The woman climbs the hill, a favourable wind behind her. Favourable only in that it’s going in the same direction, otherwise bitter, with a rough lick of salt, coming in, as it does, off the wide cold grey sea. The woman and the wind make their way along a snake of a promenade, with an incline at the tail. The beachside proceedings have dwindled now. The deckchairs for hire and saucy postcard stands, the donkey rides and Gipsy Roselee Fortune-Teller to Quality, have gone, now that the summer season is over. Along the front, signs have been taken in and hatches boarded shut. Some vendors struggle on, supplying stewed tea and buckets and spades to brave day-trippers out from London for a lungful of bracing October air. At the end of the promenade grand villas hold forth above a grassy bank. The woman takes the steep path and crosses the bank towards them. The villas set their faces to the weather as best they can, some more senile than others, with pitted stone facades, blank windows, dank gardens and roof tiles like bockety old teeth.

The woman is hatless. Nora Breen is hatless. The hat Nora has been given, a yellow beret affair, is tucked into the suitcase that she has also been given. The hat is not fetching; it gives her an air of a rakish middle-aged schoolgirl. Not that Nora is vain, but she would rather be without the hat, for she’s relishing the feel of the wind in her hair, harsh as it is. It chafes her ears and stings her eyes, but she can hear the song in it and tears are not always terrible. Nora has missed the sea all these landlocked years. She is also starting to relish the lightness of her head and the novelty of all-round vision, without the wimple and veil. She reminds herself of the remarkable human ability to adapt. Transplant a person into different soil and although their roots may recoil in shock, gradually they’ll stretch out again. She expects this is due to evolution and feels herself very forward-thinking for the notion. But then, as Nora knows, adapting is one thing; flourishing is another matter entirely.

On the first day of leaving the sisters, Nora felt that she might just float away, with her unrestricted vision and her light and airy head. She had thought of Saint Joseph of Cupertino levitating in ecstasy around his friary, which was no mean feat for a portly Franciscan. Swooping about the flower beds. Gliding past the bell tower. His brothers below looking up at him with envy and awe. On this second day after leaving the order, Nora has developed a trick. She looks down at the shoes on her feet and tells them to hang on to her as best they can. Heavy and square and of an ugly auld style, the shoes are a grand bit of ballast. They are not her shoes; neither are the clothes on her back. She entered High Dallow Carmelite monastery thirty years ago, so her own few bits would be long gone. These are the worldly belongings of another woman, discarded in favour of the habit and the veil. Nora can’t, for the life of her, imagine which sister in her former order owned the coat she is currently wearing. Puce is a colour you could certainly part company with.

Another second-day trick Nora has developed is keeping custody of her eyes. This way she can take in a snippet of this and that, small details, so as not to get drunk on the world. Little everyday things others might not notice: a club-footed pigeon, a cracked chimney pot, light through a cloud, a child sitting on a doorstep holding a cat too tightly and the look on that cat’s face. Nora tells herself that the world may seem confusing but it is just the sum of its parts. Take it piece by piece until you can work out the whole.

She keeps custody of her eyes all the way up the hill. Not least because of the alarming nature of the puce horror she is wearing. The flap of the coat’s hem or the swing of her arm is enough to draw her eye. For three decades Nora has experienced a muted palette. The colours she has lived with are calming to the eye and to the mind: pastel roses in the kitchen gardens, corridors of dark wood and whitewash, brown and black serge and snowy cotton. Apart from dawn and dusk the richest colours were the subtle golden thread of the altar cloth and the gentle gleam of a polished chalice. Adapt, that’s what she’ll do, to this riot of painted signs, lipstick and puce coats.

Below, the seaside town falls away. Above, a milkman pushes a handcart downhill, late on his rounds, whistling. He gives her a lazy wink and nod. Nora winks back. A rupture in his whistle, he quickly looks away. Nora smiles to herself and is a girl again, alarming the fellas. It had always amused her.

