The Midwife's Courage (Glenfallon)

by Lilian Darcy

  ‘I—I don’t think so,’ she murmured, woolly-witted.

  ‘But would you like to go out again?’ he finished. ‘Just the two of us this time? We didn’t get a chance to talk much last night, and I…found that I wanted to.’

  I ought to run a mile.

  ‘Yes, that would be—I’d like to, yes,’ she answered clumsily, ignoring the fluttery and almost queasy feeling in her stomach.

  ‘Are you free next weekend?’

  ‘No, I think I have some afternoon shifts. I’ll have to check my roster.’

  ‘So it would have to be during the week?’

  ‘Or we’d have to wait.’

  Unworded between them was the knowledge, suddenly, that neither of them wanted to do that.

  Too fast, much too fast. Think first.

  Kit ignored the panicking voice of reason inside her head.

  Bonnie dragged on Gian’s legs, her fists full of faded denim.

  ‘Want to check on it right now?’ he suggested softly. ‘Could you? Bonnie’s very keen to find those eggs, and with my schedule, if we don’t arrange it now…’

  ‘I have a copy of the roster in the house.’ She knew she sounded as breathless as she felt.

  He smiled. ‘We’ll still be here when you get back.’

  Kit headed for the house, surprised that she could walk straight. Aunt Helen was still out, and the place was very quiet. Cool, too, after the March sunshine outside. It still held considerable heat in this part of the country. She needed the coolness, and her mouth was dry.

  She poured a glass of water from the tap at the kitchen sink, and sipped it as she went along the silent corridor to her room. Its windows overlooked the yard, and she could see Gian and Bonnie, questing very seriously for eggs. The hens were radical nonconformists, and frequently disdained their designated laying boxes.

  Kit’s roster was pinned to the small pressed-cork notice-board on the back of her door, and it confirmed what she’d remembered. She had afternoon shifts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but Wednesday and Thursday nights were free.

  I ought to run a mile.

  She just hadn’t expected this. Not so soon. Her heart still twisted with the pain and anger of drawn out betrayal every time she thought of James. It wasn’t that she still loved him. She didn’t think that she did. She couldn’t, after all he’d done to kill her feelings. But that didn’t mean she was ‘over’ him, over everything that had happened between them. How could she be, when so much of its legacy still lingered?

  And she had given no thought at all to the future, no thought as to what she would do if a man that she liked asked her out.

  Ought she, on principle, to turn Gian down? Or accept his invitation but warn him…warn him…warn him about all that she couldn’t provide, warn him that James had found her crucially inadequate in the end.

  It seemed so stupidly premature to be considering all this on the strength of a smile or two, a sense of awareness and heat and an invitation that contained more nuances of meaning than it should.

  Outside, she heard him and Bonnie counting. ‘One, two, three, four…’ Counting eggs. Counting their chickens before they were hatched.

  Is that what I’m doing? she wondered.

  Counting chickens. Borrowing trouble. Putting the cart before the horse. Making assumptions.

  He’d only asked her for a meal. If she refused, he’d think it was personal. And it was personal, only it wasn’t about him.

  ‘How about Wednesday or Thursday?’ she suggested, when she stepped out into the sunshine again.

  ‘Wednesday,’ he answered decisively. ‘Pick you up? I’ll probably be at the farm anyway.’

  ‘Then that makes sense.’

  ‘Sevenish? If it’s nice, we could pick up a pizza and go to a park. Make it a picnic.’

  ‘That sounds lovely.’

  Bonnie leaped about once again, singing, ‘Eight eggs, eight eggs, eight eggs!’

  Gian carried them carefully in the crown of his crumpled hat. With the hat off his head, he had ‘hat hair’. The thick, dark waves were a little squashed against his scalp and his temples. Kit’s fingers itched to comb through them, putting them back in place.

  ‘You found a lot, Bonnie,’ she said to the little girl, as a necessary distraction. ‘Are you going to eat one for your dinner?’

  ‘Yes, and bekfass.’

