The Hypnotist's Love Story

Ellen walks on the beach and reflects on her previous relationships. She felt she was pretending to be in love with Andy. She was in love and had imagined a future with Edward. She’d adored Jon and he had “pulverized her heart” (22). She thinks about how odd and abrupt breakups can be, then wonders about Patrick’s stalker, Saskia.

Ellen’s grandparents, who owned the house where Ellen now lives, were together for 63 years. She feels like, given her job, she should be great at relationships, and fears she isn’t. She doesn’t want to be like her mother, who raised Ellen alone. Her grandparents’ house is somewhat outdated in its furnishings, but Ellen likes it. She finds a white stone on the beach and decides to keep it, feeling it can become a wellness stone. She acknowledges, “You weren’t meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love” (25), but she feels happy.

Saskia watches Ellen and Patrick leave the movie theater and concludes they’ve slept together. She remembers how Patrick always took his wife Colleen’s opinions so seriously because she died young. Saskia leaves Patrick a letter on the windshield of his car.

Ellen enjoys a picnic with Patrick under the Harbour Bridge. She recalls how Jon always deprecated her work as a hypnotherapist and made Ellen doubt her abilities and her worth. Patrick seems interested and respectful. Ellen performs a test of his suggestibility and finds he is a good subject.

He startles, thinking he heard something, and Ellen is slightly thrilled “at the thought of Patrick’s stalker secretly observing them” (31). He mentions how, when Colleen was sick, people told her to think positively, as if she could beat cancer with her mind. Patrick illustrates what he does as a surveyor by drawing a map, and Ellen says it’s the most beautiful map she’s ever seen.

Saskia tried following them on their date, but lost them in traffic. She watches TV and looks inside the box of memories, which contains a card, a photo of her playing with Jack, and a map Patrick drew, which Saskia said was the most beautiful map she’d ever seen.

As they sit in the sauna after swimming, Ellen tells her friend Julia about Patrick’s stalker. Ellen reflects on how good it feels to be in love and feels compassion for Saskia. Julia is very beautiful, but she was hurt by her ex-husband’s infidelity. Julia says Saskia needs to pull herself together, then admits, when she was 17, she used to call up the girl that the boy she liked started dating. Julia says, “I felt as if I didn’t exist anymore. Ringing her up somehow made me exist. It was like an addiction” (41-2). Ellen thinks that Patrick’s being a widower does complicate things, but this gives Ellen an opportunity to demonstrate her professional skills.

Ellen is nervous when Patrick tells her he will bring Jack over for dinner. She doesn’t feel comfortable around children but wants Jack to like her. Her client, Rosie, who is marrying a wealthy, prominent man, admits she’s still smoking. Ellen induces a hypnotic trance and Rosie admits she doesn’t want to marry Ian.

Ellen meets Jack, who is eight. Jack is casual, but Patrick is nervous. He says Ellen is the first woman he’s introduced Jack to since his mother died. Ellen observes that he would have met Saskia, since they lived together. Patrick claims Jack doesn’t remember Saskia. Ellen worries she has a “possibly voyeuristic interest in his ex-girlfriend” (56). She mentions her experience with Rosie, and Patrick feels sympathy for the fiancé. Patrick says he wouldn’t want to be hypnotized because he likes to be in control. That’s what bothers him about Saskia’s following him: He’s not in control. Ellen realizes she has thought more about Saskia’s feelings than Patrick’s. Ellen tells her friend, Madeleine, about the evening and Patrick’s response when she declined to have sex with him while Jack was there.

Saskia wonders what the hypnotist thinks of Jack. Sometimes, Saskia goes to Patrick’s house and sits on a bench in the backyard: “I remember when this was my home and this was my backyard and this was my life” (61). She took care of Jack, even running him to the emergency room one night, and she recalls how Patrick looked when he saw Saskia and Jack together. Then she remembers how suddenly Patrick announced that things were over.

Ellen enjoys being in love. She thinks about saying “I love you,” and then Patrick says it when he leaves one morning. Ellen thinks that things feel simple and obvious, and she “had never loved or been loved like this before” (66).

Saskia has to leave town for a work event, and she wonders what Patrick and Ellen are doing in her absence. Flying back to Sydney, she thinks, “I was a vampire and I needed blood” (66).

Ellen is nervous about the weekend. Patrick will meet her mother and godmothers, and then she will meet Patrick’s family. She thinks about her session with Deborah Vandenberg, the woman with the unexplained pain in her leg. Deborah claims she never goes under, but Ellen has helped her to think of her pain as having a dial she can turn down. When she induces a trance, Ellen tells Deborah to think of a perfect moment. Ellen’s own perfect moment was when she was 11 and tried hypnosis on her grandmother, who told Ellen she had a gift. After their session, Ellen’s next client is Mary-Kate. Mary-Kate is lumpy, sullen, and always wears black. Mary-Kate asks Ellen about her weekend. She doesn’t seem able to say what she wants out of hypnotherapy, and asks to use the bathroom.

Saskia thinks her interest in the hypnotist is like a perverse crush. She wants to tell Patrick she’s still in his life, and that Ellen might be too good for them; she seems genuinely nice, and Saskia feels fake.

Patrick drives them to Ellen’s mother’s house and has to lose Saskia, who is following them. Ellen tells him the story of her childhood: That her mother Anne wanted a child, found a man who met her requirements, though he was engaged to someone else, and raised Ellen on her own. Her mother’s friends, Melanie and Phillippa, helped raised Ellen, and she thinks of them as her godmothers. Patrick says she missed out on having a dad, and Ellen has sudden doubts about whether she’s deluding herself about Patrick.

Saskia reflects that she lost them in traffic and doesn’t know where they are going. She recalls how Patrick gave away a bottle of wine she gave him. She realizes she’s acting irrationally, but she’s unable to simply disappear from his life.

Ellen can see that Patrick is intimidated by her elegant, sharp-tongued, clever mother, Anne, who is a doctor and has striking violet eyes. Anne is concerned that Patrick has a stalker and tells Ellen to be careful.

Saskia wonders where to wait for them. She reflects on how Patrick ripped Jack out of her life, when Saskia was like Jack’s mother. When Patrick broke up with her, she lost Jack, too. She knows she should stop following him, but it’s like an “addiction”; she can’t stop. She falls asleep in the car and wakes up in the morning, hearing the kookaburras.