‘People shouldn’t want to suffer,’ I persist. ‘It isn’t normal. Life’s tough enough as it is. Suffering is something to be avoided – shunned. And I don’t care what you say, love is very different to suffering. Love is … is joy and … and happiness and fulfilment and contentment. It’s the very opposite of suffering.’

‘Has that been your experience of love?’ Alys wonders.

I open my mouth to answer and then close it again.

‘Love is 90 per cent heartache. If people knew in advance how painful love was, they’d cheerfully run a mile. Although in my experience you can sometimes run away from something so hard that you eventually only end up running straight back into it again.’ Alys sighs. ‘Either that or you live half a life, crippled by the fear of pain which is almost worse than the pain itself. Because fear is limitless.’

‘So your nun was fearless through all her suffering?’ I mutter. ‘But if she was fearless then she couldn’t truly be suffering. You can’t imply that suffering is the opposite of fear. Suffering and fear are one and the same thing, surely?’

‘But what were Orla’s actual options?’ Alys shrugs, ever the pragmatist. ‘She was destined to suffer because of the serious nature of her disability. So she faced the choice of either just suffering, for nothing, or of offering up her suffering for a purpose, to God and for souls. It made a perfect kind of sense to her.’

I consider the inalienable truth of this statement.

Alys smiles, weakly. ‘Remember how when she tried to pray, her poor dear hands couldn’t quite …?’

My eyes flood with tears again. I remember Orla praying on her calloused little knees, sick and weak, struggling to fit her palms together. But her arms were too short. Just the tips of her middle fingers could touch, but only with considerable effort and not a small amount of discomfort. Yet still she persisted. And the more difficult it was, the more blissful she grew. This was the great paradox. This was the strange mania. This was the deep mystery of Orla Nor Cleary.

I had been employed expressly to stop her from praying, to guard over her, to police her. That had been my allotted role, as ‘nurse’. And I thought I had succeeded, too; basic exercise, teaching her to bake cheese scones (her father’s favourite, although because of her chronic reflux she herself was fed only in liquids by that stage), reading to her (she’d never read The Secret Garden – ‘The secret garden is Mary Lennox’s soul!’ she’d announced, delighted, ‘and the more she tends to it, the more beautiful she grows!’ – or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or Alice in Wonderland), teaching her rummy, talking inanely about my life, my family … until I realized that she was calmly taking the considerable agony of being stopped from praying for souls and offering it up for souls! And so either way – let’s face it – I had failed. I had failed.