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‘Can you ask the ward to patch us through to her? I could take some details over the phone while we’re driving.’ Ellen focussed her mind, trying to think ahead. A breech delivery could get complicated.
Sean did as she suggested, switching the phone to speaker, and within minutes a frightened voice came over the line.
‘Dr Jamieson. Thank goodness! The nurses on the ward said you were coming to help me. Are you near? When will you get to me?’
‘Marie, everything is going to be fine,’ Sean said calmly. ‘I hope to be with you in about ten minutes. I have a midwife in the car with me and she’s going to talk to you as we drive. You don’t know her but she’s very experienced. Her name is Ellen.’
‘Hello, Marie.’ Ellen took over the call. It was good that Sean had a speaker phone. This way she wouldn’t have to keep breaking off to update him and he could concentrate on navigating the icy roads. If anything, the snow had started to fall harder since they had left the house and visibility was down to a few metres. Ellen knew that they couldn’t rely on the RAF helicopter being able to put down any time soon. ‘Ellen here. I’m the midwife Sean was telling you about. Can you tell me how far apart your contractions are?’
‘No! I don’t know how to do that. All I know is that it hurts!’
‘Okay. Just listen to my voice. I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do. Every time there is a big pain and it goes away look at your watch and count the minutes until the pain comes back. Can you do that?’
‘I’ll try.’ Marie’s voice rose as another contraction hit her. Ellen looked at her watch. ‘Tell me when it eases off, Marie, and I’ll count with you.’
Having something to concentrate on seemed to help Marie’s panic. It seemed that the contractions were four minutes apart. Not so good.
‘I’m just turning in at the end of the road to your croft, Marie,’ Sean said. ‘Hopefully I can make it down the track. If not, we’ll walk. One way or another we’ll be with you in a few minutes. You just keep counting those contractions for us.’
Sure enough, as soon as they pulled up at the gate of Marie’s croft it was obvious that there was no way even Sean’s four-by-four would make it down the snow-covered track.
Ellen thought of the high heels she was wearing. Not so great for trudging through waist-high snow.
Sean seemed to read her mind. ‘I have spare boots in the back. They may be a few sizes too big but if we have to walk they’ll keep your feet warm and dry.’
A few sizes too big was optimistic. Sean was tall.
‘Do we have anything with us?’ Ellen asked. ‘I’m assuming we might have to deliver the baby here.’ She chewed on her lip. ‘It’s some time since I had to do a home delivery.’
Sean’s answering smile was tight. ‘Me too. And the answer is no. I have some surgical gloves and a very basic medical kit with some morphine in the boot that I keep in case I’m called out to a rescue, but that’s it, I’m afraid. We’re just going to have to do the best we can.’
It took them five minutes to walk down the drive, every minute taking Ellen closer to the delivery.
They let themselves in the door, calling out as they shrugged off their jackets. After the freezing conditions outside the house was pleasantly warm.
‘I’m up here.’ Marie’s voice came from a room at the top of the stairs. Sean headed upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, but Ellen had noticed a frail old lady in the kitchen. Judging by the look of fear on her face, Marie’s mother had no idea who they were or what they were doing there.
‘Are you Marie’s mum?’ Ellen asked.
‘Yes. But Marie’s at school. What are you doing in my house?’ Her voice gathered strength. ‘You must leave, or I will call the police.’
No wonder Marie was reluctant to leave her mother. The old lady was clearly very confused.
‘Why don’t you take a seat in the living room?’ Ellen suggested calmly. ‘My name’s Ellen and I’m a nurse. The man who went upstairs is Dr Sean Jamieson. Your daughter is going to have a baby and we’re here to help her. I need to go and see how she is but if you could stay down here and listen for the phone, that would be a big help.’
The old lady’s face cleared for a moment. ‘Yes. Of course, silly me. Marie is having a baby. My memory isn’t what it used to be, dear. Sometimes I get a bit mixed up.’
Ellen led her into the sitting room and switched the television on. Judging by the number of cushions on the chair in front of the set, and the side table laden with reading glasses and bottles of pills, this was a favourite place for the old lady. With a bit of luck the cookery programme would keep Marie’s mother distracted long enough for them to deliver the baby.
Upstairs Sean was examining Marie.
‘Nine centimetres dilated,’ he said. ‘Even if the RAF manages to land soon, and I very much doubt that they’ll even be able to take off in this weather, this baby isn’t going to wait.’ He smiled reassuringly at Marie. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. I’ve delivered lots of breech births in my time and they’re all doing well.’
