She is impressed but it is such a little thing to be impressed by, that he was paying attention. He’d remembered what she had said about Venice, even though he had been upset at the time. She would bask in the thought she is someone special, but that would be dangerous. For all she knows, this is what he does – part of his charm and charisma –remembering little facts about people that make them feel seen and heard. Anna decides it is time to move the conversation away from themselves. If he still wants to talk, maybe it should be about something more generic.
“What about you?” she asks. “Where is your favourite place in the world?” And so they talk about the world, swapping anecdotes of sparkling moments caught in their memories and horror stories of bedbugs, cockroaches, and mosquitoes thesize of antelopes. Below them, unheeded, the Canadian border disappears as the great plains flow into the contorted landscape of the Badlands. By the time the Great Salt Lake appears, the flight attendants are moving about the aircraft with purpose, depositing trays of food. But Anna is in the middle of a tale about the first time she tried kitesurfing and both of them ignore the interruption, although she does eat the food. At one point he says, “Did you feel that? We’re beginning the descent.”
Cabin crew stride purposefully up and down the aisles. Rubbish is cleared. The seat belt lights come on. A flight attendant appears beside them. She bends low to put her head closer to Anna’s and then says quietly, so her words don’t carry, “Doctor, would you be able to wait with the family of the deceased until the passengers have deplaned? We will be taking him off last. We would be grateful if you could hand over to the ambulance crew.”
When Anna nods her acquiescence, the attendant turns to her companion.
“And, Mr Hyde, we will be deplaning you in advance of the rest of the passengers. You may wish to be ready.”
“Thank you.” Tolly Hyde smiles his gratitude and the flight attendant steadies herself with a hand to Anna’s seat. Anna has every sympathy. Full blast, the man is mesmerising.
Tolly stands to transfer his kit, stashing it by his feet after he resets his seat to upright. “It looks as if we part here. Thanks,” he says, “for everything.”
Anna manages a graceful tilt of her head. She scrambles for an adieu that doesn’t sound maudlin. “I hope it goes well at your meeting tomorrow.”
Tolly’s warm eyes land on Anna. He considers for a moment and then seems to reach a decision. “Give me your phone for a minute, please? Unlocked.”
She raises one eyebrow but hands it over.
“LA is a big, bad city and you’re a long way from home,” he explains as he types. “You never know when you might need a friend.” He hands her phone back.
Anna glances down. There in her contacts is a new entry:Sexiest Man Alive. She rolls her eyes but deep inside, juvenile Anna is giggling even as Dr Anna appears exasperated to all the world.
Then he sits and fastens his seat belt as the captain announces the last preparations for landing. The plane jolts slightly as the wheels lock. The engine pitch alters. The cabin falls silent except for the wails of infants stealing in from first and economy classes.
There is a bump as the wheels hit the runway. The flaps lift. The engines roar with reverse thrust. The plane slows and then starts to taxi slowly. Around her, passengers begin to gather belongings. A flight attendant appears. Tolly stands. He gives one last glance towards Anna.
And then he is gone.
Blonde Venus
As passengers stream past to disembark, Anna sits back in her seat, suddenly, inexplicably tired. Then she recalls it is the early hours of the morning in her time zone, even if the sun is heading to the horizon outside. She has been awake all night and it is looking unlikely she will see her bed anytime soon. The irony of being upgraded to a lie-flat seat and then spending all night awake is not lost on her. She sighs and waits and thinks.
Tolly was not what she expected. She’s heard of him, of course, as most hear of celebrities. Although she was not living at home the summer her sister Eleanor dated Tolly Hyde, she received her family’s reports. Admittedly, they are contradictory. Her mother regards him as some sort of saviour, an angel shimmering in a moneyed glow. Her father thinks of him as a sensible young man. The twins, Phoebe and Lily, describe him as if he were some old windbag. And Eleanor, she never speaks of him at all.
Neither Anna nor Jasmine, the next sister in line, had been around when the film crew descended on their home, bringing with them a horde of aspirational starlets. Anna had made a quick trip for the kick-off party, but although she had wined with the best of them, the leading man, Mr Darcy himself, had not been present. Anna had started the evening with every intention of hooking up with the gorgeous bad boy, Jamie Smythe. Until he’d spouted one too many idiocies. Anna had always found stupidity a most unsexy trait in both men and women. Shepreferred sharp and witty. She’d ended the evening in her own bed, alone.
