The Hypnotist's Love Story (9 page)

“And I think he’s going to tell me something profound and meaningful, and it turns out he just wants a quickie! With his son right
there.
Sex was the furthest thing from my mind!”

“It’s always the first thing on their mind,” said Ellen’s friend Madeline.

They were talking on the phone. Ellen was filing paperwork in her office and she could tell by the hissing and clattering that Madeline was cooking, probably something elegant and organic, and probably with a floral apron tied around her pregnant waist. Madeline was glowingly pregnant with her second child. She and Ellen had shared a flat when they were in their twenties, back when Madeline would have fallen about laughing at the thought of ever wearing a floral apron.

Ellen would have called Julia, but she’d found that Julia’s interest in hearing about Patrick had ever so slightly cooled as the relationship progressed. Even before Julia’s divorce, she had always been the sort of friend you called when things were going badly rather than when they were going well. Now that Patrick was officially Ellen’s “boyfriend,” there was just the tiniest hint of contempt in Julia’s voice when Ellen mentioned anything about him, unless it involved his crazy ex-girlfriend; she
loved
hearing about Saskia. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Ellen to be happy; it was just that she didn’t think there was much to say about happiness.

Madeline, on the other hand, was the sort of friend who cared deeply but was hopelessly inept when things were going badly, who panicked and changed the subject fast if someone’s voice so much as trembled with emotion.

Now Ellen frowned at the dismissive tone in Madeline’s voice. “That’s not true. That’s a cliché,” she said. “I’ve been out with men who never think about sex. Anyway, I’d just that moment had this revelation that I needed to stop thinking of him as a man, and think of him as an individual, as just another human being.”

“Just because he felt like sex doesn’t mean he’s not human.”

Madeline seemed to be missing the point.

“Yes, but with his son in the house?”

“Well, if you’re going to live with him, then you might have to get over that.”

“Don’t parents wait until their children are asleep?”

“Wasn’t the whole point of this story something to do with the expression on his face?”

“Yes, that’s right. So when I declined his charming offer, he got this
look
on his face, and I
think
it might have been a sulky look.”

“What do you mean you
think
?”

“Well, the expression was only there for a flash. I think those people who specialize in detecting lies call it a ‘micro-expression.’ After that, he was fine. We had a lovely dinner, and afterward we played Monopoly with his little boy and that was fun. But I kept thinking about that face he pulled, that micro-expression, and I thought: Is this a sign? Am I going to look back one day and say that was the moment I should have got out? Because that’s what micro-expressions do. They reveal your true self.”

“Ellen, this is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. The poor man is so enamored with you he wants sex every second of the day, and then when you turn him down, he shows the briefest look of disappointment—”

“I know, I know, I’m awful. Overanalytical. Hysterical. It’s just that I want this one to work, Madeline, I really want this one to work.”

“Well, of course you do,” said Madeline crisply.

So it’s serious. The hypnotist has met Jack. As far as I know, that’s the first woman he’s introduced to Jack since me.

I wonder what he thought of her.

She doesn’t really seem like a kid person. Too spiritual and floaty. Children like earthy, real people who get down on the floor and play with them. I can’t imagine someone who talks about “light filling your body” sitting in a sandbox.

I guess Jack is too big for sandboxes now, although it’s still there in their backyard. Sometimes, when Patrick is at work and Jack is at school, I go to the house and eat my lunch in the backyard. I sit there on the garden seat we bought on eBay, where I used to have my morning cup of tea, and I remember when this was my home and this was my backyard and this was my life.

I always told him we needed a padlock for that back gate.

I used to sit in that sandbox with Jack and we’d play with his Matchbox cars for hours. His dad did better sound effects than me, but I was more patient. Patrick was too much like a kid himself. He’d build this amazing racetrack through the sand, with bridges going over lakes, and then he’d get all frustrated when Jack suddenly decided to stand up and stomp on it. I’d say, “Patrick, he’s two years old.”

Jack looked so tall and lanky when he got out of the car at the hypnotist’s place. I was parked across the street. I just stayed there after my appointment with her. I’d had a feeling that Patrick was coming over for dinner. When she’d taken me upstairs, I’d smelled a garlic and wine sort of smell, like something marinating. I didn’t expect to see Jack come too. It gave me a shock. A sudden shock of indescribable pain, like when you’re a kid, and you’re hit on the nose with a basketball on a cold morning, and you
cannot believe
how much it hurts, and your friends all laugh and you want your mother so bad.

I don’t think Jack was especially excited about meeting the hypnotist. He didn’t look too happy. His shoulders were all slumped. I thought I saw him blowing his nose. I hope he doesn’t have the flu. It’s bad for people with underlying conditions like asthma.

Once, when he’d just turned three, and Patrick was away for work, Jack had an asthma attack in the middle of the night and I had to take him to Emergency. I can still remember the terror I felt seeing his little chest heaving as he tried to suck in enough air, and the way his beautiful green eyes fixed on mine, begging me to help him, and then sitting there with him on my lap, trying to stop him from pulling off that stupid little
plastic mask while they gave him Ventolin. The doctors and nurses all assumed I was his mother. “How is Mum coping?” “Does Mum need a cup of tea?”

It would have been stupid to have corrected them and said I was just his stepmother. “Does Stepmum need a cup of tea?”