Ellen introduced herself.
‘Okay, Marie,’ Ellen said. ‘As Dr Jamieson said, everything is going to be just fine. I’ve left your mother watching television. Dr Jamieson will stay with you while I wash up. Where can I find some clean towels?’
‘In the cupboard next to the bathroom,’ Marie said, her words tailing off in a cry of pain.
‘And scissors? Do you have a pair of kitchen scissors? We’ll need them to cut the cord.’
‘In the kitchen. The drawer next to the sink.’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. You just hang on in there. Try and relax between contractions. I know it’s hard but it will help you conserve energy for when you start pushing.’
Ellen ran down the stairs and back to the kitchen, glancing into the sitting room on her way to check on Marie’s mother. Happily she seemed to have dozed off in front of the television. Ellen put the kettle on to boil, found the kitchen scissors and scrubbed her hands. Then she placed the pan on the stove to boil the scissors. After that she ran back upstairs, found some towels and went back into the bedroom. To her dismay even the small bit of effort involved had made her breathless. It was an untimely reminder of her own medical condition. One that she didn’t need right now.
Sean looked up and noticed that she was puffing as if she’d run a half marathon. ‘You need to get to the gym more often.’ He grinned. ‘That’s what happens to city girls, Marie.’
Over the top of Marie’s head, he winked at her. Ellen knew he was trying to keep the mood light, but for a moment she felt like socking him.
‘Contractions now coming two minutes apart,’ Sean continued.
At this rate they had only minutes before it was time for Marie to push. They exchanged a glance and Ellen found herself relaxing. Everything was going to be okay.
After she’d placed several towels underneath Marie she ran back downstairs to fetch the pan with the scissors. She’d leave them cooling in the water. That way she wouldn’t have to touch them until she was ready.
Ellen placed her hands on Marie’s abdomen. The contractions were regular and strong. The difficulty would be when she started to push the baby out. Sometimes with a breech delivery, the baby’s head got stuck. That was the critical time. With the rest of the body and the cord outside the birth canal the baby would try to breathe but be starved of oxygen. They had to stop that from happening.
Suddenly Marie cried out. ‘It’s coming. Oh, God, I have to push.’ She drew her legs up instinctively and Ellen could just see the first signs of the baby appearing and a greenish discharge as well. Meconium. Ellen looked at Sean and raised one eyebrow in silent query about whether they should be worried.
‘Meconium is normal with breech babies.’ Sean answered the unspoken question. ‘Your baby is going to be here soon, Marie.’
It was good that Marie didn’t know that Ellen’s heart was still pounding almost as fast as her patient’s. If Sean was worried at all, and he must be, he was keeping it well hidden.
‘It’s coming again,’ Marie gasped.
‘Draw up your knees, take a big breath and push hard into your bottom. Your baby is almost here now,’ Ellen encouraged.
Suddenly, the baby’s bottom slid into view, followed by the torso and thighs. Sean grasped the baby’s trunk and turned the shoulders uppermost.
‘Another push, Marie. You’re doing fantastically well,’ Ellen said.
Sean used his fingers to ease the baby’s arms across the tiny chest, before guiding the shoulders through the birth canal.
So far so good. The baby’s chest moved as it took a gasp. And again. They needed to get the rest of the baby out—and quickly.
‘What’s happening?’ Marie asked, panic in her voice.
‘We need to wait for the next contraction then you must give the biggest push of all, Marie,’ Ellen said, trying to sound as calm as possible. It seemed like minutes had passed. Where had the contractions gone?
‘I’ll support Marie’s legs, Ellen, while you deliver the baby,’ Sean said. ‘Just lift up baby’s feet and support the chin and cheeks with your right hand and the baby will come.’
Ellen knew that Sean wasn’t talking to her so much as to the mother. Ellen had attended breech births in her time, but that had always been with a full paediatric team in attendance.
Sure enough, with the next contraction the baby’s face and forehead eased out and Ellen was suddenly holding the limp baby boy by the feet. Her heart hammered against her ribs. They needed to get the baby breathing. Ellen placed the tiny infant on the clean towels she had laid on the bed.
‘Why isn’t my baby crying? Why is he so quiet? Is he all right?’ Marie was scrambling onto her elbows, desperate to see her child.
‘They are often a little stunned when they come out bottom first,’ Sean explained. He wiped baby’s face and body vigorously with the towel then held two fingers against his tiny chest.
‘Heart rate’s good.’ Although he smiled, Ellen could see the tension in his eyes. ‘Come on, baby, time to breathe,’ he murmured under his breath.
