The Hypnotist's Love Story Read Online Free PDF

octogenarians.
    When her grandparents were alive, they would walk along this beach every night just before the six o’clock news.
    They spent sixty-three years together. Sixty-three years of waking up next to the same person, in the very same bedroom, in fact, where she and Patrick had made love last night. (Which, now that she thought about it, was terrible. She liked to think that the spirits of her grandparents still inhabited the house. She hoped her poor grandfather hadn’t been trapped in the bedroom, standing behind the curtains, shielding his eyes.)
    Ellen had always assumed she would marry young and have a relationship like theirs. She thought she was that sort of person. Traditional.
Nice.
As if nice girls always found nice boys. As if “niceness” was all that was necessary to maintain a relationship.
    In all honesty (and the achievement of genuine self-awareness was her ongoing goal), it wasn’t her niceness so much as the fact that she believed herself to be nothing like her own mother: her mother who had brought up Ellen alone, with barely a man in sight.
    And yet, here she was, thirty-five and looking for men on the Internet. Each time she clicked on to the website she felt like she was doing something vaguely unseemly.
    Unseemly for
her
. That was the crux of it. She didn’t think there wasanything unseemly about anyone else doing Internet dating. Oh, no, it was fine for the unwashed masses! But Ellen helped people with their personal lives for a
living
.
    That was it. She thought she should be the sort of person who was great at relationships, and it seemed she actually wasn’t. Really, she kept telling herself briskly, why shouldn’t she have suffered and had her heart broken like anyone else? Why shouldn’t she have found it hard to meet the right man, like so many other women? Why shouldn’t she be worried about the ticking of her biological clock, even if it was a cliché? Why shouldn’t she be a cliché?
    She was ashamed of her shame. As penance she was extremely open about her single status. She told all and sundry that she was Internet dating. She went on each awkward new date with her head held high, her outlook positive and her heart and mind open to all possibilities.
    But it was hard work at times.
    She reached the rock pool where she always turned back and put her hands on her hips, breathing heavily. She’d been walking faster than she realized.
    She looked back along the beach toward her grandparents’ house, now her house, the glass room at the back winking in the morning sun, like a diamond stuck haphazardly to the side of the house. “Fabulous. He’s made it even more of an eyesore,” her mother had said when she saw the new room Ellen’s grandfather had added on, thanks once again to Great-aunt Mary’s lotto win.
    Ellen’s grandfather’s childless, unmarried younger sister, Mary, had won half a million dollars in lotto and then died just six weeks later, while she was still pondering what to do with her windfall. (A new TV, perhaps? One of those “flat screens”? But really,
Deal or No Deal
would still look exactly the same, wouldn’t it? Just bigger.) All her money had gone to Ellen’s grandparents, who had used it to put on the extra glass room, install gas heating and go on a ten-day cruise each year until they died. Great-auntMary’s lotto win had also resulted in their decision to leave their house to Ellen when they died, while her mother and Amnesty International had inherited the capital. This suited everyone because Ellen’s mother had no desire to live in her childhood home. “No amount of money could save it,” she liked to say, with sad authority, as if she’d been asked to give her expert opinion.
    It was a strange-looking house, built in the seventies and incorporating all the most fashionable design features that decade had to offer: exposed beams and bricks, a stainless-steel spiral staircase, mirrored arches, lime green shag carpet and a bright