’d be waiting another while. Any other time, I’d be scrolling through Facebook and Twitter to pass the time. But I’d vowed to keep off the internet for a few days, hoping that the Gill furore would have died down by the time I returned. I did a breathing exercise and rehearsed my story in my head.

The smell here was the same as it had been in St Angela’s convent, a mixture of furniture polish, cooking and mothballs. Comforting, in an odd way. By the time I got to secondary school, I had been adopted and my name had been changed to Fitzpatrick. It had been Whelan for most of primary school, until my birth mother had died. That had been a scary time, but Mam and Dad had said that they would fight to keep me if they had to. As it turned out, they didn’t have to fight very hard. All of my birth mother’s relatives, country people, had said no-thank-you-very-much to the social worker’s suggestion that one of them might want to take me in. After a couple of months, or years, it had seemed like a long time, but it might not have been, everything was settled.