The Hypnotist's Love Story (39 page)

Ellen knew that she didn’t love Patrick with that same ferocity. Actually, she’d never loved anyone that much. She would never break into anyone’s house. She’d never be so overcome by a feeling that she’d break a law, or do anything that was socially unacceptable. She could hear Julia and Madeline saying,
That’s a good thing, you fool! That’s sanity! That’s maturity!

She sighed and reached out to turn the key in the ignition, and then she dropped her hand back in her lap. A young couple walked by on the pavement outside the car. They were arguing over something. Suddenly the girl turned on her heel and walked away, making a flicking motion with her hand. The boy watched her go. Follow her, thought Ellen. That’s what she wants you to do. But he clenched his jaw, shrugged, shoved his hand in his pockets and walked away from her.

She thought about everything she’d said to her friends at dinner that night and everything she’d left out.

All those years she’d sanctimoniously told clients that “relationships are hard work,” she’d never truly understood the truth of what she was saying.

(In fact, she’d probably secretly thought that relationships were hard work for other people, not for her, not with her knowledge and skills and emotional intelligence. Oh, the conceit!)

She and Patrick had made up after their trip to the mountains, of course, later that night. The relief was exquisite, almost worth the argument.

“It was my fault,” Ellen had said nobly.

“It was absolutely my fault,” said Patrick, and he’d explained about a problem he was having at work: a client who was refusing to pay a big bill. Also, he’d seen Saskia waiting outside in her car when they left for the mountains. Patrick said, “I think I was subconsciously taking out my stress on you.” He was trying his best to speak her language, which was sort of adorable.

Then he’d been horrified to learn that she’d had to cancel her coffee with Julia to stay home with Jack.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. “That’s crazy!”

“I don’t know,” said Ellen. “I guess I just wanted to be like a proper mother.”

“You
are
a proper mother,” said Patrick. “I love the way you are with him. You couldn’t be any better. I should never have assumed you were free.”

“Well, I guess I should have told you earlier.”

“Shut up, woman. I’m taking the fall for this one,” said Patrick, and he’d spent the next twenty minutes rubbing her feet.

There was no way she was going to mention Saskia’s biscuits then. The foot rubbing would have ended instantly, while he paced and fretted and swore.

And later that night on the day of their trip to the mountains he’d actually moved two of the boxes. He’d dragged them into the dining room, leaving what looked like the tire marks of a monster truck right across her grandmother’s carpet. Ellen had a vision of her grandmother’s horror-struck face, remembering all the times she’d spent on her hands and knees scrubbing away at some tiny spot visible only to her eyes.

Sorry, Grandma
.

The rest of the boxes were still there. They had a settled, slumped look about them now. It was becoming impossible to imagine them moved.

Now she turned on the ignition and switched on the headlights, illuminating the street in front of her.

The boy she’d seen earlier was running back along the street, his chin down, his arms pumping like he was on a football field. Yes! Ellen felt a tingle. He was running back after his girlfriend to swoop her up into his arms and bury his face in her hair. How lovely.

Or perhaps he was going back to knock her teeth out. Life wasn’t always as romantic as it seemed. She pulled out into the traffic.

Like, for example, you would think that meeting your father for the first time ever would be an occasion filled with tender, tremulous emotion.

Monday lunchtime had been such a mistake. Why in the world had she thought that daytime would be better than night? It was so obvious that dinner would have been more appropriate. They had ended up meeting at a café in North Sydney, because all three of them had various appointments around the area that day and it seemed to make sense. The problem was that it made the lunch feel like just another appointment in their day, an errand to be crossed off their list. They were making small talk like business acquaintances do before someone takes out their notepad and says, “Right, let’s get started.”

Also, the lighting was all wrong. It was too sunny and real. She didn’t want to notice the minuscule black dots of hair on her father’s upper lip. She didn’t want to see the pores on his nose, or the glimpses of pink mottled scalp beneath his hair. She didn’t want to see the sauce from his Moroccan chicken wrap on his lip. She certainly didn’t want to see her mother gaily wiping it away with her serviette! (Her mother! So soft and accommodating and feminine. At one point in the conversation, she’d actually fiddled with her hair.)