  ‘Yum! Eggs are good, aren’t they? Especially fresh ones. Would you like some tea or a cool drink, Gian?’ she added.

  ‘Not today. Just an egg carton, if you have one. Should have thought to bring one of our own.’

  ‘I’m sure we have some inside.’

  She headed for the kitchen door and he followed her. Bonnie was still chanting, ‘Eight eggs! Eight eggs!’

  ‘Are you sure about the tea?’ Kit asked again, over her shoulder. She felt breathless. ‘If you’re coming in for the carton…’

  ‘I ought to get Bonnie out of your hair. I’m sure you have things to do.’

  ‘Bonnie’s fine. We have a box of kids’ toys for occasions like this. My aunt has four grandchildren now.’

  ‘You like kids?’

  Kit’s heart lurched in her chest. ‘Yes,’ she said lightly. ‘Kids are great.’

  ‘Still…’ He looked at his watch and frowned. ‘Not today.’

  Kit rummaged in a cupboard and produced the egg carton. Gian and Bonnie counted the eggs out of his hat, one by one, and then they were ready to leave. The house seemed even quieter after they’d gone.

  Kit encountered Gian at work on Wednesday morning. She took over from another midwife at seven, assisting with the labour of one of Gian’s private patients, a first-time mother aged thirty-nine.

  Jenny Smith’s labour had gone slowly but without complications, and things were starting to hot up now. Jenny was finding it harder to manage the pain of the contractions. She tried a hot shower, tried leaning against the bed, and her husband tried pressing a tennis ball against her lower spine. None of it seemed to help any more.

  The first Kit knew of Gian’s presence was his voice in the doorway.

  ‘Tell me, Jenny,’ he teased the patient ‘have I got time for a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I want you to examine me and tell me you absolutely haven’t!’ she managed to tease back, though her voice dropped to a whimper at the end of it.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, reaching for a pair of gloves as Kit stepped back from the bedside. ‘Let’s give everyone some encouragement.’

  His assessment was quick and deft.

  ‘Almost there,’ he announced, after a moment. ‘Baby’s still a little high, but you’re almost fully dilated, Jenny. A good nine, or even nine and a half centimetres. No wonder you’re feeling uncomfortable!’ He listened to the heartbeat, and reported, ‘Good and strong. I’ll skip the coffee, just make a phone call instead.’

  ‘Will you? Oh, good!’ Mrs Smith said emphatically. Five minutes later, she gasped, ‘I think this might be it. Yes, this is it!’

  Kit pressed the buzzer and Gian reappeared very quickly. After another check of the baby’s position, he told the labouring woman, ‘The head’s still not very far down, so you’ve got to do some good, strong pushing, OK?’

  ‘Work with the contractions, Jenny,’ Kit added. ‘We’ll talk you through it. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it’s coming.’

  Over an hour of pushing was needed to get the baby’s head to crown. Gian had to leave, at one stage, to take a phone call. He disappeared and returned unobtrusively, however, and Kit wasn’t even convinced that Jenny knew he had gone. She was getting tired and discouraged again, until Gian told her, ‘You’re having a blonde, Jenny.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A blonde.’

  ‘A blonde!’ She was half laughing, half crying. ‘You can see?’

  ‘Yes, crowning beautifully now, and not slipping back, a gorgeous golden blonde.’ His eyes met Kit’s for a moment.

  ‘I’m having a blonde.
Come on, baby girl…’

  The concrete reality of the baby’s head of hair encouraged the labouring mother hugely. She gave several mighty pushes through the next two contractions, and the head bulged forward, floated steady between contractions and came out with the next push. No cord around the neck. No sign of any problems. Gian rotated the head gently, ninety degrees, and first one shoulder slipped free, then the other.

  ‘She’s out,’ he said. ‘She’s here, and she’s beautiful. Congratulations!’

  The baby cried, and so did Mrs Smith. Her husband Gordon seemed choky and tearful as well. ‘She’s great. You were amazing, love!’

