“You should hate me,” I said. My voice sounded unfamiliar: slurred, like a stroke victim. “Patrick hates me.”

“That’s because I don’t have the emotional connection that Patrick has to you. Patrick hates you because he once loved you.”

“That’s nice of you to say that,” I said. My nose was running. I went to wipe it with the back of my hand and saw I had the drip attached. I sniffed noisily. I didn’t even care. I had no dignity left to lose.

“I’m not that nice,” said Ellen. “When I saw you holding the ultrasound photos, I wanted to kill you. It turns out that I do have limits. I don’t want you near my baby.”

Her eyes had turned steely.

The words “I’m sorry” came into my mind, but they seemed insultingly inadequate.

I said instead, “Patrick is lucky to have you.” And it occurred to me that I might actually mean it, that in a far-off, more generous part of my mind, I could even be happy for him.

Her face shifted in some tiny, subtle way. She said, “He’s still in love with his first wife.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. I could feel my senses starting to drift. “He still loves Colleen. First love and all that, but, so what, she’s dead, isn’t she? I always knew that I loved him more than he loved me, but I didn’t care. I just loved him so much.”

A great wave of tiredness was dragging me somewhere far away.

“I know you did.” Ellen stood up, adjusting my blankets, like a mother. “You loved him. And you loved Jack.”

For a moment I seemed to swim back up to lucidity again, and I said, “Have you hypnotized me?”

She smiled. “I’ve been trying to unhypnotize you, Saskia.”

And then I was drifting away again, and I heard her say, “It’s time to move on now, Saskia, and let go of all those memories of Patrick and Jack. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or that Patrick didn’t love you, or that you weren’t a wonderful mother to Jack. I know that you were. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t hurt you terribly. But now it’s time to close that door. Imagine an actual door. A big heavy wooden door with an old-fashioned gold lock. Now close it. Bang. Lock it. Throw away the key. It’s closed, Saskia. Closed forever.”

When I woke up again, the room was empty and the hypnotist’s visit seemed like a dream.

Chapter 23

Love! Give me chocolate any day!

—Ellen’s godmother Pip

The suffragettes didn’t starve themselves for the vote

so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.

—Ellen’s godmother Mel

Oh Lord, what superficial nonsense she’d been spouting: Close the door. Close it forever.

For heaven’s sake, the woman had broken into their house in the middle of the night and watched them sleep. She was probably schizophrenic or bipolar or who knew what. She probably needed anti-psychotic medication combined with intensive ongoing therapy. Ellen’s sappy little comments were like giving her vitamins when she needed surgery.

Also, closing the door wasn’t quite the right metaphor. You didn’t close the door on your memories. That was encouraging repression! Something to do with water might have been better. Cleanse yourself … oh, whatever.

Ellen yawned hugely without bothering to put her hand over her mouth. She was driving back from the hospital. There wasn’t as much traffic as usual on the roads; people were staying home because of the dust storm. It was still windy, although not as bad as the previous night. The sky was heavy with gloomy clouds, and the entire city was covered in a fine layer of orange dust. Everything looked grimy. She drove by an empty outdoor café and saw a woman wearing a hospital mask and mopping the floor. A mother hurried from her car carrying a toddler with a sheet draped over its head, like one of Michael Jackson’s children. Then a young man wearing shorts and a T-shirt jogged by, as if he’d jogged straight through from another day, a sunny, blue-skied clean and ordinary day.

Why were you even talking to her? That’s what everyone would say. You must be crazier than her! Did you take her chocolates and flowers? A get-well card?

She looked at her watch. It was noon. She thought back to early that morning: It seemed like days had passed since then, not hours.

When it became obvious that Jack was well enough to move around, Patrick had decided to drive him to the hospital. It was clear to Ellen that he couldn’t bear to sit and wait for an ambulance, he needed to be moving, taking action, and most important of all, he needed to be far away from Saskia. Ellen could sense the heat of his simmering fury emanating from his body like a low-grade fever. She offered to stay at home and wait for Saskia’s ambulance. “You can’t stay with her,” Patrick had said, but Ellen pointed out that as she was barely conscious (breathing shallowly and obviously in a great deal of pain), she wasn’t a danger to anyone, and besides, they could hardly just leave her there alone, with a note pinned to the door for the paramedics. Patrick hadn’t been in the mood for lighthearted remarks of that nature. Let’s call the police, he’d said, and hand her over. But Ellen had convinced him to concentrate on Jack.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics told Ellen they were taking Saskia to Mona Vale Hospital and not to try to follow them but to take her time driving there, and that Saskia was in good hands. They seemed to take it for granted that Ellen would also be coming. So she got dressed and drove to the hospital and then sat for hours in a crowded waiting room, reading trashy magazines without absorbing a single word, surrounded by wheezing asthmatics who had been affected by the dust storm. Finally, a nurse told her that she could see Saskia for a few minutes.