Page 2 of The Midwife By the Sea

Standing up, Hope pushed open the cubicle door which creaked like something out of a horror movie, making the woman at the sink whirl around to face her, her mouth dropping open.

‘Oh God, I had no idea anyone was in here.’ She clutched her chest and Hope kept her voice low.

‘I’m really sorry. I came in when you and your friend were in the cubicles and then when I heard you talking it just felt wrong to come out and interrupt, so I decided to wait it out, but then your friend left and I heard crying.’ Suddenly Hope wasn’t sure what else to say. The woman in front of her was a complete stranger and she’d probably freak out if Hope tried to comfort her. Instead, she turned away for a moment to wash her hands.

‘Oh, please don’t apologise. It was so nice of you to be so thoughtful.’ The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties, about ten years older than Hope. It could have been more than that, or less, because she was classically beautiful, with a lean, almost gazelle-like physique and it was hard to place her age. Then, as she turned towards Hope, the loose top she was wearing caught on the edge of the sink, and pulled slightly against her stomach, revealing the outline of a small, but distinctive bump, which on a woman built like her almost certainly meant one thing. She was pregnant. Hope hadn’t meant to let her gaze rest on the bump, but her jolt of recognition had clearly been obvious.

‘I’m not going to be able to hide this for much longer, am I?’ The woman rested a hand on her stomach. ‘But how can I tell my best friend that I’m pregnant for a second time, when she and my brother would give anything to have a baby? I just can’t do it.’

‘That must be so hard, but I can’t imagine she’d want you to put yourself under any kind of additional stress when you’re pregnant.’ Hope shook herself, aware that it must have sounded to this complete stranger like she was hugely overstepping the mark, and she needed to explain herself. ‘Sorry, it’s none of my business, but I’m a midwife and the idea of any pregnant woman feeling like they need to hide their pregnancy is hard to hear.’

‘Honestly, there’s no need to keep apologising and I’d say exactly the same to someone else, even though I work in the emergency department and not midwifery.’ She smiled at Hope, brushing a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand. ‘I’m Danni, by the way.’

‘It’s nice to meet you, Danni, even if it isn’t in the best of situations. I’m Hope.’

‘What a beautiful name.’ Danni was cradling her bump now, as if relishing the opportunity not to have to hide the pregnancy. ‘I haven’t even wanted to find out the sex of this baby, let alone start to think about names. Not when I can’t share the news with some of the people I love most. But I really like the name Hope.’

‘Thank you.’ She looked away for a moment, unsure if she should share her story with this complete stranger, but Danni had confided in her and, in the circumstances, the idea of revealing something she didn’t normally share with people didn’t seem that odd after all. ‘It was the name my birth mother wanted to give me and my adopted parents decided to keep it.’

‘That’s so lovely.’ Tears sprung into Danni’s eyes, but she hadn’t heard the half of it yet.

‘I think it was my birth mother’s way of wanting to show she loved me, despite the way I arrived into the world.’ Hope took a deep breath; it was always easier if she got all of it out in one go. ‘She gave birth to me in the toilets of the sixth-form common room at her school. She was a week off her seventeenth birthday, and she’d strapped her bump up and worn as many layers of clothes as she could to disguise it, all the way through her pregnancy. She hadn’t told a soul, because she was so terrified of what would happen, and I arrived headfirst in the toilet bowl. According to what my parents were told, she was devastated and just kept saying she hoped nothing she’d done was going to affect me when I grew up. She kept repeating “I just hope she’s okay”, and that’s what she decided to call me for the brief time we were together. Hope. And it seems I’m destined to make surprise appearances in the toilets.’ She gave a small laugh, hoping the insight into her life had made things a bit less tense for Danni.

‘It does, and what an incredible story.’ For the first time Danni smiled, but then her face clouded again. ‘That poor girl, though, not being able to tell anyone. At least I’ve been able to share the news with my husband and a couple of other friends. I’m not sure I could cope with carrying that secret all on my own, never mind at sixteen.’

‘I think she even tried to convince herself it wasn’t true, but babies always make their presence known in the end, no matter how hard anyone tries to hide the fact they’re on the way.’ The last thing Hope wanted was to sound judgemental, but she was genuinely worried about the stress that keeping this secret might be putting Danni and the baby under. ‘If you can’t bring yourself to tell your friend about the baby, do you think you could talk to your brother about it and see what he thinks you should do?’

‘Maybe.’ For a moment Danni continued to look doubtful, but then she nodded slowly. ‘Joe’s a consultant psychiatrist and he ought to be more than qualified to work out what to do for the best, but it’s different when it’s about the people you love, isn’t it?’

‘Does Joe work at St Piran’s too?’ Hope was doing her best to sound casual. Both Danni and her friend had mentioned the name Joe, which was common enough not to mean anything, but his job title could be far more significant, especially if he did work at St Piran’s. Her heart was thudding in her ears as she waited for a response, and Danni’s eyebrows shot up so quickly they disappeared behind her fringe, her eyes widening in what looked like fear.

‘He does, but oh God, please don’t tell anyone what I’ve said, will you? St Piran’s can be like a village sometimes and gossip spreads like wildfire. I’d be absolutely heartbroken if Esther and Joe heard the news about the baby from anyone but me.’