  There were no problems, postpartum. Gian delivered a healthy placenta several minutes later, while Jenny held her naked baby girl in her arms. Little Martha Marie took the breast easily, the suction stimulating the uterus to contract effectively, which reduced the risk of haemorrhage.

  A few minutes later, Gian said to Kit, ‘I’ll see you tonight.’

  ‘Yes…You were good. You were lovely,’ she added, a little huskily.

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised about it,’ he teased, and his grin turned her insides to melted butter.

  Kit spent the rest of an uneventful shift wondering what on earth she was doing, feeling this way, when just a few days ago she had felt so far away and so safe from anything like this.

  The pizza and picnic plan didn’t work out. By the time Kit reached home, just before three-thirty, it was raining. The gutters ran like rivers, the sky was low and dark, and there was no evidence that it would let up any time soon.

  ‘The Glenfallon Bakery?’ Gian suggested instead, as they drove into town.

  He was casually dressed in dark trousers and a grey shirt, the same colour as the clouds darkening overhead, as the sun dropped out of the sky. Kit wore stretch trousers and a leather jacket, and doubted that she’d be taking the jacket off, since she had short, silky sleeves beneath it. The wind-screen wipers on Gian’s car clacked back and forth at a rapid rhythm.

  ‘The bakery sounds nice,’ she answered him. Casual enough that it wouldn’t lend too much importance to the evening. She was shying away from that, nervous about it. ‘Is it open this late?’

  ‘Since they expanded to take over the old bank building next door, yes. It’s as much a restaurant as a bakery and café now.’

  He didn’t touch her as they got out of the car. They were both being a little cautious with each other tonight, as if they’d rethought, in a more rational frame of mind, those telling moments over the weekend when they’d both sensed that something was in the air.

  I’ll ride it out, Kit decided. We’ll have a pleasant evening, and he won’t ask again. There’ll be no need ever to tell him about…

  She didn’t word the rest of the thought in her mind. It trailed off in a series of uncompleted scenes from her past and from her imagination. Scenes that involved James and Gian, medical specialists, pain and discomfort, arguments, silences and the innocent woman in Canberra who would, by this time, be heavily pregnant with James’s child.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘I WASN’T expecting this,’ Gian said, a little later in the evening.

  ‘Dessert? You ordered it.’

  ‘Don’t pretend. I’m serious. And you know what I mean.’

  Yes, Kit did, and it frightened her.

  He touched her hand across the table, his fingers communicating the promise of much more than just this chaste contact as they stroked her skin. She found herself thinking about how it would feel to get closer, to know more about the way he could touch her, and knew that he wanted her to think this way.

  She couldn’t meet his eyes, and had to look down, which meant she was looking at their hands. This didn’t help. She took in the contrasts in skin tone and texture, and felt the heat of awareness flood higher and higher up her arm.

  I shouldn’t have let it get to this point.

  They had kept the conversation light and general for the first part of the evening. He’d talked about the local tourist attractions—which ones he recommended and which ones he didn’t. Then he’d talked about what it was like to practise medicine here, when most specialists shunned rural Australia, and hospitals in towns even as substantial and pleasant as Glenfallon had trouble attracting the medical staff they needed.

  ‘Dad’s death was a big factor in me coming back, of course,’ he’d told Kit.

  After this, they’d talked for quite a long while about family bonds, priorities, goals. He’d touched on his divorce, beginning with his formal separation from his wife, eighteen months ago.

  ‘Yes, I’ve come out of a serious relationship fairly recently, too,’ Kit told him. ‘Not a marriage.’

  But to her it had always felt like one. She’d made the same ‘for better, for worse’ commitment to James that she would have made if she’d spoken legally binding vows.

  It was only after almost six years that she’d discovered his attitude was very different—that he’d felt himself free to bail out without guilt or apology. She wondered if a real marriage and a divorce would have been easier on her heart and her self-confidence, or if it would have been even worse.

  Gian didn’t say much about how he felt about his divorce, or about the reasons for it, but Kit remembered what his mother had said—the very first words she’d overheard on the older woman’s lips, just last week.

  ‘I can’t understand a woman not wanting children,’ Federica Di Luzio had said.