If only they had some oxygen to give the baby. Or a neonatal face mask.
Just as Ellen began to fear the worst, the baby gave a huge gasp followed by a soft whimpering sound. Thank God! Ellen looked up at Sean, and he gave her a slow smile.
‘Congratulations, Marie. You have a baby boy,’ Ellen announced.
Later, after mother and baby were settled, Ellen and Sean stepped to the side to give them some time alone. Now that the adrenaline was seeping away, Ellen felt shaky.
Sean smiled at her. ‘Well done. We make a good team.’
And they had.
‘I’d hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t been able to get here,’ she said. ‘It could have had a very different outcome.’
‘I guess that’s why we do what we do. There’s no feeling quite like delivering a healthy baby when the odds are stacked against it.’
They looked across to Marie, who was murmuring to her baby as he suckled. Under the satisfaction and pleasure Ellen felt at the sight was a deep sadness. Now that the emergency was over she allowed herself to look properly at the baby they had just delivered. He had the cutest bow lips and snub nose and a smattering of fine blond hair on his head. Tiny fingers reached out to his mother as he fed, and, as his tiny legs kicked with pleasure, Ellen’s heart cracked a little.
She would never know what it was like to hold her baby in her arms. She would never feel her child’s skin against hers, never know what it was like to love and be loved unconditionally. Never know the joy and the pain, and she knew there was always pain when it came to loving, of bringing up a child. She forced the thought away. There was nothing to be gained in thinking like that.
At least she’d been able to cope with seeing a baby born without breaking down. Up until this moment she hadn’t been sure that she could. Now she knew that eventually she would be able to go back to being a midwife and the knowledge was a huge relief. Being able to help other women achieve what she never could, would give her life purpose again. If her time on this earth was limited, at least she was making a difference to someone else’s life. It was the first step towards a future.
‘I’m going to call him Sean,’ Marie said, looking up from her feeding baby. ‘If he’d been a girl I would have called her Ellen.’
‘Great choice of name,’ Sean said with a grin.
‘Ideally we should take you to the hospital,’ Ellen told Marie. ‘But that would mean taking baby Sean into the cold as well as taking your mother with us. I’m guessing that she wouldn’t cope with being left on her own? So, if you like, you could remain here and I’ll stay with you.’
Marie’s eyes lit up. ‘Could we? My sister was going to come to be with Mum but of course, with the baby being a bit early she’s not here. I did phone her as soon as I knew I was in labour and she said she’d set off as soon as she could. She lives in Glasgow so I don’t know how long it will take her, or even if the roads are passable. Would you really stay with me? Don’t you have somewhere else to be?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘Right now there is nowhere I need or want to be more than here.’
CHAPTER THREE
THE next day, Sean came to collect her from Marie’s. The snow had turned to rain through the night. The roads had been cleared and the track leading down to Marie’s croft was slushy rather than icy. A couple of hours earlier, Marie’s sister had arrived along with a load of shopping. Ellen was relieved that the sisters’ mother seemed to recognise her. It had been a difficult night spent between the baby and the old lady, and Ellen longed for a bath and a few hours in bed. Sean told them that he had arranged for one of the midwives to come and see mother and baby the next day.
Sean admired the baby again and had a word with Marie before they left. Inside the car he looked intently at Ellen.
‘You look different somehow. Tired … but different.’
‘Thanks a lot, Sean. No woman likes to be told she looks tired, even if it is true. It usually means she looks terrible.’
The look Sean gave her was unfathomable. ‘I don’t think you could look anything but beautiful.’
A shiver ran down her spine. Was Sean beginning to see her as a grown woman at last? Why now? When it was too late?
‘Why, thank you, kind sir,’ she said lightly. ‘But, I have to admit, I’m looking forward to a shower and change of clothes.’
‘Why did you give up working as a midwife?’ Sean asked suddenly. ‘Anyone can see that you love what you do. It’s such a waste.’
Ellen thought rapidly. What could she tell him that would make him stop pressing her for answers she didn’t have or want to give?
‘I haven’t given up being a midwife. I’ll be going back in a while. I just wanted a break. I planned to take some time out to …’ She stopped. She didn’t want to explain about the aborted trip to India. That would lead to more questions she didn’t want to answer. Everything seemed to lead back to her illness. ‘.to think about some stuff.’ She changed the subject ‘What about you? What are your plans? I thought someone with your reputation would be working in a large teaching hospital.’