It was the first time Danni had used her best friend’s name. Esther. She’d called her Essie when they’d been talking, but Hope knew for sure now that her suspicions were right. Esther and Joe. The chances of there being two couples with those names working at St Piran’s were tiny, even if Danni hadn’t already confirmed Joe’s speciality. Hope was struggling to think straight, a hundred questions waiting to be asked, but she knew she couldn’t voice any of them. Looking at Danni again, all she could do now was reassure the other woman that this wouldn’t go any further.

‘Of course I won’t say anything. You’d be amazed at the stories I’ve been told since I became a midwife and I never share any of them, unless it directly affects a patient’s care. Midwives are like priests that way.’ She smiled, hoping it didn’t look as forced as it felt and that it would give Danni the reassurance she so clearly needed. ‘Anyway, you know I arrived in the world face down in a toilet bowl and I don’t really want the whole of St Piran’s knowing about that either. So how about we make a pact to keep each other’s secrets?’

‘Absolutely. Shall we shake on it?’ Danni’s smile had returned and she stuck her hand out towards Hope.

‘It feels like we’re in a secret society,’ Hope said, trying to stop her voice from shaking and giving away just how big the secret between them really was.

‘I suppose we are.’ Danni was still smiling, clearly not picking up on the tension that felt as though it was radiating from Hope. ‘And I want to say thank you, not just for agreeing to keep this to yourself, but for allowing me to tell someone about the baby at a moment when I really needed to.’

‘I was in the right place at the right time, that’s all.’

‘I think there was more to it than that. Even the way you speak is soothing, I could listen to you talking all day and I’ve always loved Welsh accents.’ Danni’s voice was warm and for a split second that was almost enough for Hope to say the words that were bubbling up in her throat, but that she knew she had to push down. Adopting the most casual smile she could muster, even as an invisible battle raged on inside her, Hope reached out to touch Danni’s arm.

‘Thank you and, who knows, maybe there was more to me being here than coincidence. Either way, I just really hope it all works out okay for you and Esther. I’m sure it will in the end.’ Maybe it was over familiar for Hope to have physically reached out, but Danni didn’t seem to mind, and she wasn’t sure she could have stopped herself if her life had depended upon it. She’d needed to comfort Danni and make a tangible connection to this person who’d been a total stranger to her less than twenty minutes ago, but who she was now almost certain was her biological aunt.

2

Hope had been in her new job for two weeks, dividing her time between working in the maternity department at St Piran’s Hospital and the midwifery unit in Port Agnes. It had been a dream of hers to be able to work across both hospital and community midwifery, which truly represented the best of both worlds as far as she was concerned. The fact that a role in integrated care had come up in the Three Ports area of Cornwall had felt like pure serendipity, after discovering that the man she’d been told was her biological father worked at St Piran’s.

The decision to reach out and try to discover who her biological parents were hadn’t been an easy one. She’d never felt any kind of void where there might have been one, because her mum and dad were so amazing and she’d been with them from just a few days after her birth. Back then they were foster carers, with two young daughters of their own, and Hope had been taken straight from the hospital to stay with them. Her birth mother and her family had decided it would be easier on them all that way. It had been intended as a temporary measure, on what was called a ‘bridging to adoption placement’. Hope had quite quickly been matched with a couple who’d been on the waiting list to adopt for almost five years, and everything was moving forward, when the man who would have been Hope’s adopted father was diagnosed with a serious heart condition, derailing the plan.

The adoption was put on hold while he went through surgery and further treatment, and she remained with Dave and Alison, with the plan that the adoption would eventually proceed if and when the local authority was confident that he would make a full recovery. Hope was eighteen months old when the couple themselves decided to pull out, because the husband’s health was still precarious and they wanted to focus on his recovery. By that time, Hope was incredibly attached to both Dave and Alison, and their daughters. She already called them Mummy and Daddy, having copied her elder sisters, and they loved her too, begging the social workers not to find another family to adopt her and take Hope away from the only family she’d ever known. They’d told the social workers they’d give up fostering, if they were permitted to adopt Hope. They just wanted to be allowed to keep their little girl, because that’s what she was by then: theirs. It was another six months before Dave and Alison were finally given the go-ahead to begin the adoption process, and more than a year after that before everything was finalised. Bea was the baby of the family. Alison had fallen pregnant with her almost five years after Hope officially became their third daughter, but it hadn’t changed anything – except to add yet more love to the Masterson household. Her father had seemed to revel in being surrounded by ‘his girls’ as he called them, joking that after having four daughters it had only been Teddy, the family dog, who’d done anything to stop him being completely outnumbered.

Hope had spent her whole life immersed right in the centre of her family, surrounded by an innate sense of belonging that had never once wavered. It was only when she’d started suffering from lethargy and weight loss, and had undergone some blood tests, that things changed. Discovering that she had haemochromatosis had been a relief in many ways, because she’d worried that it might be something far more serious. Haemochromatosis was a fairly common disorder, resulting from the over absorption of iron. It was treated by three-monthly blood transfusions, all of which felt like something she could easily live with, that wouldn’t have a huge impact on her life. What changed things was the discovery that it was a hereditary condition and, for the first time in her life, Hope felt she needed to know more about where she came from in a biological sense. It wasn’t that she needed her biological parents in her life from an emotional perspective and she wasn’t sure she’d ever have sought them out without that diagnosis. Of course she’d wondered about them, especially after hearing the full details of her birth story, when she was not much younger than her biological mother had been. She just hadn’t wanted anything to change at home, and the Mastersons were her family. They always would be. So, despite that curiosity, she hadn’t done anything about finding them until her diagnosis. Even then, it had been her parents who’d pushed her to take action, and she’d never forget the conversation.