Finally, she stumbles into her hotel room. Neutral tones and hard-wearing brown carpet, an arm-less armchair and desk chair. She ignores the coffeemaker, drags her suitcase onto the stand, and unzips it. The pristine white linen on the bed is calling to her but she knows she won’t truly relax until she has washed off the grime of the journey. She extracts her wash bag and makes her way into the bathroom. The one thing chain hotels always get right is water pressure. Turning on the shower, she undresses quickly and then steps under the stream of hot water. She can feel the muck wash off her, the waxy sheen of her face, the sweat from her armpits. She feels like a different person when she emerges. A quick blow dry of her hair and then finally, beautifully, she crawls between the clean sheets.
It is only as her mind loosens and she slips into sleep that she registers: if the car had been ordered by the airline, the sign would have been written “Dr Mortimer”. There is only one person in the world who knows her as Doctor Anna.
Out of the Past
Anna wakes on the ebb-tide of a nightmare, the desperate feelings of failure and helplessness washing through her mind and body. The dream is thinning, slipping away, but her conscious mind registers its last remnants. The body on the gurney, the abortive attempt at a resuscitation she screwed up in every way possible. Hands in the wrong position, losing count of the beats, forgetting to add in breaths. The dreams are always different, but the emotions are the same. Failure.
The room is dark. She gropes for her phone on the bedside table. It’s four in the morning. She collapses back into the pillows and tries to school her thoughts, to overlay dream memories with real ones. She is good in a crisis, clear-thinking and analytical even under pressure. She has never lost it. She always has a plan even when she doesn’t know what to do with a patient. Only when she is sure she won’t return to the same awful dreamworld does she shut her eyes to go back to sleep. But despite being dog-tired the night before, sleep eludes her. She tries everything she can think of, adjusting the air conditioning, emptying her bladder and drinking a glass of water to re-hydrate. She tries lying on her left side, then on her right before rolling onto her back. She even tries sleeping on her front, which is far less comfortable than it was in childhood.
Nothing works. Although she can feel the weariness still inside her, her body cannot forget it is midday in her normal time zone. Even years of adjusting to the varied sleep patterns ofshift work cannot seem to override the built-in imperative to be up and doing something.
But there is not much to do at four in the morning. Except think.
And her thinking is all to do with Tolly Hyde. Like the rest of the world, her superficial first impression of him is that he is One Fine Man. “Fine” with a capital F in blazing neon as high as the Hollywood hills.
But he was not what she had always thought he would be. Anna is not without connections. She is one of a family of landed gentry with friends in many places. Her father, Baron Larkford, holds the lowest rank in the aristocracy, but it is still sufficient in the British class system to give them privilege. Her mother, Lady Larkford, is the daughter of an earl. Anna’s aunts and uncles have their own distinctions. Through friends and connections, Anna has come across film stars, rock stars, and other celebrities before. She has never been particularly taken with any of them. Some were egotistical, some were self-deprecating. Some were thicker than you would expect, some were cleverer. Some were shallow, some more substantial. But none of them had made her feel one iota of the emotions that Tolly Hyde had aroused.
Anna has always fancied herself impervious to stardust. She would dread to think of herself slobbering after any man in mindless adoration. So it comes as a shock to her to find it isn’t some superior character trait. It was only that she hadn’t met the right star. The way she had reacted to Tolly Hyde wasn’t just the product of lust. She’s honest enough with herself to acknowledge that. Lust is easily dealt with, either with the object itself or alone in a room with a fantasy in your head. But this is new. This longing, this fascination with him, is something she can never allow. She cannot act on it. Because quite apart from all the other considerations, Tolly Hyde is her older sister’s ex. And that fact is deeply inconvenient.
Growing up as one of five girls, Anna had never lacked for playmates. But she was closest to her elder sister, Eleanor. The twins, the youngest, always had each other. Jasmine, the middle child, had never seemed to need anyone.
The pairing of the eldest two had been momentarily interrupted by the arrival of their cousin Serena when she came to live with them. But the twosome had widened to a threesome, and Anna had usually been included in their antics. Despite being the same age as Eleanor, Serena didn’t seek exclusivity, which might have spelled the end of the sisters’ close relationship. As an only child, Serena was overjoyed to find herself in so much company and welcomed all her cousins into her coterie. It was lucky for Anna, because she had followed Eleanor and Serena to the same boarding school. Two years younger, Anna could easily have been ignored, but when the older girls started going to parties with boys, Anna was invited along. It was at these parties that she began to understand how intoxicating her beauty could be for men. It was also at these parties she began to understand how troublesome that could be.
Anna loves her sister deeply, so she’d always failed to understand how Eleanor’s admirers could so easily abandon her to run after her younger sister. But they did. And each one was another chip in her sister’s self-confidence. The thought of havingbothsisters obviously appealed to some of them, although it left Anna feeling icky. Moreover, some assumed Anna’s lack of committed relationships meant she had no morals and no standards. After one embarrassing incident where one of Eleanor’s boyfriends had tried to climb into Anna’s bed, both sisters had pledged never to date another’s leavings. It was a teenage promise, but it has held for over a decade and Anna has no intention of breaking it now.
She is lying in bed, idly paging through social media, when her phone rings. As if summoned by thought, it is Eleanor.
“You should be sleeping,” she greets Anna.
“Good morning to you, too.”
“It’s afternoon here. Why are you liking social media posts at this time in the morning?”
“Jetlag?” Anna offers.
“Bummer. But I’m glad I caught you. I spoke to Serena yesterday.”
“And?”
“She’s split with Frankie.”
Anna sits up straighter in bed. “She’s what?”
“Finally split with Frankie. Frankie hit a milestone birthday and she gave Serena an ultimatum. She wanted both of them to change jobs, commit to each other, and settle down. Serena chose not to sacrifice her career and Frankie called time.”
“Are you sure? I mean, they have the weirdest relationship out. Is this just another phase of it?” Anna’s cousin is a location manager and so is her girlfriend, Frankie. The two of them seemed to be together when they were physically together and something else when apart.
“She seemed pretty sure. Which brings me to this call. I thought maybe you could squeeze in a visit while you are there?”
“I’ll try,” Anna says. “But last time I was here, Serena was in a desert in Morrocco somewhere pretending it was Mars for a science fiction film. You know what her schedule is like.” Location managers go where they are needed. It’s hard to pin down where Serena might be at any point. Nor could you book in advance, as plans and schedules go awry all the time.
“I just think she could do with a dose of family love about now.”
“And you’ve chosen me to give it?” Anna jests. “You must be desperate. You do know mopey, heartbroken people are not my preferred choice of companion and words of comfort are not my primary skillset?”
“I have faith in you,” Eleanor says.
The noise of a horn and a male voice cussing makes Anna wrinkle her brow. “Are you in the car?”