Nora reaches the house at the tip of the tail of the promenade. Just above the house there is a small squat church with a cosy vicarage and overgrown graveyard. It looks to be peeking over its grander neighbour’s shoulder. Further on still there is scrubland and a jumble of allotments, started during the war no doubt, doing reasonably well despite their proximity to the sea. A narrow path leads on to the uninhabited headlands and dwindles long before it reaches the cliffs.

Nora heads towards the last house. It is quite the ageing beauty. Four storeys, generous bay windows, a sprinkling of porthole windows, a tower of sorts. There is an undulating quality about the roof tiles that suggest either subsidence or fanciful notions. There are two gates and a half-moon drive that would amply allow for the turning of a carriage. Gloomy huddles of yew trees lend a funereal aspect. It would have been a grand place in its day. Now it survives as a boarding house. Nora notices with surprise the herd of rabbits grazing on a scrappy lawn; they are too tame to be wild and too muscular to be domesticated. They have winter-ready fur and a sharp look in their eyes. A few are lop-eared, some are downright fancy.

Nora climbs mossy stone steps and rings the bell, next to which is placed a discreet sign:

A stout, wide woman opens the door. The rabbits immediately scatter. Nora sees that the woman is sturdy with the chapped and waterlogged hands of a lifelong charlady. There’s sweat on her brow and the pepper-salt hair that escapes from her headscarf is wet too. Her apron is none too clean and on her feet are clogs of the kind worn by slatterns back in the day. A doughy red face is garnished with curranty eyes. The narrowing of these eyes serves as a greeting.

Nora Breen states her name, only it feels strange in her mouth. It’s a name she hasn’t used for thirty years, the name she gladly dropped to become Sister Agnes of Christ. When she last used this name, her hair was bright auburn and her skin smooth. The coat on her back was her own and the shoes on her feet weren’t lined with newspaper.

Nora is shown into the parlour, where she waits. Divested of the puce coat, she feels calmer, more at ease. The second-hand dress she wears is high-necked, a nice charcoal colour, although loose on the bust, for she hasn’t one. Nora in middle age is boyish in shape, of a type considered sporty. She entered the order before curves and left without them. In the interim years, who knows? As Sister Agnes her body was negligible, swathed in serge. Her body rose at dawn and daily observed the Hours. It knelt or mopped with equal devotion. It conveyed her to chapel or about her work in the infirmary. It was washed in cold water, fed on bland foods, kept largely in silence and laid down on a narrow bed nightly. Consequently, Nora is of robust health, suffering from none of the vices her contemporaries at large in the world have enjoyed. Slim-limbed, smooth-skinned, tallish, with the long quiet hands of a saint. A glance in the mirror above the mantel there would tell her what she already knows. She has a face that looks severe unless it’s smiling, with a strong jaw, wide mouth, straight nose, clear grey eyes. There’s a gap in her front teeth that was adorable in youth and will be endearing in old age. Her brown hair, salted with white strands around the temple, was cropped for the veil. Now it is growing back, pelt-like, a short fringe framing her face, like a middle-aged Joan of Arc.

Nora sits straight-backed on an easy chair. She is not given to lolling. Neither is she given to fidgeting. She rests her hands on her lap, divested of tunic, scapular and the rest now that she is no longer a bride of Christ. She wonders what relation she is to Him at all. A woman unattached, unbound, out in the world. She looks down at her shoes and bids them: hang on to me. A rising panic sets her doubting her decisions of the past few months. That insidious thought needles her again: what kind of fool throws up thirty years of dedication to solve a puzzle, albeit a troubling one?

Nora tries to smooth this snagging thought. Leaving the order was both simple and complicated, impulsive and the product of decades of deliberation. At some point she might well unravel this knotty decision, but right now she’ll roll it to a dusty corner of her mind and concentrate on the job at hand.

She steadies herself...