have grabbed a towel and a pair of gloves as she came through the door, both of which were still lying on the bed, because she was distracted as she tried to help the frantic young woman remove her shorts.
In Sam’s opinion the baby seemed to be trying to escape into his mother’s underwear but Swift was equal to the task. She deftly encouraged one of the mother’s legs out and whipped the towel off the bed and put it between the mother’s legs, where the baby seemed to unfold into it in a swan dive and was pushed between the mother’s knees into Swift’s waiting hands. The baby spluttered his displeasure on the end of the purple cord after his rapid ejection into a towel.
‘Good extrication,’ Sam murmured with a little fillip of unexpected excitement as he pulled on a pair of gloves from the dispenser at the door. Could that be the first ghost of emotion he’d felt at a birth for a long while? With a sinking dismay it dawned on him that he hadn’t even noticed it had been missing.
He crossed the room to assess the infant, who’d stopped crying and was slowly turning purple, which nobody seemed to notice as they all laughed and crowed at the rapid birth and helped the woman up on the bed to lie down.
‘Would you like me to attend to third stage or the baby?’ he enquired quietly.
He saw Swift glance at the baby, adjust the towel and rub the infant briskly. ‘Need you to cut the cord now, John,’ she said to the husband. ‘Your little rocket is a bit stunned.’
The parents disentangled their locked gazes and Sam heard their indrawn breaths. The father jerked up the scissors Ellie had put instantly into his hand and she directed him between the two clamps as she went on calmly. ‘It happens when they fly out.’ A few nervous sawing snips from Dad with the big scissors and the cord was cut. Done.
‘Dr Southwell will sort you, Josie, while we sort the baby.’ Swift said it prosaically and they swapped places as the baby was bundled and she carried him to the resuscitation trolley. ‘Come on, John.’ She gestured for the father to follow her. ‘Talk to your daughter.’
The compressed air hissed as she turned it on and Sam could hear her talking to the dad behind him as automatically he smiled at the mother. ‘Well done. Congratulations.’
The baby cried and they both smiled. ‘It all happened very fast,’ the mother said as she craned her neck toward the baby and, reassured that Swift and her husband were smiling, she settled back. ‘A bit too fast.’
He nodded as a small gush of blood signalled the third stage was about to arrive. Seconds later it was done, the bleeding settled, and he tidied the sheet under her and dropped it in the linen bag behind him. He couldn’t help a smile to himself at having done a tidying job he’d watched countless times but couldn’t actually remember doing himself. ‘Always nice to have your underwear off first, I imagine.’
The mother laughed as she craned her neck again and by her smile he guessed they were coming back. ‘Easier.’
‘Here we go.’ Swift lifted the mother’s T-shirt and crop top and nestled the baby skin-to-skin between her bare breasts. She turned the baby’s head sideways so his cheek was against his mother. ‘Just watch her colour, especially the lips. Her being against your skin will warm her like toast.’
Sam stood back and watched. He saw the adjustments Ellie made, calmly ensuring mother and baby were comfortable—including the dad, with a word here and there, even asking for the father’s mobile phone to take a few pictures of the brand new baby and parents. She glanced at the clock. He hadn’t thought of looking at the clock once. She had it all under control.
Sam stepped back further and peeled off his gloves. He went to the basin to wash his hands and his mind kept replaying the scene. He realised why it was different. The lack of people milling around.
Swift pushed the silver trolley with the equipment and scissors towards the door. He stopped her. ‘Do you always do this on your own?’
She pointed to a green call button. ‘Usually I ring and one of the nurses comes from the main hospital to be on hand if needed until the GP arrives. But it happened fast today and you were here.’ She flashed him a smile. ‘Back in a minute. Watch her, will you? Physiological third stage.’ Then she sailed away.
He hadn’t thought about the injection they usually gave to reduce risk of bleeding after the birth. He’d somehow assumed it had already been given, but realised there weren’t enough hands to have done it, although he could have done it if someone had mentioned it. Someone.
As far as he knew all women were given the injection at his hospital unless they’d expressly requested not to have it. Research backed that up. It reduced post-partum haemorrhage. He’d mention it.
His eyes fell on Josie’s notes, which were lying on the table top where he’d dropped them, and he snicked the little wheeled stool out from under the bench with his foot and sat there to read through the medical records. The last month’s antenatal care had been shared between his father and ‘E Swift’. He glanced up every minute or so to check that both mother and baby were well but nothing happened before ‘E Swift’ returned.
* * *
An hour later Sam had been escorted around the hospital by a nurse who’d been summoned by phone and found himself deposited back in the little maternity wing. The five-minute cottage hospital tour had taken an hour because the infected great toenail he’d been fearing had found him and he’d had to deal with it, and the pain the poor sufferer was in.
Apparently he still remembered how to treat phalanges and the patient had seemed satisfied. He assumed Ellie would be still with the new maternity patient, but he was wrong.
Ellie sat, staring at the nurses’ station window in a strangely rigid hunch, her hand clutching her pen six inches above the medical records, and he paused and turned his head to see what had attracted her attention.
He couldn’t see anything. When he listened, all he could hear were frogs and the distant sound of the sea.
‘You okay?’ He’d thought his voice was quiet when he asked but she jumped as though he’d fired a gun past her ear. The pen dropped as her hand went to her chest, as if to push her heart back in with her lungs. His own pulse rate sped up. Good grief! He’d thought it was too good to be true that this place would be relaxing.
‘You’re back?’ she said, stating the obvious with a blank look on her face.
He picked up the underlying stutter in her voice. Something had really upset her and he glanced around again, expecting to see a masked intruder at least. She glanced at him and then the window. ‘Can you do me a favour?’
‘Sure.’ She looked like she could do with a favour.
‘There’s a green tree frog behind that plant in front of the window.’ He could hear the effort she was putting in to enunciate clearly and began to suspect this was an issue of mammoth proportions.
‘Yes?’
‘Take it away!’
‘Ranidaphobia?’
She looked at him and, as he studied her, a little of the colour crept back into her face. She even laughed shakily. ‘How many people know that word?’
He smiled at her, trying to install some normality in the fraught atmosphere. ‘I’m guessing everyone who’s
