“Glass of wine?” said Anne.

“No, I won’t actually,” said Ellen. “I overindulged last weekend, and I’m trying to be alcohol-free this week.”

And I’m pregnant, Mum.

The thought crossed her mind but felt strangely meaningless. Although nothing had changed since she’d done the test on Monday, now that the initial shock had worn off, it had begun to seem less and less likely that she really was pregnant. For one thing, apart from that night when she’d had the roast potato “cravings,” she hadn’t experienced any symptoms; she felt completely normal. It had also crossed her mind that she would probably miscarry. She was in her thirties, after all, and you were meant to take vitamin supplements when you were planning to get pregnant and make an appointment with the doctor and have blood tests. As soon as this had occurred to her, she had become positive that it would happen. If she didn’t make too much of a fuss about it, or overthink it, this pregnancy would probably just slip quietly away, until her body was ready for a properly organized pregnancy.

“Oh, well, I won’t either then,” said her mother. She put the bottle of wine down and rapped her knuckles gently on the table. It seemed an uncharacteristically pointless gesture, and Ellen remembered Melanie’s call earlier in the week about her mother seeming “secretive.”

“How are you?” she said.

“Me? I’m well. Very well.” Her mother stopped rapping and shook her head slightly. “Shall we have a cup of tea then? What were you doing when I interrupted you so shockingly?”

“Packing,” said Ellen, as she put the kettle on to boil and carefully selected two of her grandmother’s most flowery, old lady-ish china cups and saucers. “I’m going away with Patrick for the weekend. To Noosa.”

“Ah, Patrick,” said Anne. She settled herself down at the table. “I really don’t need the whole teacup and saucer palaver. I’m not eighty.”

Ellen ignored her and took out the teapot.

“A tea bag will do! Are you eighty?”

“So, what did you think of Patrick anyway?” said Ellen, warming the pot just to annoy her mother. “Both Mel and Pip called to say how much they liked him.”

“Did they?” said Anne. She raised her voice over the bubbling of the kettle. “Well, I certainly didn’t dislike him. You really should replace that kettle.”

Ellen put down the teapot. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean it’s so loud. It’s like a plane taking off.”

“No, what do you mean, you didn’t dislike Patrick?”

“He’s perfectly innocuous,” said Anne.

“That is so insulting!” Ellen was half laughing in disbelief.

“If you want to know the truth, I just felt that there was something not quite right about him. A sort of coldness.”

Coldness! This, from her warm, cuddly, motherly mother.

“Oh, and you’re such a discerning judge of character.” Ellen sat down at the table and watched her hand shake slightly as she poured the tea. It was rage. She was filled with rage on Patrick’s behalf.

“Well, you asked me,” said Anne. “I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just telling you how I felt.”

“You thought Jon was wonderful.”

“Jon was good company.” Anne smiled fondly, as if Jon was a dear old friend.

“Mel said the other night that he was a self-satisfied prick. He was brutally sarcastic. He treated me like I was an idiot. He was bordering on verbally abusive.”

“Oh, Ellen, he wasn’t. Don’t try to rewrite history. Especially don’t rewrite it to make yourself the victim. I hate that victim mentality women have these days. It was just a relationship that didn’t work out. He wasn’t an evil monster.”

“Jon made me very unhappy,” said Ellen. He was SO an evil monster! Her voice trembled. She was reminded of the year she turned fifteen when her hormones went crazy, and it seemed like every conversation she had with her mother ended up with Ellen crying. “And Patrick makes me very happy.”

“Well, then, that’s all that matters,” said Anne in the same brisk, sensible, placatory tone that used to drive Ellen to distraction when she was fifteen. “You don’t need to listen to me. Look at my history. What do I know about men?”

“Nothing,” said Ellen. “You know nothing.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows and lifted her teacup. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Well, you did,” said Ellen sullenly. She really was behaving like a teenager. Where was all her advanced emotional intelligence today?

“I am sorry. I’m truly sorry.” Anne clumsily patted Ellen’s shoulder. “You still look very pale.”

“Probably because I’m pregnant,” Ellen said and dissolved into a luxurious flood of salty tears.

I called in sick on Tuesday and went to Avalon Beach again with my new boogie board.

I have never done such a thing before. It’s not how I was brought up. My mother would be bewildered. She thought a regular pay packet was a wonderful thing; something a woman especially should never take for granted. I can still hear the reverence in her voice when she told people about my very first position out of university. “Saskia has got herself a job.”

I remember how baffled she was when I once said something about “job satisfaction.” “But, darling, they pay you!” She was worried I would be rude to the boss. She would have thought taking a sickie was crazy, risky and very bad mannered.

Sorry, Mum. I needed a “mental health” day.

“Mental health,” she would have snorted.

She didn’t believe in modern maladies like depression or anorexia. A friend’s son was diagnosed with clinical depression and Mum was disgusted. “What’s the silly man got to be sad about? He’s got a good job! A wife! A baby!”

She believed in grief over death and joy over birth and love and marriage and plain wholesome food and a spick-and-span house. Anything else was just “being silly.”

I wonder if she would have said I was being silly when I fell apart after Patrick broke up with me. She adored him, and Jack too, of course. She thought of Patrick as her son-in-law and Jack as her grandson.

I assume that Patrick would have met the hypnotist’s parents by now. The thought of him chatting to the hypnotist’s mother, being polite and trying to impress her, as if my sweet mother never existed, as if my mother was just practice for the real mother-in-law—well, that just fills me with an almighty torrent of rage.