The following day she had returned to her own life in London and forgotten about the lot of them until a succession of excited messages from her mother had announced the arrival of Tolly Hyde by helicopter. Then there was a late-night call from Eleanor, upset that Tolly had kissed her. But that must have all been smoothed over because the next thing Anna had heard was another flurry from her mother looking forward to her eldest daughter’s nuptials with the self-same man. Anna had ignored this. Until she heard the news from Eleanor herself, she would give no credence to her mother’s speculation. Her elder sister was level-headed and she doubted Eleanor was quite as carried away with love as her mother’s rose-tinted glasses implied, particularly as Eleanor herself never mentioned her new boyfriend.
Their mother was in love with the idea of a dynastic marriage, and Tolly Hyde, who came from a banking family, had been the perfect match. Anna had the general impression that Eleanor would eventually submit. After all, she had submitted in everything else. Eleanor had aced her exams and gone to Oxford University to read History, a suitable subject for someone destined to care for a five-hundred-year-old estate. After she finished, she’d returned home to join her father in the family business of being landed gentry. There had been no teenage rebellions, no gap years finding herself. Eleanor had always had a destiny, and she had followed the path allotted without a murmur. Finding a suitable man whom she liked well enough to settle down with was the next step on the path. Except Tolly Hyde had left Eleanor for Los Angeles and the chance to make his fortune. And Eleanor had jumped off the allotted path and banged the son of the gardener, Jake Winter.
Eleanor had never divulged to anyone, not even Anna, how she had, in the course of a few days, gone from being Tolly’s girlfriend to Jake’s partner. Family gossip held that Tolly had ditched her after landing a role in a blockbuster Hollywood film. And that certainly fitted with the facts but didn’t explain the rest. Whatever had happened with Tolly, Eleanor had become besotted with another man.
Their mother thought it was a rebound. That Eleanor was soothing her damaged heart with the adoration of a safer man. Or it might just have been poor timing because no one who had seen Eleanor could doubt she was crazily, stupidly in love with the impoverished ex-soldier she had married. And no one who had met Jake would ever describe him assafe. Anna could well remember their first meeting as adults. She had laughed for an hour after the phone call that set up the meeting, for her elder sister had managed to astound them all.
While Anna likes her new brother-in-law, she does not understand what lured her sister to upset the family applecart. Their marriage had caused a rift in the family. On the unsuitability of the relationship, their father had sided with Eleanor, but their mother had sided with their grandmother (possibly for the first time in their lives) against Anna’s sister.
Now that Anna has met Tolly Hyde, she is inclined to give her mother’s explanation more credence. She doesn’t think she would have found him such an easy person to forget. He is handsome, yes, but that isn’t all of it. He had a way of looking right at her when he was talking to her. It made her feel as if she were the most important person on the plane. So maybe her mother was right and Eleanorhadbeen heartbroken by Tolly’s desertion. And she had sought to mend her heart with someone who loved her more than Tolly had. Because Anna can still feel Tolly’s magnetism, even after he has gone. And then there at the end, he had shown an unexpected level of kindness; he’d taken arisk and given a perfect stranger his contact details, just in case she should need a friend.
Anna has no intention of ever using that number. It would be a betrayal of her sister for a start. But she leaves it there in her phone. It is proof. Of what, she doesn’t know. A surreal night, perhaps. But something. Definitely something.
As the aircraft empties, Anna stands and gathers her belongings. She moves towards the First Class cabin and looks for the deceased. There in one corner, slumped against the body of the plane as if in sleep, is her patient. A mask covers his eyes, and a blanket is draped over his body. Unusually, everyone in First Class is still in their seats, waiting. As the trickle of disembarking passengers disappears, there is a muttered conversation between the flight crew on the plane and the ground crew on the jet bridge. The pilots appear, then stand back as a gurney is wheeled onto the plane. Two paramedics in blue shirts with big patches on their upper arms accompany it. Anna moves forward and identifies herself as the doctor who had pronounced death.
She gives her short summary of the treatment and the timings. Middle-aged man. Collapsed. Asystolic. Resuscitation started by aircrew. Epinephrine given. Time of death. A life reduced.
Then she is free to go.
She steps out onto the jet bridge to find it empty of passengers. The stultifying heat of Los Angeles hits her, sweat prickling on her forehead, clamming up her palms. Her footsteps echo as she makes her way onto solid ground. The normal stream of travellers that sweeps along towards the immigration hall has disappeared. Anna has to pick out the way from the signs alone. She walks slowly, back-tracking once when confused by the signage. Then she turns a corner and enters another world. Hordes of people queue in snaking lines. Theirchatter forms a constant hum. Uniform-clad officials shepherd the masses, occasionally barking an order to an oblivious traveller.