  The comment clicked into place like a puzzle piece, completing the picture.

  Gian had wanted children, and his ex-wife hadn’t. That, at heart, was the reason for their split.

  ‘You do know what I mean, don’t you, Kit?’ Gian said. He hadn’t touched his dessert, and her hand was still deliciously imprisoned in his. ‘The sense that this is worth exploring. Like some enticing, magical pathway, with lots of turns and half-hidden glimpses, to see where it leads.’

  ‘Dr Di Luzio!’ said a woman’s voice several metres away, before Kit could reply. She saw a young woman in a wheelchair propelling herself towards them with a smile on her face. ‘My brother only just told me you were in here tonight.’

  ‘Hello, Megan!’ Gian was smiling, too. ‘I almost said something to the waiter, but I thought you’d be at home. Resting,’ he added in a stern tone, and she blushed.

  Belatedly, Kit realised that the woman was pregnant. It was difficult to tell where she was up to. Around halfway? She must be one of Gian’s patients.

  ‘I rested all afternoon, and then I got bored,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling fine. Is it really that much more important for me to rest than it is for any other pregnant woman?’

  ‘You think I don’t tell other pregnant women to rest?’

  ‘Not as often.’

  ‘Humour me, OK?’

  ‘All right, all right. I must admit, I enjoy getting my feet up. Now, you humour me, and eat your dessert, Doctor!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am!’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ She smiled at Kit, clearly curious although trying not to let it show, then wheeled herself away, to greet another couple on the far side of the restaurant.

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have introduced you,’ Gian said. ‘She’s—’

  ‘No,’ Kit cut in abruptly. ‘No, you shouldn’t have. I mean, it’s OK. Let’s not create the wrong impression.’

  She snatched her hand free of the delicious web of sensation he’d created on her skin—something she should have done minutes ago.

  Gian frowned. ‘She’s a patient, Kit.’

  ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘She’s not always in the wheelchair. She has some mobility and can walk with crutches, but she was in an accident several years ago and sustained some permanent damage. I’m keeping a close eye on her, and we’ll schedule a Caesarean. This is her first baby…and mine, with this particular set of circumstances. I thought you might have been interested.’

  He sounded stiff and cool, and she fe
lt miserable. Her sense of what was happening here swung wildly by the minute, between the conviction that they needed to talk very soon, bring certain issues out into the open, and the equal certainty that she was overreacting by a country mile and there was nothing to say.

  Heavens, this was essentially their first date, and the only promise of a second had been in the touch of his fingers on her hand, in the intuitive connection in the way they looked at each other, and in the words he’d spoken, to which she hadn’t yet given a reply.

  ‘I—I’m sorry,’ she stammered.

  ‘Yes. So am I,’ he said, sitting back. His mouth hardened a little. ‘Because something’s obviously wrong. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Me. Being an idiot. Please, enjoy your dessert.’ She was sticking to decaf coffee, herself. ‘This is such a nice setting for a restaurant, isn’t it?’ she gabbled, creating the excuse to look around. ‘Hard to believe it used to be a bank.’

  ‘Yes, it’s quite cosy, even on a rainy night.’

  ‘I think the rain has stopped.’

  He ignored her. ‘And we were having a nice time until a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Perhaps I just need some fresh air.’

  The remainder of his lemon tart disappeared into Gian’s mouth, and he brushed a crumb from his full lower lip with the ball of his thumb, then dropped it onto his tongue. The casually sensual gesture caught Kit’s gaze and held it.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ll pay and we’ll leave, then we’ll get to the bottom of this.’

  He rose to his feet, his height and sure movement as intimidating as the banked fire in his dark eyes. He wanted her to know that he was angry, that he was taking no nonsense…and that every bit of the awareness between them was still there. On that issue, she didn’t need his input. She could feel it all too strongly.

  Leaning down, he splayed his fingers on the tabletop and looked into her eyes.

  ‘Going to put on your jacket?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You’re right. It has stopped raining. Let’s go for a walk.’

  ‘Yes. All right.’