The Hypnotist's Love Story (56 page)

I remembered the Anzac biscuits I’d baked in Ellen’s kitchen and I shuddered at the memory. I picked up the mail to distract myself.

“Apparently Janet’s
brother has taken a shine to you,” said Tammy. “So we’re going to match you up at this party.”

“Janet’s brother?” She was talking nonsense. “I’ve never even met her brother.” As she talked I sorted my mail: Bills. Junk mail. More bills.

“He met you once on your way out,” said Tammy. “He thinks he’s seen you before, at Avalon Beach, boogie boarding? Could that be right?”

I picked up a letter addressed to me in neat handwriting that was vaguely familiar. I noticed there was a strange bulge in the bottom right-hand corner of the envelope.

“I tried boogie boarding a few times,” I said. I flicked the envelope back and forth between my fingertips as I remembered that woolly-haired man at the beach, the way his shadow fell over me that morning when I lay in the sand in my red dress, the day after I’d turned up at Patrick’s parents’ house when Ellen was there.

Then I thought back to the man carrying the wine, coming up the path of the next-door neighbor’s as I’d left for the pretend fortieth birthday party. I remembered how he’d looked at me as if he knew me.

I morphed together the two images from my memory and saw that they could easily be the same person. It gave me a peculiar feeling, as if I needed to go back and examine my whole life and look for all the things I’d missed.

“But he’s got a girlfriend,” I said, remembering the way he’d put his arm around the woman he was with, and how bereft I’d felt when I’d seen it.

“He just broke up with someone,” said Tammy. “He’s back on the market. You’ll have to move fast before he’s snapped up by someone else.”

“What’s he do for a living?” said Kate. “Or is that a superficial question? What are his dreams, his hopes?”

“Wait for it,” said Tammy dramatically. “He’s a …
carpenter
.”

“He is
not
.” Kate dropped her knitting.

“He
is
!”

“
Be still my beating heart!”

I laughed at them. I’d forgotten that sort of laughter. Silly, girly, helpless giggling. I thought I’d grown too old for giggling, but actually you never
really grow out of it. I should have known that. When Mum was in her seventies she used to meet up with her old tennis club once a month for lunch. I was staying with her once when it was her turn to host, and I remember walking in the front door and hearing
peals
of laughter coming from the living room. They sounded like teenagers.

I’d forgotten that the best part of dating wasn’t the actual dating at all but the talking about it: the analysis of potential new boyfriends with your girlfriends.

“Can I come to this party?” said Kate. “So I can meet the carpenter?”

“Of course,” said Tammy. “I wonder if we could think up an excuse so he’ll need to do some actual
carpentry
at the party?”

“Like putting up a bookshelf?”

“Ideally something that makes Saskia seem helpless and vulnerable.”

“So much for feminism,” I said.

Kate snapped her fingers. “A disabled ramp! For her wheelchair!”

“They say I’ll be walking by the time I go home,” I said. They were going to try to get me on crutches next week.

“Oh,” said Kate, disappointed. “Are you sure?”

I forgot about the envelope with the familiar handwriting until later that night after they’d left. I turned it over and saw the sender’s details on the back:

Mrs. Maureen Scott.

Patrick’s mother. Of course. She was like my own mother. A card sender. When I was with Patrick, Maureen had sent countless cards for the smallest of reasons.
Dear Patrick, Saskia and Jack, Thank you for the lovely evening on Saturday night. We thoroughly enjoyed Saskia’s “Thai Beef Salad.” It was delicious.

Why was she writing to me now? To tell me, enough was enough? You broke my grandson’s arm, you evil bitch?

I opened it. The pale purple stationery with a border of lavender sprigs looked familiar. She’d probably been using the same notepaper for years.

I read:

The card showed a picture of a giraffe sitting up in bed with a thermometer in its mouth. Jack had written:

At the bottom of the envelope was a marble.

I held it up to the light and studied the intricate, intertwined paint splashes of color, and my eyes blurred.

I cried for such a long time. There were no wrenching, painful sobs, just quiet, cleansing tears, like a long, soft rainfall on a Sunday afternoon.

When the tears finally stopped, I blew my nose and turned off the light, and I slept more deeply than I think I’d slept in years. I don’t think I dreamed at all. It was like I was an animal that had gone into hibernation for the winter. Waking up was like emerging from a deep, dark cave into the fresh spring air.

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and smelled undercooked bacon and bad coffee. Sally, the wonderfully grumpy aide who brought in my breakfast most mornings, was standing at the end of my bed. She dumped the tray on my table with her usual ungracious clatter and raised her eyebrows at me.

“Sleep well?” she said.

“Wonderfully,” I said.

Y
es, that is my nose, and yes, it’s very funny. Now could you focus?”

The baby let go of Ellen’s nose and placed her palm over Ellen’s mouth.

Ellen pretended to eat it. “Umm, umm.”

The baby grinned. She turned her head and fastened her mouth back around Ellen’s nipple, sucking with greedy concentration, one finger lifted in the air, as if to say: Hold that thought. I’ll be right back with you.

Ellen closed her eyes briefly as she felt the tingling warm rush of a thousand tiny magnets pulling down the milk. Six months ago she’d never felt this; now it was as familiar a sensation as a sneeze.

Except that every time, it still felt marginally extraordinary.

For a few minutes Grace fed, her tiny hand circling as if she were conducting a symphony. She tipped her head back and her eyelids fluttered as though the music was touching her soul.

“Where’s my little girl?”

At the sound of her father’s voice, the baby swung her head so fast in his direction she wrenched on Ellen’s nipple and droplets of milk flew.

“
Hello
, my little Gracie girl, hello, hello,
hello
!” Patrick crouched down on the floor next to where Ellen was sitting. The baby crowed and gurgled and wriggled in an ecstasy of love. Patrick held out his hands and looked up at Ellen for approval.