Ellen’s nausea hadn’t helped either. It really colored the way she saw the world. A horrible beige color. It seemed to get better at night. Why hadn’t she remembered that?

When she’d walked into the café, it had reminded her of Internet
dating: that intensely peculiar feeling of searching the room for the face of a stranger, a stranger whom you were imagining as a potential life partner.
Could I imagine kissing you, waking up with you, arguing with you?
Except that there was no escape clause with this meeting, because it didn’t actually matter what she thought of him. She wouldn’t be able to go back online and choose another potential father.

Her eyes had skimmed right past him at first. He was just another one of the ubiquitous gray-haired businessmen in good suits who filled the café. And then she saw her mother sitting opposite him. She almost hadn’t recognized her. She was used to seeing her mother with Mel and Pip, the three of them making a minor spectacle of themselves: talking and laughing louder than anyone else. Her mother seemed somehow diminished sitting opposite this gray-haired man. Instead of sitting back in her chair, with perfect posture like a queen, she was leaning forward, both her forearms resting on the table, her head tilted at a subservient angle.

When she saw Ellen, she sat up abruptly, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong, and then she smiled and waved, and Ellen saw pride, followed almost instantaneously by fear, cross her face.

David, her father, stood up as Ellen walked toward them, and kissed her graciously on both cheeks, in the way that men of a certain age and income level did these days. (“The kissing thing has got out of control in this city lately,” Madeline had said tonight at dinner. “Next thing you know, you’ll have to kiss the checkout chick good-bye as you’re picking up your groceries.”)

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ellen,” he’d said, and then as they sat down he said, more formally, “You’re a very welcome surprise in my life.” But at the moment he said it, a waitress appeared, talking over the top of him, tossing down laminated menus on their table, and then he obviously wasn’t sure if Ellen had heard him and he didn’t know if he should say it again, and Ellen was too busy asking if the waitress could bring some plain bread as quickly as possible, please, so the moment passed for her to
reassure him and to say that he was a welcome surprise in her life too. That tiny little moment of social awkwardness had caused his urbane façade to slip a little, and that had given her the squirmy feeling of seeing something she shouldn’t have seen, as though she’d suddenly noticed that he was wearing a toupee.

After that they’d stuck to the small talk. They chatted about the weekend away in the Whitsundays (Glorious! Amazing! Her mother’s voice was so shrill. She sounded like someone else’s mother) and the play they’d seen, about what it was like for David to be living back in Sydney after all these years. He was an orthopedic surgeon and planned to practice for only a few more years before he retired.

“Then I might buy a boat and sail around the world for a year,” he said. He looked at Anne. “Fancy being my first mate?”

Anne glowed. “As long as there’s an espresso machine onboard.”

Every now and then Ellen would think, These are my parents. I’m out having lunch with my parents. She imagined meeting a friend, or a client, someone who didn’t know her history. “This is my mum and dad.”

How extraordinarily ordinary.

Her father had asked her lots of searching questions about hypnotherapy, with elaborately casual references to articles he’d recently read. It was obvious that he’d spent some time researching hypnotherapy specifically for this meeting, which was touching, almost painfully so. Ellen got a prickling sensation behind her eyes as he listened so courteously and attentively to her answers.

It was also obvious that he was relatively open-minded on the subject of “alternative therapies,” especially for a surgeon of his age and background. Her mother didn’t make any of her normal sharp comments. She even made some vaguely complimentary remarks. “Ellen often has a waiting list, you know,” she told David, and a few minutes later, in a doctor-to-another-doctor tone: “Apparently she’s had some quite good results with idiopathic pain management.”

Although you’ve never once referred a patient to me, Mum
. Did her mother feel she needed to sell Ellen to him? As if Anne was a single mother and her kid was part of the package, like Jack was part of Patrick’s package.

David spoke about his two sons with a father’s casual tenderness; just using their names caused him to smile involuntarily.

