The Hypnotist's Love Story (50 page)

“I thought he was dead,” said Maureen.

“So you thought yelling at me would bring me back to life.”

“I understand completely,” said Anne. “The fear makes you furious.”

“You’ll understand when you have your baby, Ellen,” said Maureen.

Ellen, who was actually looking forward to being the very opposite of her own mother, and fondly imagined herself soothing her child’s feverish brow with a gentle cool hand, said, “I’m sure I will.”

“Dad wasn’t mad at me when I broke my arm,” said Jack. “He was mad at Saskia.”

There was an instant strained silence around the table.

“That’s because it was Saskia’s fault,” said Patrick.

“It was an accident,” said Jack. “Actually,
you
were sort of pushing
her
.”

“Yes, darling, it was an accident, but what your dad means is that Saskia should not have been here in the middle of the night,” said Maureen.

“How’d you go with the police?” said George to Patrick.

“You told the police about Saskia!” Jack’s head whipped around to look accusingly at his father. “She’s not going to jail, is she?”

“She won’t go to jail,” said Patrick. “But you understand, mate, she can’t break into our house again. The police will just tell her that she can’t come anywhere near us anymore.”

“Right, but I guess she’ll still come and watch me play soccer, though,” said Jack.

Ellen drew in her breath.

“Good Lord,” said George.

“What are you talking about, Jack?” Patrick carefully placed his sausage sandwich back on the plate in front of him.

“She watches all my games,” said Jack.

“I’ve never seen her there,” said Patrick.

“You’ve got bad eyes,” said Jack dismissively. “She stands way off. Near a tree or whatever. She always wears this blue knitted hat, like a pancake.”

“Beret?” murmured Anne.

“Goodness, I think I knitted it for her,” said Maureen.

“If I see her anywhere near you again I’ll have her arrested,” said Patrick.

“You will not!” said Jack.

“I will.”

“If you do, I will never speak to you again.”

“Fine,” said Patrick. “Don’t!”

“Boys.” Maureen held out her hands to each of them helplessly.

Ellen’s phone began to ring.

“I’ll just—excuse me.”

She rushed into the kitchen with the phone. “Mary-Kate?”

“Yes, hi, Ellen. Right, they’re holding offon publication. The journalisthas agreed tohear your side of the storyfirst. And I get the impression she’s readyto dropthe whole thing. Mostjournalistsdo haveintegrity—andthis one ishating the idea that Ian Roman could be using her for somepersonal vendetta. Even if Ian Roman does rule her world.”

Ellen felt her whole body sag with relief.

“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t thank you enough, Mary-Kate.”

“No problem,” said Mary-Kate.

Ellen heard the deep rumble of a man’s voice in the background. “By the way, Alfred says to say hi.”

“Alfred?” said Ellen. “Alfred Boyle?”

Mary-Kate chuckled. Ellen didn’t think she’d ever heard her laugh before. “Don’t pretend to be so surprised, Ellen.”

Ellen laughed. A little nervously.

“Alfred said to tell you that he gave a speech to two hundred accountants today, and he had them in stitches. That’s really saying something. He made accountants laugh.”

“That’s great,” said Ellen.

“I’ll be in touch about where we go next with this,” said Mary-Kate. “But I expect once the journalist and editor know the full story, it will be shelved.”

“You’ll have to bill me for your work,” said Ellen. (Didn’t barristers charge by the minute?)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mary-Kate joyfully, and then she abruptly hung up.

Ellen dropped her head, closed her eyes and tapped the phone against her forehead. So her matchmaking with Mary-Kate and Alfred had paid off. She must remember to tell the journalist about it, if she ever got to speak to her again. Clinical hypnotherapist hypnotizes her patients to fall in love with each other. That would really add to her credibility.

“Everything OK?”

Ellen opened her eyes. Her mother was standing in front of her holding a salad bowl. “Thought I’d start clearing up. It’s getting a bit tense in there. I’m not surprised. This Saskia is clearly deranged.”

“Saskia is finished with us,” said Ellen. “I talked to her today.”

“Hypnotized her, did you?” said Anne smartly, but automatically, as if she was just doing it out of habit, and before Ellen could answer, she put the bowl down on the table and said, “Listen. I need to talk to you about something. About your father.”

“You’re getting married,” guessed Ellen.

She could just imagine the discreetly elegant wedding. Her mother would wear violet to match her eyes. There would be designer labels
galore, flutes of champagne held between manicured fingers. It would be the sort of wedding that made it into the society pages. Ellen’s face would ache from faking her smile.

“Will you have Pip and Mel as bridesmaids?” she said. “I could be flower girl! Your daughter as your flower girl. Your cute little pregnant flower girl.”

“Ellen.”

“My stepbrothers could be page boys. Giant page boys.”

“We broke up.”

“Oh, no!” The one time Ellen was enjoying being a bitch and it was entirely inappropriate and hurtful. (And, in fact, she would have been perfectly happy for her parents to be married! Their wedding would have been moving and lovely. What was wrong with her?)

“What happened?” she asked. He went back to his wife, of course. Or he moved on to a younger model. Or was it somehow Ellen’s fault? Did he not like Ellen? (Ah, listen to the Inner Child piping up for attention.)

“I broke it off,” said Anne. She sat down at the kitchen table and extracted a cherry tomato from the salad bowl.

“But why?” Ellen pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her mother. “You seemed—well, you seemed completely besotted.”

“I know,” said her mother. She looked at Ellen and gave a little half smile and shrug. “I was. Look, I’m utterly mortified.”

Ellen was momentarily distracted by the sound of Patrick’s voice rising in the dining room. “Can we please talk about something else other than Saskia? Like, I don’t know, Armageddon? Who wants to talk about Armageddon?”

