One very sexy head jerks up. “Dead? Who’s dead?”
“A guy in First Class.” Anna looks down, looping the seatbelt loosely around her waist and snapping the clasp closed.
“Which guy? The sheik?”
“Mm hmm.” Anna reaches for her Kindle. She can’t quite remember the last bit she read, but she’s sure she’ll pick it up again soon enough.
“But he can’t be! I just saw him in the First Class lounge. He was fine. We even had a selfie together. He said his mother would love it!” It is the change in voice that alerts Anna, not the words. She stops what she is doing and focuses on him properly. She had been talking to him the way she would a colleague. But he isn’t. He is the Sexiest Man Alive and he’s probably never experienced sudden death in his life. He no longer looks relaxed. His eyes are wide with shock.
Anna was hoping for a chance to de-stress. After years on wards, she is no stranger to death. She has her techniques for dealing with the aftermath. In the moment of crisis, shefunctions. It is later that the doubts surface. Unless the patient is very young, though, a cardiac arrest is not normally too upsetting. The patient is already dead. She cannot make things worse. There is still a period to collect herself, of course.
But the general population is different. With the average person living into their eighties, few people come across death in daily life anymore. Death takes place in hospitals or hospices or nursing homes. Or alone at home, unseen, usually after years of long, slow decline. Sudden death is unusual. And everyone reacts differently because people are individuals. Some witness extremely traumatic events and shrug. Others burst into tears at the loss of their friend’s cat. Anna really hopes he is not one of those.
His profession may make him more sensitive, more intense. Actors probably learn to lean into their feelings, just as doctors learn to lean away from them. Do people like him need to be more empathic than the normal population? And it is not uncommon for people to be affected by death, especially sudden death. Even the most sensible, level-headed person can find themselves thrown when someone they were just talking to dies suddenly. Anna puts down her Kindle. The next grisly murder will have to wait.
She makes her voice smoother, calmer than normal. Her “bad news” voice. “There was nothing I could do,” she says. Then, using the universal euphemism, “He’d already gone.”
Sudden death may confront people with their own mortality, or it may trigger memories of loss. Because sanitation, vaccination, and medicine have prolonged lives, those who are unfortunate enough to know death earlier in life are often isolated. There is no longer a community full of experience on how to cope with the loss of a child or a sibling or a parent. Their peers frequently lack understanding and sympathy. Or have limited quantities of both, when grief and loss endure forever.Whatever may be the underlying reason for it, her bunkmate is clearly disturbed by the sheik’s passing. Therapy on a plane is beyond Anna. But there is a useful alternative in distraction and, luckily, every anaesthetist is practised in it. Most conscious patients enter the operating theatre fearful, but everything goes so much better if they are relaxed. Anna, not a person given to blather, long ago learnt to perfect her small talk.
“So how come you were back in the UK?” she asks.
She can see him considering. Probably wondering whether to trust her with any details of his life, whether he will read of their conversation in next week’s gossip magazines. But people confide in doctors all the time. Doctors and hairdressers. There’s a theory it’s the subconscious trusting those allowed to touch your body. They trust them with their deepest secrets, so she isn’t surprised when he answers.
“My mother eloped.”
Anna is glad she hasn’t been drinking anything. For sure as hell, she would have spat it in his face. “Well! Those are three words you don’t hear every day,” she says. “Go, Mum!” Then she checks the look on his face and moderates her enthusiasm. “Sorry,” she says. As something strikes her, Anna says carefully, “Oh! Your father?” In trying to distract him, has she led straight back to heartbreak? Was his father dead? Or cuckolded?
“They’ve been divorced for over a year. She was devastated when he left. That wasn’t the problem,” he replies. “My mother is a wealthy woman in her own right. Her family are bankers. When she sent a picture of herself in a wedding dress with her new husband standing outside the Blacksmith’s shop at Gretna Green, I got on the first plane to London.”
“Wasn’t that pointless?”
“What do you mean?” His perfect forehead wrinkles. No Botox there, she notes.
“By then, they were already married. The damage was done, so to speak. And wouldn’t she have already left on honeymoon?”
“I discovered they were taking the Orient Express to Venice. I caught an onward flight to Paris and boarded the train there.”
Anna sits up. She wants to clap her hands together but restrains herself. This is wonderful stuff. She had set out to help him, but she is the one whose spirits are lifting. “It sounds like a sixties film! A mad flit across continents. A dash through the Parisian traffic with a lunatic French taxi driver, who corners on two wheels and beeps at any pedestrians foolish enough to venture onto the cobbles. Am I right?” Anna grins at her own vision.
“Perhaps a little,” he allows.
“I can just see the steam wreathing around the carriages and you striding along the platform, seeking vengeance,” she speculates further.
He snorts. “Hardly! For a start, I forgot I was quite so famous. As soon as I got to the station, I was mobbed. Despite the beard.” He repeats her gesture from earlier, one finger tracing his chin. “Teamed with shades and a baseball cap, normally I can pass undetected. If anyone challenges me, I reply in a West Texas accent.”
Anna leans forwards. “Is there an East Texas accent?”
“There are all sorts of Texas accents, but West Texas is easy to do because they speak without opening their mouths. And I’m an excellent mimic.”
Anna knows very well he is. After all, this privately educated posh boy got his first big break playing an evil Mancunian. But that isn’t the point of the conversation. “Prove it.”
“Well, howdy, ma’am. Is this here seat taken?”
“Oh, my!” It may be the sexiest thing Anna’s ever heard. She fans herself. The gesture is showy but her need for it is not. “Well, if you’re trying not to draw attention to yourself, I’d lose the West Texas. Maybe something like those high-pitched, squeaky voices? Anyway, let’s get back to the story. The disguise didn’t work.”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t wearing the cap and shades. It was France. No one wears a baseball cap in France. And Paris was cloudy.”
“So, mobbed. Did you miss the train?” Anna is entranced by his story. And his voice.