“Do they have children yet?” asked Ellen. She was refusing to think too hard about the fact that these two strange men—one was in real estate and the other was in marketing—two men, a few years younger than her, living on the other side of the world, presumably with English accents and English complexions, were her half-brothers. It was like hearing that the imaginary friends of your childhood had actually existed all along. When she was a child she was always asking her mother if her father had other children, and her mother would answer, depending on her mood, airily or tersely, “Probably.”

She had created sisters and brothers in her imagination: a sexy older brother who wore a leather jacket and rode a motorbike and had lots of handsome friends, a younger sister who adored her, an older sister who lent her makeup. She’d grown out of it, of course. There was really no necessity for two younger brothers now. She was busy. She had enough trouble keeping up with her own friends. What was she meant to do: look them up on Facebook?

“No grandchildren yet,” said David. “Callum is married, but his wife doesn’t seem too interested in having children, and Lachlan seems to be settling into bachelorhood.” He stopped and frowned. “So this”—he made an awkward sweeping motion with his teaspoon toward Ellen’s stomach—“so this is my first grandchild!”

Then he flushed slightly as though he’d overstepped the line.

“Yes,” said Ellen, trying to be generous.

“Who would have thought we’d be grandparents,” murmured Ellen’s mother, and Ellen watched as her parents (her
parents
!) exchanged secretive, loaded looks.

Throughout the lunch Ellen had stared at her father’s features, searching for evidence of their shared DNA. She noted the small ears and good teeth that her mother had put on his list of attributes. (She couldn’t see any evidence of his “strange sense of humor,” but that was probably because he was nervous. They all were. None of the three of them were really being themselves.) David must have been covertly studying her too, because at one point he suddenly said, “I think you have my mother’s eyes.”

That was the one time when she hovered on the edge of feeling something momentous: A sense of loss for everything that could have been? The family she never knew? Grandparents were her soft spot.

“Your mother who read tarot cards?” said Ellen.

He looked startled. “That’s right. She did. It was a funny hobby of hers. How in the world did you—”

“Your mother read my cards once,” said Anne quickly. (Presumably David didn’t know about the scoring system.) “Don’t you remember? She told me she saw a journey to far-off lands in my future. I think she was hoping I would take a long journey far away from you. She didn’t like me much.”

“I think she saw you as a threat.” David smiled. “She was fond of Jane.”

“Was Jane your wife?” said Ellen, and then she’d flushed, because his wife had been the woman he’d cheated on when Ellen was conceived and Ellen felt weirdly culpable.

David cleared his throat. “Yes.” He lifted his cappuccino to his mouth. Ellen’s mother tapped her teaspoon against the rim of her saucer. At the table next to them, two women were looking at a laptop together and speaking passionately about “poor response rates.”

“My mother died in 1998,” said David. “She would have been fond of you. She would have been very interested in your choice of career.”

“She might not have approved of my existence,” said Ellen, and smiled, to show that he didn’t need to worry, none of this really mattered to her, she was not a mixed-up teenager, that it was all such a long time ago.

“Still,” said her father. He chewed on his lip. “Still…”

He glanced at his watch. “I must run. This was a pleasure, Ellen. I hope we can do it again. And of course, I’d like to meet, perhaps, your husband-to-be, ah, Patrick, isn’t it? That is, if you would like that.”

Oh, the awful strangeness of it all! It was just like the end of an Internet date, one where the man was trying to ascertain her interest in a second date, when he was pretty sure he had no chance but thought it might be worth a shot anyway.

“Of course!” said Ellen, all false smiles, in Internet date mode.

He’d kissed them both and left, stopping at the counter to swiftly, efficiently pay their bill. He was clearly a man who always automatically paid the bill.

“So, what did you think?” asked Anne, her eyes on David’s back as he left the café. He didn’t look back. He was looking at the screen of his iPhone as he walked. There was something about the look in her mother’s beautiful violet eyes that reminded Ellen of the expression on Patrick’s face at Colleen’s grave. Was it a yearning look? It made her feel grumpy.