IF THE fairytale had reached the happy-ever-after conclusion that the script suggested, Kim Clijsters would be Mrs Lleyton Hewitt. This tournament would have been their sporting and spiritual honeymoon. With a husband in the hotel room, it is less likely to have been a target for a burglar as Clijsters’s was yesterday.

A surreal scenario had Clijsters following Hewitt into the interview room at the Pacific Life Open, Hewitt being accosted by a large Argentine woman demanding to know what he thinks about that country’s players — they play Australia in the Davis Cup in July — and Clijsters by a deputy sheriff asking to take her fingerprints so that police can check whether those on the money they have retrieved from the alleged intruder are hers.

Hewitt is now engaged to Bec Cartwright, a lovely young woman who appears in the soap Home and Away; Clijsters bought a new dog, a Great Dane, as companionship for herself and her British bulldog. In January, Hewitt reached the final of the Australian Open for the first time, while Clijsters, who had lost in that final a year earlier, was shadow-hitting — swinging a racket with no ball to strike — to test if her left wrist would stand the rigours of the circuit again.

Here last year, the Belgian, No 2 in the world at the time, having just won her 21st title, was hitting a routine backhand when something gave in the wrist. “I felt this jolt, I knew something wasn’t right,” she said. A tendon tear was diagnosed, the bone was shaved and a cyst growing beneath it removed.

Then, on home territory in Hasselt in October, she suffered another tear — “the net that holds the tendon had come out of its runner,” she said — and the whole area was badly inflamed.

For three months she fretted, with doctors saying that it could be career-threatening. “I had to believe that wouldn’t happen,” she said, “but it was tough. I was training, still running, but there was no certainty it would lead to anything. I started to think what I was going to do with my life. There are a few things I was interested in, but not yet.

“I had been to a health farm in Australia and realised there wasn’t anything like that in Belgium. I had the idea I could have started something like that. I learnt how to ride a horse, something I would never had a chance to do if I was on the tour.” She had always talked about her love of children. “I have a young Mum and I really enjoy that, but there is still time,” she said. “I realise that now. I’m only 21.”

So young to have played and lost so many grand-slam finals — twice in Paris, once each in New York and Melbourne — so young to have loved and lost. But she is back playing, there is a spring in her step and her wrist hurts no more. “I feel blessed,” Clijsters said. “I came back in Antwerp last month, I didn’t know how I would play and it ended up being the best event ever. I just drew on all the crowd’s energy, that and their love. I had never received so many teddy bears, so many cards, so many kind thoughts.”

From inside tennis, too. Anastasia Myskina, the French Open champion from Russia, was constantly on the phone, as was Ai Sugiyama, her doubles partner, and Rennae Stubbs, the gregarious Australian.

Any calls from Justine Henin-Hardenne, her fellow Belgian and the former world No 1 who, because of a viral infection, has spent as long away as Clijsters? “Not at all,” she said, melancholy in her voice for once. “I’ve done that (tried to make contact with Henin-Hardenne) for a while, but it’s tough to keep trying when nothing comes back.

“I have always believed things happen for a reason,” Clijsters, who has reached the quarter-finals in Indian Wells, said. “Nobody’s life is the way they always want it. Bad things happen, but positive things come out of it. It may be called maturing, but I’ve got to know myself better in the last year. I realised who I could count on and who I couldn’t, the people who are there for you in good times and bad. It is a learning experience to find out who cares for you and who doesn’t.

“Now all I want to do is challenge the girls again to see what happens the second time around for me.” No one more merits a happy ending.