The Hypnotist's Love Story (36 page)

“When I was pregnant with Colleen I ate dry biscuits all day long,” said Millie, as she handed over the plate. “But then when she was pregnant with Jack the lucky girl didn’t get any nausea at all.”

She smiled at her grandson. “You were such a well-behaved baby, Jack, even before you were born.” She turned back to Ellen. “Not that I mean your own little baby isn’t well behaved.”

As Millie spoke, Ellen caught sight of a framed photo on the wall of Colleen holding Jack when he must have been about six months old. She was smiling adoringly down at him, while Jack gnawed on the leg of a toy rabbit.

That’s when it happened.

She burst into tears, choking on her cracker, spraying crumbs, causing everyone to stare at her with alarm and astonishment.

What are you doing?
It was as though her body had done something unmentionable in polite company, like an explosive fart.
Stop it
, she ordered herself, but the tears kept sliding down her face.

It was a combination of the adoration on Colleen’s face in the picture, the exquisite relief of eating the cracker, the warmth of the house after the cold mountain air, Millie saying, “Your little baby,” the strangeness and stress of the graveyard visit, the fact that she was meeting her father for the first time the following day—oh, who knew what it was, except that her emotions had never embarrassed her like this before.

“
Hey
now,” said Frank, and he came over to where she was sitting, squatted down on his long spidery legs and rubbed her back in gentle circular motions.

Lucky Colleen to have grown up with a lovely father like Frank.

“What’s wrong, Ellen?” asked Jack.

He’d looked to his father, but Patrick was no help. He had the stunned expression of someone whose girlfriend has just knocked over a priceless vase. He’d kept up a steady stream of conversation ever since he’d walked in the house, his voice light and chatty but with a panicky undertone, as if he was trying to distract someone from jumping off a cliff by talking about ordinary things while he waited for the police. Ellen had never seen him talk so much, and she saw that these visits were a huge effort for him, and
that he was determined to ensure there were no conversational gaps or uncomfortable silences that might allow for horrible displays of grief. Now she’d upset the delicate balance he was working so hard to maintain.

“So sorry,” she finally sniffed. “It must be my hormones.”

Hormones, hormones, hormones. It was all she talked about lately, and yet, she’d never believed in blaming her body for her behavior! She’d always believed that the mind-body connection was more likely to operate in the other direction: the mind affecting the body, not the body affecting the mind. If a client had described this irrational behavior and then tried to blame it on hormones, she would have said (in such a soothing, know-it-all tone!), “I suspect this is your body’s way of trying to pass on a message from your subconscious.”

Patrick finally recovered enough to move over and hug her.

“You’re probably just exhausted from the drive,” he said, speaking in his normal voice, and the relief of feeling his arms around her and breathing in his familiar Patrick scent nearly made her cry again.

“So sorry,” she said shakily.

“Don’t think anything of it,” Frank and Millie soothed.

She worked hard to redeem herself over lunch, following Patrick’s bright, chatty lead. They bounced the conversation rapidly back and forth across the table, without letting it drop once, like a frantic game of hot potato. When they were ready to leave, she noticed that Frank and Millie looked drained. They probably wished the two of them had just shut up for a second.

“We hope to see you next month, my dear,” said Millie, and she put her hand on Ellen’s arm. For one dreadful moment Ellen felt more tears threatening, but she fought them back with sheer force of will.

Nobody said anything as they drove out of Katoomba. Jack seemed to be slumbering in the backseat. Finally, Ellen couldn’t bear it any longer.

“I’m sorry about my unexpected weeping back there,” she said, as if the word “weeping” would turn it into a charming, rather fascinating little incident.

“It’s fine,” said Patrick. “Seriously. Don’t worry about it.”

That’s where she should have left it.

“They must have found it so difficult,” she said. “Meeting me, and the new baby.”

“Yes,” he said. “Although of course
you
were the one doing the crying!”

The sting was so sharp she caught her breath.

“I’m sorry,” he said almost immediately, taking one hand off the steering wheel to reach for her. “That was meant to be a joke. A really stupid joke. Whenever I see Frank and Millie I feel guilty for being alive when Colleen is dead. I find those visits really hard. Awkward.”

No kidding.

“Yes. I found it very awkward myself,” she said.
I sat on your dead wife’s grave! These grass stains will never come out!

“I’m sorry,” he said again, putting his hand back on the steering wheel. “Really. You were wonderful today. I’m so grateful to you for coming. I just wish…”

His voice drifted away, and then he stopped talking and frowned at the road ahead, as if driving now required all his concentration.

What did he mean? I just wish you hadn’t cried? I just wish Colleen wasn’t dead? Ellen silently boiled and bubbled with different emotions she couldn’t even properly define: shame, resentment and something like fear.
This is not me. I am not like this.

She broke the silence when they stopped at a red light. “So, I guess you won’t have time to move those boxes tonight.”

Even while she was saying it, another part of her looked on, coolly observing and shaking her head.
Oh, Ellen. You feel guilty about embarrassing him with your tears, so this is your childish way of pointing out that he’s not perfect either. You’re picking a fight because you want to make something happen.

“
I told you I’ve got to work this afternoon,” he said.

“So maybe we can make next weekend the new deadline?” she said, and her tone was light and humorous, but just like his joke, it had that fine thread of steel running through the center of it.

“Don’t nag me, Ellen,” he said, and as she turned to look at his profile she saw that he was clenching his jaw so tightly his cheek was hollow.

“
Nagging?
How am I nagging?”

“Not now. Not here,” he hissed, turning his head slightly to indicate Jack in the backseat, as though she’d deliberately picked a fight in front of his young, impressionable son.