“You don’t need to feel embarrassed,” she said to her mother.

“I’ve been such a twit,” said Anne. “With everything you’ve got going on in your life at the moment.” She inclined her head toward the dining room. “Getting married, new stepson, baby on the way, deranged stalker and what have you—and I decide to throw your father into the mix!”

“Mum, I’m a grown-up,”
said Ellen gravely, and extremely fraudulently, seeing as she’d thought exactly the same thing. “Tell me why you broke it off.”

“I’ve spent the last thirty-five years being in love with a memory,” said Anne. “It’s crazy, and I would have denied it, but every time I went out with anyone, I was comparing him to your father. Your father, whom I had never actually dated, whom I really didn’t even know that well. So of course, every man came up short.” She giggled. “In more ways than one.”

“Mother.” Ellen recoiled. “Please.”

“Sorry. So when David and I started dating again, I was deliriously happy. He was every bit as lovely as I recalled. Actually, let me make this clear. He
is
lovely. He still qualifies as the loveliest man I’ve ever met.”

“So? What’s the problem?” said Ellen.

“Well, I started noticing this feeling creeping over me after we’d spent more than an hour together. At first I couldn’t put a name to it, and then last week it hit me. I was bored.”

“Bored,” said Ellen. She was suddenly feeling very sorry for her father.

“Bored out of my mind,” confirmed Anne.

“Well, but that can happen—”

“No,” said Anne decidedly. “He’s not right for me. He never was right for me. He doesn’t have enough to
say
! And he has these periods of time where he literally does nothing. The other morning he sat in an armchair for twenty minutes, literally twenty minutes, without doing
anything.
Not reading. Not talking. Just staring at a tree. What’s that about?”

“Perhaps he was silently contemplating the beauty of nature,” offered Ellen. “Or just taking a few moments to meditate and be thankful for his life. Or he was practicing mindfulness—”

“It was a rhetorical question, Ellen. Honestly, I thought he’d lost brain function. Anyway, as the young people say so eloquently: whatever. I don’t care what he’s doing, I just know it drives me nuts. We will be friends, of course. It’s all perfectly amicable. And he says that he would love to see you again, if you’d like that.”

“That would be nice,” said
Ellen. Actually, the thought of meeting up with her father now seemed perfectly acceptable, even quite soothing. She thought of rainy Sunday afternoons as a child, when she would lie on a rug on the floor mesmerized by the raindrops sliding down the windowpane, and her mother would keep walking in and out of the room saying, “Ellen, what are you doing? Let’s go out! Let’s talk! Let’s
do
something.”

Perhaps she and her father could linger together, without the need to say a word. No need for awkward “getting to know you” conversations. They could just be. Father and daughter. And if they didn’t feel a thing for each other except a mild friendliness, then that would be perfectly fine.

“So, at the tender age of sixty-six,” said Anne, “I might be finally ready for a real relationship, now that I can let go of my silly obsession with a romance that never really was. I might even do a little online shopping for a new man. Apparently it’s the latest thing for the over-sixties. And look how successful it’s been for you!”

“Yes!” said Ellen. He would never love another woman as much as he loved Colleen. Maybe not that successful.

“Speaking of which”—Anne lowered her voice—“I’ve been meaning for a while to say that I’ve become very fond of Patrick. Really. Very fond. I took some time to warm to him—”

“He’s right there!” hissed Ellen.

“Well, that’s OK, I’m saying nice things about him. I like the way he looks at you. You’re right. Jon was entertaining, but he didn’t look at you the way Patrick looks at you.”

“How does Patrick look at me?” asked Ellen.

“And he’s a good father.”

“Am I interrupting?”

Ellen and her mother turned to see Maureen at the door, with her arms full of plates.

“I was just saying what a good father your son is.” Anne stood up and took some of the plates from her.

Maureen beamed. There was a sound of running footsteps and they heard Jack scream, “I hate you!”

“Fine!” shouted back Patrick. “Break your other arm for all I care!”

Maureen’s beam wavered. She got it back under control and began scraping leftover food from the plates with the edge of a knife.

“This windy weather really puts people on edge, doesn’t it? I wonder, is there a medical reason for that, Anne?”

I must have fallen asleep because it seemed like I just blinked my eyes and Tammy had materialized. She and Lance and Kate were sitting in a little semicircle of chairs next to my bed, eating chocolates.

Tammy had changed her hair from long and dark to short and strawberry blond. A mistake, I thought.

Lance and Tammy were talking excitedly to each other in peculiar accents, shrugging their shoulders and jutting out their chins.

“They’re trying to talk like Baltimore drug dealers,” explained Kate when she saw I’d woken up. “They’ve discovered they’re both obsessed with
The Wire
. Some weekends Lance talks like that for an entire
day
. Can you imagine? I mean, fine, if he actually did sound like a drug dealer, that might be quite sexy.”

“Tammy?” I said.

“Saskia, honey!” She stood up and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. She must have still been using the same fragrance as she had three years ago, because I was immediately taken back to a different time and place.

“It’s so good to see you!” she said. “But you’re meant to be sitting next to me in a bar, not lying in a hospital bed. Lance and Kate said you were sleepwalking and fell down some stairs? That’s terrible! How long have you been sleepwalking for?”

“Since I last saw you,” I said mysteriously—the sort of profound comment that Ellen would appreciate—but Tammy took it at face value.

“Really? Is there a cure? You know, I was thinking on the way here about the last time I saw you. You’d just had your heart broken by some guy. That surveyor? What was his name? Pete? Patrick? It’s been so long you probably don’t even remember the guy.”

Oh, how I laughed.