‘Of course I’ll come in,’ Indy had said at half five that morning when the call had come in.
Being a midwife meant mad hours. Indy’s sleep had never really returned to normal once she’d had Minnie and Daisy, so she’d been awake at five, lying in bed beside Steve, thinking about the week ahead. Today, Monday, was the list day – according to Vonnie. Indy, as eldest daughter, could have felt put out that Vonnie had appointed herself organiser-in-chief but Indy had so much to do every week, that she’d delightedly handed it all over to Vonnie.
People always told Indy that she was well-balanced and she loved that: it had been handy in her home growing up when there had always been some drama or other, usually involving Dad or Rory.
Tomorrow was for the hotel, which they hadn’t been able to get into up to now. In February, the last time they’d been into the Sorrento, when Mum and Dad said they were marrying again, Meg, Vonnie and Indy had trooped in to see the place.
‘We’ll sort out the damp,’ said Frank, Dad’s old friend, who’d bought the Sorrento with a view to turning it into an Airbnb. At the time, Indy had thought the Airbnb people would refuse to have it on their books as the previous owners – three since the Robicheaux family had moved out fifteen years before – had done nothing about the damp or the heating issues. Knocking it down was possibly the only way to sort out any of the issues but Frank, bless his innocence, thought he could do it. Tomorrow, the sisters were going home – Indy realised she still thought of it as home – to see how things looked.
‘The ballroom won’t be touched,’ Frank had assured them, which was what Indy was scared of. The ballroom had been a beautiful room with hand-painted wallpaper, exquisite curtains that were falling apart with age and a walnut floor with a few bits missing.
If the builders had had a look at it and hadn’t said it was a hazard, then there was some hope. Otherwise, the wedding was in trouble. Because all those years ago when they’d had to leave, it had been damp and in need of renovation and in February, nothing had changed.
In front of her now, in the stripped-down bed, lay a seventeen-year-old who’d been in the first stage of labour for nearly ten hours. Indy, a midwife with coming up to two decades of experience, had been with Tanya since eight that morning and said a silent prayer that her patient was leaving the first transition and coming to the delivery stage. But Tanya, who seemed like a child herself, was exhausted and Indy knew that it would be tough to get her through what might be another hour at least to deliver her baby. First births could take up to two hours at this point – second babies often slipped out like baby dolphins but first ones took a lot of coaxing.
‘You’re doing great, Tanya,’ Indy said: calm, comforting, the voice of authority. Delivering a baby safely into the world meant reassuring the labouring woman, while inside her mind, the midwife’s inner alarm system was running a constant check to make sure everything was going to plan medically.
Foetal heartbeat, presentation – at least Tanya’s baby was presenting in the head-first position. She was slender and this was a big baby, so that rotating the baby for birth would have been tricky.
‘You are doing amazingly well, Tanya, and you can stay strong,’ Indy said, her midwife’s reassuring voice speaking while her mind ran through what could go wrong.
There was far more back-up in hospital births than there was for the home births Indy specialised in but midwifery was about more than the mechanics of the process: it was about empathy, the ability to see what was holding a patient back, what was making them angry, afraid, who in the room was helping – who in the room was not.
Today, Tanya’s birthing partner, her older sister, Mandy, was not helping. Her fear was enveloping the delivery room. Indy could understand it. Their mother couldn’t come, Mandy explained, automatically closing her eyes at the sentence, when Indy had taken over at eight that morning.
Indy had worked as a midwife for far too long even to blink at this statement. Mandy’s closed eyes had told her that Mama would not have been a help.
‘We’ve got everything we need here,’ Indy had said, smiling and shifting into the gear she used for young girls thrust into adulthood and parenthood too early. Mandy had a two-year-old, she’d said at one point. Mandy had had an emergency caesarean but was woolly on why.
This pinged an alarm bell for both Indy and Seema, a slight obstetrician with slender wrists and the uncanny ability to manoeuvre the most recalcitrant baby from its warm womb. Sisters often had similar issues birth-wise. The estimated foetal size meant that Tanya’s baby was large for its age, and Tanya was a slender young woman.
She was getting anxious and so, according to the foetal heart monitor, was her baby.
Indy knew that an emergency caesarean was getting closer and it would not help Tanya, who would have to recover from major abdominal surgery as well as dealing with the emotional and hormonal flood of becoming a mother at the same time.
But the trick to being a good midwife was being able to project an aura of utter calm while, internally, shrieking: ‘What is going on?’
Indy, a senior midwife for years, could put an amazing game face on, so none of this showed.
‘Can you get Dr Patel,’ she whispered to Clare, the junior midwife working with her.
Clare nodded, smiled and sailed serenely off.
She was only just out the door, when everything changed.
Indy examined Tanya’s cervix again and found that, suddenly, she was fully dilated. The transition period was over. Indy felt herself breathe deeply again. With first babies, you never knew how long it was going to take but this baby had decided it was time to emerge into the world.
‘You’re ready to push,’ she said. ‘Let’s meet your baby, Tanya, pet.’
‘I’m going to call her Cecilia,’ said Tanya forty minutes later, gazing at the tiny head with its tousled dark baby hair.
‘How beautiful,’ said Indy, settling the newly named Cecilia at her mother’s breast. Breastfeeding helped deliver the placenta and that was the final step in the birthing process.
‘I thought you were going to give her bottles?’ Mandy demanded, phone out and taking photos of her sister from the waist up.
Indy kept her smile going. Breastfeeding was a hot-potato topic. She didn’t ever like to pressure anyone, disapproved of women who looked down on those who didn’t breastfeed. Motherhood was hard enough as it was.
‘Even a few weeks of breastfeeding helps,’ she said. ‘But not everyone can do it or wants to, but if you can—’