They didn’t say another word for the rest of the drive home. Ellen spent the entire time reliving that weekend in the mountains with Jon, deliberately lingering over the memories of their lovemaking. It was the most passive-aggressive thing she’d ever done.

By the time they got home the air in the car was stuffy with silence.

“I’ll see you later,” said Patrick shortly, before driving off and leaving Ellen to take Jack inside. She would have to remember to cancel her coffee with Julia before she got started on homework.

“What’s this?” said Ellen as she opened the screen door.

There was a foil-wrapped package sitting next to the front door. She bent down and picked it up. It felt warm.

Her breath quickened.
Saskia.

It was an impulse decision. I walked into her kitchen with the plastic bag full of ingredients and it was like I was returning home from the supermarket. I thought, Why not cook some biscuits for them?

I enjoyed being in her kitchen, using her mixing bowl, her spoons, her baking trays. I have a feeling most of the things in her kitchen probably belonged to her grandmother. I remember her saying that she hadn’t changed anything much when she inherited the house. “I have sort of retro taste,” she told me once. I’d made some remark about liking the carpet. I guess that’s something we have in common; apart from Patrick, of course.

I felt strangely peaceful, like I had every right to be in this house, as if I were Ellen, and Patrick and Jack were out somewhere and I was planning on surprising them with freshly baked biscuits, like I used to do when Jack
was little and they went out to the park. I imagined them coming home, the sound of the key in the lock, the pounding of Jack’s footsteps down the hallway.

Ellen’s kitchen reminded me a lot of my mother’s—perhaps that’s why I felt so inappropriately comfortable, because I felt like I was in my childhood home. I remembered being a little girl, standing on a kitchen chair, one of Mum’s aprons tied around my waist, helping her cook. I’d always imagined doing the same thing with my little girl one day.

In fact, I did do the same thing with Jack, except I never bothered with the apron, and I didn’t stand him on a chair, I just let him sit up on the bench top next to me. He loved it. Flour in his hair, sticky fingers, eggshell in the mix. I let him use the beaters once and he lifted them up and splattered the entire kitchen with cake mix.

How would I have explained myself if they’d come home early?

I know this seems strange, but I cannot bear my nonexistence in your lives. If I could just move in with you, maybe? If I could just sit quietly in the corner over there and watch you live? So, anyway, how was your day in the mountains? Biscuit, anyone?

They didn’t come home, but somebody did stop by.

I was just taking the biscuits out of the oven when the doorbell rang.

I jumped. Guiltily. I haven’t completely lost my mind. I know that you’re not meant to walk into someone else’s house and start making biscuits.

After the bell rang, someone started banging on the front door.

My first thought was that it was Patrick, something about the angry tone of the knocking, even though that didn’t make sense, because why wouldn’t he just walk straight in?

And then I thought maybe it was the police. Someone had seen me take the key and called them. A friendly neighbor, perhaps. Ellen is the sort to have a friendly neighbor.

I put down the tray and crept down the hallway, past Patrick’s boxes piled up all higgledy-piggledy. Poor Ellen; her house doesn’t have quite the same spiritual feel to it now, with all these dusty boxes. I wonder if she
hates it, or if she is above such earthly matters. If I know Patrick, they’ll be sitting there for a long time.

I looked out the side window near Ellen’s front door and I could see a man. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets and stuck his jaw out, like he was preparing for a confrontation. He was in his forties. There was something premium-looking about him, something that said money: Maybe it was the suit, or the longish, carefully tousled haircut, or just the way he was standing with his feet firmly planted, the stance of a man who was used to being in charge.

I was intrigued.

A customer in need of a hypnotic fix?

An ex-boyfriend of Ellen’s? He didn’t seem her type. I’m sure Patrick isn’t her type either—he’s too ordinary and blokey. She should be with a pale and interesting poet, and give me back my hale and hearty surveyor.

A lover?
Perhaps Patrick wasn’t the baby’s father
. That would be perfect. Could this visitor, this really quite angry-looking man, be a spanner in their works?

I opened the door.

L
isten to this, Madeline.”

Julia put her hand on Madeline’s arm and Ellen watched Madeline flinch slightly. It was Wednesday night and the three of them were out having dinner at a crowded Thai restaurant before they saw a movie. They were squashed together in a booth. The movie started at nine p.m. and it was seven-thirty now, and they’d only just managed to get their menus delivered. They were going to be late for the movie, which would irritate Madeline, while Julia would make a show of not letting it worry her, being the free and easy type that she wasn’t.

Julia and Madeline didn’t get on, and they only pretended to like each other for Ellen’s sake. As the “mutual friend,” Ellen normally made a point of seeing them separately, but she’d known that they both had wanted to see the new George Clooney movie, so it seemed silly not to ask the two of them.

Now she reminded herself not to do it again. Julia always seemed to want to make it clear to Madeline that she was the longer-standing friend,
bringing up stories from their school days, mentioning old friends and behaving in a slightly adolescent fashion. Madeline refused to take part in the I’m-the-better-friend-of-Ellen competition and instead took refuge in her role as the only mother among the three of them. She maintained a permanent distracted, harried expression, as if she was listening out for a child’s cry. At the moment she was eight months pregnant, so she was even worse than usual, with one hand permanently pressed to her belly. Now that Ellen was pregnant too, Madeline had the edge over Julia and she was using it to full advantage, constantly steering the conversation back to babies. As the only one drinking, Julia was working her way through a bottle of wine and fighting back by using every opportunity to imply that she adored her childfree existence and high-flying career.