‘Celia…’ I stood there helplessly. ‘You should talk to Michael, not me.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry. I shall be doing more than talking to him, I can tell you. I shall be giving him a piece of my mind.’
Rosie came downstairs. ‘I’m going out, Mum,’ she said. ‘Oh hello, Granny. I just want to go and see Alice… see how she’s getting on.’
‘Rosie,’ said Celia. ‘You shouldn’t be visiting friends. You should be revising.’
‘I’m not doing them,’ she said. ‘Not this year anyway.’
Celia looked as though she had vomited in her own mouth.
Rosie blundered on. ‘I’m taking a year to reassess…’ she said, speeding up, as Celia’s face was a picture of someone witnessing untold horrors. ‘I’m going to reapply to another college. Do something with English.’
‘Not. Doing. Your. Exams? Not. Going. To. Trinity!’ Celia’s wild eyes swivelled to me. ‘What is going on? Somebody FOR GOD’S SAKE tell me what’s going on!’ She focussed on Red, who was leaning inconspicuously on the edge of the kitchen counter. ‘Can you tell me?’ she charged at him. ‘Do you know anything? Because it seems I am the last to know!’
Red shook his head.
But then she turned to me. ‘And you’re happy, are you, Tabitha?’ she accused. ‘You’re happy about this? I might have known you’d scupper her chances, ruin her future.’
‘Granny, please…’ Rosie was on the verge of tears.
‘Celia, it’s all going to be fine,’ I tried to explain. ‘This year’s been really tough on Rosie and she’s seeing a counsellor to deal with anxiety… there was no way she could do the Leaving Cert.’
‘No way she could do the Leaving Cert?’ Celia repeated, utterly incredulous, looking as though she had swallowed a wasp. She began making weird throat-clearing sounds.
‘Anyway,’ went on Rosie, ‘everything’ll be lovely once the baby’s born.’
‘A baby? You’re not… don’t tell me that… surely you’re not… you can’t be…’ Celia was white with shock.
‘Not me, Granny. Dad and Lucy!’
Celia looked ready to faint. Her hand rattled her cup. ‘Baby?’ Her voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘A baby.’
Time for the medicinal Baileys, I thought but then my phone rang.
‘If it’s Michael, tell him his mother wants a word,’ warned Celia.
‘It’s not, it’s Mary. I have to take this.’
‘Tabitha.’ Mary was crying. ‘Tabitha. I’m in customs in Dublin airport and they won’t let me through. I had my purse stolen in Dubai and I’ve lost my passport and everything. I’m so sorry to bother you, I know you’ve got enough on your plate because Mammy rang me about Lucy. She’s mortified. Are you all right?’
‘Don’t mind me,’ I said.
‘I tried to call Red,’ she went on, ‘but there was no answer.’
‘You were in Dubai?’
‘Stopover. We were only there for three hours and I just wasn’t paying attention. I was so caught up with…’ She began to sob now. ‘You’ve probably got enough to do but if you could get a message to Red, he might be able to come.’
‘He’s here with me actually,’ I said. ‘But what do you need me to do?’
‘Would you mind going to my house. Key’s under the geranium pot on the window beside the door. There’s a copy of my passport in the filing cabinet in my office upstairs. Top door, marked Personal. They said they would accept a copy for now and then at least… at least we can go home. It’s been such a long and exhausting week and we just need to sleep.’
We?
When I put down the phone, I turned to Red, ‘we have to go to the airport,’ I said. ‘Mary’s lost her passport. She said she tried to call you.’
He held up his phone. ‘On silent. Sorry. The poor woman.’
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ I said.
‘I might do but I think it would be better if it came from her. Shall we go?’
‘You’re coming?’
‘Try and stop me. Where you go, I go.’
‘You’ll find out,’ he said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘That’s a relief,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure how to make you come otherwise.’
And after I had poured Celia another Baileys and left her sitting on the sofa, her feet up, ready for a little sleep, he took my hand and we ran out to his car.
‘I had no idea your life was so exciting,’ he said.
‘It hasn’t been for decades,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At the airport, Red dropped me off and went to park the car. Inside the terminal, I explained everything to a security guard.
‘It’s a friend of mine. Mary Hooley. I have a copy of her passport to prove she is an Irish citizen. I don’t know why you didn’t just ask her to speak. She’s from Ballyjamesduff and she has the accent to prove it.’
He jerked his thumb. ‘She’s back here.’
He led me through a secret door, flashing and skimming his pass through a warren of corridors and electronic gates until he pushed open a door. And there was Mary, drinking a cup of tea, with another security guard.
‘Cavalry has arrived,’ said the first guard.
‘We are so sorry to drag you all this way,’ said the second guard. ‘But with things as they are, you know, we’d get in terrible trouble, so we would. We can’t let people through without passports. It’s not like the old days when any Tom, Dick or Paddy would swan through passport control. Now, Mary here and the little lady can finally be away. They’ve had a terrible journey all the way from Beijing so they have. They’re both fit to be tied.’
‘Little lady?’
Mary was looking at me with big eyes, tears pooling. ‘I’ve got her, Tabitha,’ she said. ‘She’s here. My little angel is finally here.’ She unpeeled the top of her coat to show me what was tucked inside. A tiny face, eyes closed, a thatch of black hair on her head. The sweetest little rosebud for a mouth. ‘This is little Huan… my new daughter, adopted from China. I’ve waited so long for her but this time everything is all right… everything is just perfect.’
‘Oh my God…’ I looked at Mary with wonder. A huge smile of awe and amazement spread on my face, matching the one that had appeared on Mary’s. ‘You are a dark horse,’ I said, bending over the tiny figure, nestled against her new mother. ‘Hello Huan,’ I said gently to the little black head. ‘Hello little lady.’
‘It means joy,’ said Mary. ‘Who would have thought that something so small could bring so much joy?’
She pulled her coat down lower so I could see Huan’s tiny hands balled into fists, her bright intelligent eyes looking at me, wondering where on earth she was. She still had on a beautiful jade-coloured Chinese jacket and tiny little embroidered slippers.
‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, overawed by this adorable baby who had travelled so far. ‘Welcome to Ireland, little girl of happiness. You’ve come a long, long way and it’s time to go home.’
*
We helped settle Huan into her new house, their house, making sure the heating was on and warming up Huan’s cot – which Mary had bought before heading off – with a hot water bottle.
Finally, we drew up outside my house. We sat in the car for a moment, talking about Mary and Huan.
‘So you knew everything?’
‘Only some of it,’ he admitted. ‘I knew she was going through this long and arduous process, that she had travelled to China before and that it hadn’t worked out. Frankly, I don’t know how she kept it together, there were so many disappointments, near-misses… and then this happened. She got the call that there was a baby who needed a home and… well, she just had to leave. I think she talked to me because I was an outsider. No judgement…’
‘I wouldn’t have judged,’ I said, quickly, defensively.
‘We became friends,’ he said. ‘I think it was our shared love of Johnny Logan. And then going to see improving films together. She told me what exactly she’d gone through to get to this point.’
‘A baby…’ I said. ‘There’s nothing like a baby.’ For a moment, I watched Red and wondered what he was thinking. He was looking though the windscreen at the road ahead.