‘I like it here. I love being close to the mountains and I like being part of the Mountain Rescue Team. Living here suits me. The hospital has a first-class reputation, which is continuing to grow. They wanted someone with expertise in high-risk pregnancies to develop the service, so they asked me.’
It was as if someone had thrown ice cubes down the back of Ellen’s blouse. It was ironic. For a second, but only for a second, she was tempted to ask him whether he’d ever had a patient with pulmonary hypertension. Instead, she changed the conversation.
‘What about girlfriends?’ Although Gran had said there wasn’t one, Ellen found herself wanting to be sure. There could be someone Gran didn’t know about.
Sean shot her a look. ‘No one permanent. I’m happy with my life exactly how it is.’
Ellen felt a surge of relief. Which was dumb. It wasn’t as if she had any aspirations as far as Sean Jamieson was concerned. It was just that she couldn’t stop remembering how she’d once felt about him. She needed to remember that he wasn’t the same person she had known as a child—and neither was she. Nevertheless, it felt good to have him back in her life. If being with him unsettled her, at least it was a diversion from her own morbid thoughts.
Ellen closed her eyes as a wave of tiredness washed over her. Spending the night in a chair in between checking up on baby Sean and Marie’s mother hadn’t been conducive to a good night’s sleep. ‘Wake me up when we get home,’ she said, and closed her eyes.
Sean slid a glance in Ellen’s direction. Home. It was funny, the way she’d said that. Almost as if they were a married couple returning to their home after a night out. And even odder that it felt right somehow.
He was going crazy. He had to be. Ellen hadn’t been back in his life for much longer than a few days and already he felt as if she’d never left.
The image of her lifting her face to his to be kissed came rushing back as if it had only been eight weeks ago instead of eight years. If only she’d known how tempted he’d been back then to carry on kissing her, to take her to bed, to take up the promise in her eyes. But, thank God, at the last minute reason had come rushing back. He was older than her and so much more experienced. Not only that. He’d known that she’d thought herself in love with him and there had been no way he could take advantage of her feelings. He had been fond of her, in the way he was fond of his youngest sister, too fond to risk breaking her heart.
He smiled. His first memory of Ellen was when he had been ten and she had been five. A little girl with a round stomach and bright red curls, she had formed an instant devotion to him, following behind him and his friends whenever she could.
And so it had continued. Every year she’d arrive to stay with Maggie for the summer, and every summer she would insist on pursuing him and his pals whenever she could keep up. It had irritated the hell out of them all but he’d felt responsible for her. More often than not he would glance back, when his friends weren’t looking, just to check that she hadn’t hurt herself or got lost. There had been that incident by the river when she had been eight and he thirteen. If he hadn’t been keeping an eye on her she could have drowned, so great had been her determination to do exactly as he’d done, even if she had been about a foot smaller and the river had covered her head when it had only come up to his armpits. He grinned as he recalled a face red with fury and mortification, small fists banging on his chest as she’d demanded to be let go. She had been a little tiger.
And so the summers had gone on. She’d hung about his house with his sisters and parents, happy to sit by the fire and listen while he and his noisy family had laughed and argued. Even then he had sensed a deep loneliness in her. He couldn’t understand why she hadn’t spent the summers with her mother. As she’d got older, she’d stopped following him and started spending more time with his sisters, pretending—and he didn’t know how he knew this—to share their interest in make-up and clothes. Maybe it was because she’d always worn the same rolled-up jeans and thick cotton checked shirt. Come to think of it, that was the kind of clothes he’d always worn too.
There had been a gap of a couple of years when he hadn’t seen her—he’d been at medical school and had spent his holidays travelling in Europe—but when she’d been sixteen he’d been back, and he’d barely recognised the coltish beauty who had turned up at his house.
He sneaked another glance at her. She was still beautiful, but most of the light had gone out of her. What had changed her from the daredevil, energetic girl she had been to this cool, almost reticent woman? Why had she stopped working? Especially when it had been clear from the look on her face when she had helped during Marie’s labour that being a midwife was what she was born to do. And then there had been that odd look on her face when she’d held the baby in her arms. For a moment she had seemed to hesitate before she had taken the newborn. That wasn’t in keeping with someone who was used to delivering babies. This Ellen was a mystery. Was she running away from something, and, if so, what? He shook his head. Underneath the closed-off facade he was sure the Ellen he had once known still lurked, and somewhere inside him there was that same protective feeling. If Ellen was in trouble, he wanted to know.
Later that day, once Ellen had had some sleep, Sean came by the house again.
‘We never did make it to the shops. I’m going now. Would you like to join me?’
