I mean, the sound that I found really profound was the first time I heard Delphi’s heartbeat,” Natasha Khan tells me. We’re in her kitchen in east London, seated on either side of a small wooden table. Delphi is her daughter.
Natasha is telling me about something that happened five years earlier, when she was early in her pregnancy and went to visit a midwife, Nancy, a “silver-haired, beautiful woman in her sixties who had helped to birth 1,500 babies”. She’d not expected to hear a heartbeat that day, but Nancy had the equipment and asked if she wanted to. “And then suddenly there was just, like, a magical sound.” I ask if it surprised her, what it sounded like. “It was much faster than I imagined. And because you see it all the time in movies and people talk about it so much, it’s supposed to be emotional. But I suppose until you actually hear it . . . It’s different when it’s your baby.”
