Ellen didn’t say anything for a moment. She felt an overwhelming wave of tiredness at the thought. She would have to pack a bag. One of those big broad-rimmed hats that girls wore on romantic long weekends. She didn’t know where her sunglasses were at the moment. They had been missing for days. The lost sunglasses seemed like an insurmountable problem.
“You know, cocktails by the pool, sleeping in, lying on the beach,” Patrick continued. He hesitated and sounded unsure of himself. “Or I guess when you live by the beach, maybe going somewhere like Noosa doesn’t sound so exciting?”
Ellen roused herself. Her lovely new boyfriend was suggesting a weekend away. She should be thrilled.
“No, no, it sounds perfect. Just what we both need.”
Relief smoothed out Patrick’s voice. “I already asked Mum if she could take Jack for the weekend and she’s fine with it. Oh, my whole family loves you, by the way. My brother said you were hot. I said hands off, kid.”
“Did he?” Ellen was flattered. Simon was so young! Take that, Jon.
What would Patrick’s family think if they knew she was pregnant? She remembered the crucifix hanging over the television. They were old-fashioned Catholics, Patrick had said. Presumably in this day and age they would assume they were sleeping together, but they probably didn’t want to have it shoved in their faces quite so soon. Would his mother suddenly call her a wanton hussy?
“Can you take next Monday off?”
“I’ve got a few appointments, but I should be able to move them.”
“Good. I’m really looking forward to it. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
When she hung up, she headed straight for the plate of roast potatoes to throw them away.
She would tell him on the weekend. It made sense. A neutral location; not his place or hers. They would be lying on a king-size bed, tangled in crisp white hotel sheets, without any of the clutter of their day-to-day lives, and as a result they would come up with a correspondingly clean, elegant solution.
“Patrick, my love,” she would say, with the white sheet pulled up over her br**sts and tucked under her arms like in the movies, her hair sexily tousled. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
As she straightened up from scraping the potatoes into the bin, she caught sight of her missing sunglasses sitting on top of the fridge.
Yes, everything was going to be just fine.
I drove straight to work after my appointment with the hypnotist. When I walked into the office, I moved carefully and slowly, because I was in a million pieces and any tiny movement might have made me disintegrate like a special effect in a movie.
“You look like you’re in pain,” said my boss. He thinks I’m seeing a physio for a bad back. I chose this deliberately because he had problems with his back all through last year, and now he finds anything to do with bad backs a fascinating topic of discussion.
I said I was in pain, and then we talked about slipped discs and stretching and anti-inflammatory tablets before he remembered he was late for a meeting.
Then I worked.
I answered e-mails, returned phone calls, cleared my in-tray and wrote the first five pages of a report.
I worked well. I was crisp and efficient and diligent. I am highly respected in my professional world. I wonder what my colleagues would think if they knew I spent my lunch break crying in my ex-boyfriend’s office. I wonder what they would think if they knew that underneath that veneer I am broken.
I gave him a letter I had written sitting outside the hypnotist’s office. It was full of rage and probably didn’t make much sense.
It was pointless because I have a feeling he doesn’t read my letters anymore.
And that’s the problem with this rage. There’s nowhere for it to go, because he no longer sees me. It’s like I am smashing my head against an enormous, impassive silent cliff face, over and over, until I’m dripping with blood. Nothing I do will change his opinion of me. Nothing I do will make him see me again.
And I can’t seem to accept that.
If he were dead, like my mother, then I would understand. He would be gone. But he’s not gone. He’s still there. He’s living his life as if I died, like his wife. He seems to think he is perfectly entitled to move on, to replace me, to make another woman pregnant.
If somebody would just tell me what to do to make the pain and the rage stop, I would do it.
It’s strange. Sometimes when I’m sitting in the hypnotist’s office with all that light bouncing around the walls, I want to ask her. “Ellen,” I want to say, “please help me.”
She would, I think.
Chapter 10
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On Thursday night, while Ellen was trying to pack for her weekend away, there was a knock at the door.
“What happened?” said Ellen, when she opened the door and saw her mother holding a bottle of wine and smiling socially as if she was arriving for a dinner party.
“I’m ‘dropping by,’” said Anne. “Stop looking so panicked. I had dinner in the area, and I made an impromptu decision to stop and see my daughter. For heaven’s sake, you’ve gone completely white. It’s not that unprecedented, is it?”
“Yes it is,” said Ellen, standing back so she could come in. “You don’t drop by.”
“I can’t believe you still haven’t got rid of this wallpaper,” said Anne, running her fingertips disdainfully down the wall in the hallway. “I’d be ripping it off—”
“And painting it a nice neutral color,” finished Ellen. “I know. You’ve told me, and I’ve told you, I like it. It reminds me of Grandma.”
“Exactly,” murmured Anne. She walked into the kitchen and winced as she always did at the orange worktops as if she’d never seen them before. It was all some sort of performance to prove how she’d moved on. Her mother had enjoyed a perfectly idyllic childhood in this perfectly lovely, spacious house, on the beach, mind you, but for some reason she liked to behave as though she’d spent her childhood in a white-trash ghetto and she now lived in Paris.