Jack called me Sas, because that’s what Patrick called me. Each night when I went in to say good night, he’d take his dummy out of his mouth (we didn’t wean him off his dummy until he was nearly four, which was very bad; we were soft with him) and say, “I lub you, Sas,” and quickly pop his dummy back in, and every time I felt like my heart would just about explode out of my chest.

Jack was more than I’d ever hoped for, more than I’d ever dreamed.

The night he had the asthma attack, they finally let us go home when the sun was coming up. I didn’t want to put him in his cot, so I took him into our bed, and we both fell asleep. When I woke up, Patrick had got home from his trip, and he was just standing there watching us, with this look on his face, this look of tenderness and love and pride, and he said, “Hello, family.” I’ll never forget that look.

Two years later, three weeks after Jack started school, Patrick said, “I think it’s over.”

“You think what’s over?” I said cheerfully. That’s how unexpected it was. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. A TV series? The summer?

He meant us. We were over.

T
here were no more “micro-expressions,” or if there were, she didn’t catch them. Her doubts drifted away like candle smoke.

The first two weeks of July were glorious that year: shiny, blue-skied winter days as crisp and crunchy as apples. It was the perfect weather for a new relationship, for holding hands on public transport, for the sort of behavior that makes the recently brokenhearted want to weep and everyone else roll their eyes.

Ellen collected memories: a remarkably lustful kiss pressed up against a brick wall like teenagers outside the Museum of Contemporary Art; a Sunday morning breakfast when she’d made him laugh so hard other people in the café turned to look; a mildly drunken game of gin rummy that ended in bed; coming home from yoga to find an enormous bunch of flowers lying on her doorstep with a note that said:
For my girl.

They stopped being quite so careful with each other. “Jesus,” said Patrick the first time he saw Ellen polish off a giant steak.

“Aren’t you meant to be a good Catholic boy?” said Ellen.

“I wasn’t using the Lord’s name in vain. I was saying, Jesus, did you see what that woman just ate? I thought I was dating a hippie, dippy vegan chick, not a bloodthirsty carnivore.”

“Hurry up or I’ll eat yours.”

There was no sign of Saskia for a while.

“Maybe I’ve scared her off,” said Ellen, who was still idly researching the psychology of stalking whenever she had a spare moment.

“Maybe!” Patrick patted her arm in the kindly, worried fashion of a doctor responding to a terminal patient who says, “Maybe I’ll be the exception to the rule.”

The words “I love you” began to hover in Ellen’s thoughts, like a song lyric she couldn’t get out of her head. She remembered reading somewhere, probably in a stupid magazine article, that it was fatal for the woman to say “I love you” first. Which was the most sexist, superstitious thing she’d ever heard … but still, there was no rush. They’d only been dating for six weeks. The right moment would present itself.

She thought back over her previous “I love you” history.

She’d been the first to say “I love you” to Andy. He’d looked momentarily terrified before he quickly, dutifully said that he loved her too.

She also said it first to Edward, after drinking a particularly delicious strawberry daiquiri. She hadn’t really meant it, to be honest. She meant that she loved strawberry daiquiris.

Actually, now that she thought about it, she always took the lead. She’d written “I love you” on Jon’s thirty-eighth birthday card, and he’d taken forty-two humiliating days to say it back.

It might be safer all round if Patrick said it first.

And then he did.

He stayed at her place one weeknight, and in the morning he was
running late for an early appointment. He leaned over the bed, kissed her cheek and said, “OK, gotta go, love you,” before rushing off.

He’d said it in the exact same casual voice that he used on the phone to tell Jack that he loved him. It was clearly a slip of the tongue.

She was pondering this, half amused, when she heard the sound of his footsteps pounding up the spiral staircase. She sat up in bed as he reappeared at her doorway.

“Sorry,” he said breathlessly, his hands gripping the doorjamb. “That was a mistake. Well, no, not a mistake! I was waiting for the perfect moment with moonlight and rainbows or whatever, and now I’ve blown it. Fool.” He slapped his forehead.

He came and sat down on the bed next to her, and looked at her in a way that she didn’t think she’d ever been looked at before, by anyone, lover or friend, as if nobody else had ever concentrated that hard.

He said, “I would like to make something very clear.”

“All right.” Ellen made her face serious.

“I am making this, er, declaration on the record. I am of course prepared to put it in writing if necessary.”

“Right.”

He cleared his throat. “Ellen. I love you. I officially love you.”

“I love you too,” said Ellen. “Officially, that is.”

“Right. Good then. Well, this has all worked out extremely well then.”

He held out his hand and they shook hands, as if at the conclusion of a satisfactory business deal, except that before she could let go, he pulled her to him, rolled her on to her back and kissed her hard.

They sat back up, grinned idiotically at each other and then Patrick looked at his watch. “OK, so this sounds bad—”

“That’s right. Love me and leave me.”

He kissed her again and left. She lay back down and felt drenched with happiness.
This
was how love was meant to feel: simple and peaceful and funny. Obvious. There was nothing to analyze. It seemed to her that she
had never loved or been loved like this before. All those other times had been a wishy-washy imitation of the real thing.

Just imagine if she’d gone her whole life without knowing that!

(Also, not that it mattered, it was just something interesting to note for future reference:
He
said it first.)