“It’s OK. She was just snacking really.”

Patrick took the baby into his arms and buried his face in her neck. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a yummy, yummy baby.”

Ellen refastened her bra and the buttons of her shirt, watching Patrick.

“Good Lord, I’ve never seen such a besotted father,” Anne had said the previous night after watching him play with Grace. She sounded mildly disapproving, even cranky. Ellen wondered if it was regret that Ellen had missed out on a besotted daddy, or envy because Anne had been a single mother, or if she thought there was something unmanly or unseemly about Patrick’s behavior.

“Sorry.” Patrick stood up with the baby on his hip and kissed the top of Ellen’s head. “Hello, you.”

“Oh, yes, don’t mind me.” Ellen shrugged.

She didn’t think it was unmanly. She couldn’t get enough of seeing Patrick interact with Grace. The very first moment she’d been wheeled back into her hospital room and seen him cradling the new baby to his bare chest (the nurses had told him to give Grace skin-to-skin contact while Ellen was in recovery, and so he’d unbuttoned his shirt and tucked her up against his bare chest like a sleepy koala), she’d felt such a powerful rush of feeling—something like lust—except not. It was just like the breastfeeding, an entirely new sensation. She wondered if it was biology: the satisfaction of seeing your mate bond with your offspring, so you knew that he would be likely to stick around and keep clubbing lions and tigers for you. Or was it because she was identifying with Grace, and Patrick was filling Ellen’s repressed need for paternal love?

Whatever it was, she was grateful for it. Now all that fuss over whether or not Patrick still had feelings for Colleen seemed so silly. Ellen looked back tenderly and condescendingly at herself a year ago: all that unnecessary drama! There was enough love to go around for everyone.

There was even enough love to cope with last Monday morning’s phone call from Harriet to say that Jon’s new wife was pregnant with twins.

(Nearly enough love anyway. It helped to imagine how badly Jon would cope with sleep deprivation. He’d always liked his sleep. She hoped his twin babies would be healthy and lively, particularly at three a.m.)

After Harriet’s phone call it had occurred to her how rarely she thought about her ex-boyfriends now. Gracie’s arrival had kicked them clean out of her head. It used to be that a big part of her satisfaction with her love for Patrick was because it compared so favorably to her feelings for her previous partners. It was like she’d entered their relationship in a permanent contest with all her past relationships.
Yes, yet again, we’re the winners! Look at our superior sex life! Look at how happy we are!

Except no one was watching (not anymore) and no one cared.

Now her love for Patrick was just a fact, an intrinsic part of her life, as if it had always been so.

She did sometimes wonder if all this blissful contentment might be due to the fact that breastfeeding released the “love hormone”—oxytocin—which increased trust and empathy and reduced fear.

Oh, well. She was going to breastfeed for as long as Grace wanted. (“Promise me you won’t be one of those freaky hippie mothers still feeding her when she starts school,” said Anne. “What’s wrong with that?” asked Ellen innocently.)

Grace Lily Scott, named in honor of her maternal great-grandmothers, was born on Valentine’s Day by a planned C-section. A natural birth wasn’t an option because of the baby’s “low-lying placenta.” For a while there, that had seemed like the end of the world. Ellen had always imagined herself having a drug-free, natural labor, using the hypnosis skills she’d
successfully taught so many other mothers-to-be. It had never occurred to her that she might not even get to
try
a natural birth.

“Yes, I can see you’d be upset,” said Julia at the time. (She had just recently moved in with Stinky and was incandescent with happiness, due also to the news that her ex-husband’s new wife had left him for another man: karma of the most satisfying sort.) “It’s because a cesarean doesn’t fit with your brand identity. You should be having a home birth with chanting and candles and incense.”

“It’s not exactly that,” sniffed Ellen, although Julia was exactly right.

“I always knew you’d be too posh to push,” said Madeline, before admitting that she was just jealous, because her sixteen-hour labor to bring little Harry into the world wasn’t exactly one of her favorite memories. (Madeline had also recently admitted that the reason she never asked Ellen about her hypnotherapy work was because she thought Ellen didn’t consider her “spiritual or deep enough” to understand. Ellen had been astonished.)

“Labor doesn’t make you a mother, darling,” said Patrick’s mother.

“If
only
you were born a hundred years ago, when you could have gone through days of natural labor before bleeding naturally to death,” said Ellen’s mother.

Of course, in the end, it hadn’t mattered. She’d used self-hypnosis to help keep her blood pressure stable through the surgery and there had been no complications. “Your wife is the most calm, serene patient I’ve ever had,” said the anesthetist to Patrick. “You should see her when she’s ninja fighting,” replied Patrick.

Ellen had stayed in her own peaceful little zone until the obstetrician held up her baby, at which point she’d gasped for air like she’d just been pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool, and everyone got concerned, and she couldn’t speak properly to tell them she was perfectly fine, it was just that— Oh my God, did you see, that’s an actual
baby
!

Apparently, while her conscious mind had been reading books and
setting up a nursery, her subconscious mind had been thinking she was giving birth to a fish, or a teddy bear, or something other than a baby.

“What are we going to do while Mummy is busy hypnotizing?” said Patrick now to Grace. “Do you want to go down to the beach with me and your big brother? Or just hang out and shoot the breeze?”

Grace launched into a long conversation in baby talk, her big eyes fixed on Patrick. She had inherited Ellen’s mother’s violet eyes. Ellen was very vain about Gracie’s eyes, deliberately dressing her in colors that would make them even more startling. She had literally never been out in public without someone stopping to compliment her on them, although each time she would act surprised and flattered as if it was the first time someone had noticed. “They come from her grandma,” she’d say modestly.