The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

Author:Colm Toibin [Toibin, Colm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary, Gay
ISBN: 9780743203319
Google: V9rUaWjCelwC
Amazon: 0743203313
Barnesnoble: 0743203313
Goodreads: 43702
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

***

They made up the beds for Larry and Paul in the small room upstairs while Lily took her leave of them, saying that she had not been able to sleep the previous night, making her mother promise that she would turn on the mobile phone. She said she would be back in the morning. Helen walked out to the car with her.

'I couldn't sleep the first night I came here either,' she said.

'If there is a problem, you will give me a ring, won't you?' her mother said.

'I found it very strange being back here after all this time,' Helen said.

Her mother started the ignition and began to reverse the car in the yard. Helen stood out of her way.

Later, when she returned from Blackwater, where she had phoned Hugh, she found Declan by the Aga in his pyjamas and slippers. Paul and Larry and her grandmother were sitting at the kitchen table looking at a full-page advertisement in the Wexford People for Lily's computer company.

'She's a big noise, your mother,' Paul said.

'Lily was always very independent-minded,' Helen's grandmother said. 'Even when she was a baby, if you picked her up to cuddle her or put her on your knee, she'd want to be let down to crawl around on her own, or walk when she was old enough. You could never tell her what to do. You couldn't even tell her to get up in the morning. She'd be up before you. She was always a great worker and she had great brains, she won a university scholarship. The nuns loved her. I took in bathers first so I could pay for her to go to FCJ in Bunclody, and, you know, she nearly became a nun.'

'I never knew that,' Helen said.

'Oh, the nuns loved her,' her grandmother went on, 'and when she was in her final year and we drove her back up after the Hallowe'en break, they called us in, and they had never looked up or down at us before, oh they were very grand, the nuns, a French order. And Mother Emmanuelle, the grandest of them all, told me that she believed Lily had a vocation. I smiled at her and said that would be the happiest thing for us. It was all smiles until I got out to the car and I said to your grandfather that I was going to pray to God to stop Lily entering the convent.'

'And did you not want her to be a nun?' Paul asked.

'Lily? Our beautiful daughter? Have all her hair cut off? And a veil and a draughty old convent and only doddery old nuns for company? I did not! And I lay awake every night thinking about how to stop her. I knew that we could say nothing to her, that talking to her would make no difference. Your grandfather, who was a very good man and is getting his reward in heaven, said that we should accept God's will, and I said that my not wanting her to be a nun could also be God's will.

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