Whistle Down the Wind
Before she can answer, Ryan sweeps her aside and stalks into the house. Anna, not expecting to be manhandled, is off balance. By the time she recovers, Ryan has already started up the stairs, great long strides carrying him upwards, multiple steps at a time.
She hurries in his wake. She supposes she should be grateful Tolly has someone who is concerned about him, except for two things. First, she is uncertain whether the concern stems from genuine affection for Tolly or his earning ability. Second, she would prefer his concern did not put her in opposition, casting her in the role of enemy. Ryan clearly thinks something malevolent is going on.
Upstairs, the agent heads straight for a door at the end of the corridor. He throws it open in triumph and then comes to a skidding halt. Turning, his eyes fix on Anna.
“Where is he?” he demands once more.
Anna walks calmly into the room and shuts the door behind them. She doesn’t want Ryan disturbing her patient, and the man is on the verge of shouting. This is obviously Tolly’s bedroom. She can see the balcony through the glass wall frontage and the view of the city beyond, bathed in the yellow light of early morning sun. White walls and a Statuario marble floor give the room an austere feel. On one side, an enormous television hangs over a long-ribbon gas fire. There is a super-king bed, two bedside tables, each with a lamp, and two easy chairs on either side of a low coffee table, all facing the view. For such a large room, it is surprisingly under-furnished. A single photo frame sits on one side of the pristine bed, but it is too far for Anna to see which lucky person has pride of place.
She turns her attention back to Ryan. It is not the first time she has faced down an aggressive man. If Ryan thinks he can intimidate her, he should try a shift in an Accident and Emergency in central London on a Saturday night.
“He’s safe and I will take you to him,” she says. “But before I do, I need you to understand his situation.”
Ryan huffs and his jaw is clamped tight, probably grinding his teeth. “Listen, you bitch, I’ve dealt with gold-diggers like you many times before. Think you can get your claws into a film star? Not with my talent.”
And Anna laughs. She can’t help it. Here she is planning to give up Tolly in a grand but heart-breaking gesture, and there is Ryan, accusing her of the basest motives. The irony!
She sobers. “Doctor.”
“What?” Ryan jerks backward.
“Not bitch, doctor,” Anna replies. “Not a gold-digger either. I am a doctor.”
“You think the two are mutually exclusive?” Ryan sneers. “But of the two, I’d take a gold-digger over a doctor any day.”
Anna, used to the immediate respect her profession generally generates, blinks. Ryan’s attitude speaks much to the state of American healthcare. But then again, the recent spate of stories of stars dead of an overdose of prescribed medicine must place doctors in Hollywood on a par with drug dealers. Perhaps Ryan’s words can be excused.
She most definitely doesn’t like Ryan, but they need to get past this. “If you are insinuating what I think you are, you should be reassured to know that I have no prescribing rights in the US.”
“That never stopped anyone.” Ryan looks at her as if she is stupid. Perhaps it was na?ve to say that. Look how easily Bella had obtained drugs at Tolly’s party and Anna would lay odds her friend hadn’t even paid for them.
“Tolly is ill,” she says with more than a little asperity.
“That’s what Mike said you told him. I’m going to need a little more detail than that and I’m not so easily fobbed off as he is.”
“Tolly has paralytic shellfish poisoning.”
“What?” Ryan’s eyes bug out. “You’ve poisoned him?”
“Absolutely not!” she responds firmly. “He ate some shellfish from a dodgy street food van.”
“Then why are you hiding him?” A look of horror crosses Ryan’s face. “He’s not dead?”
“I’m not hiding him and he’s not dead. Merely a little paralysed.”
In retrospect, she should have known those words would have repercussions. But she is very tired and she really does not like Tolly’s agent.
“Paralysed?” Ryan looks as if he is a candidate for a heart attack.
“Tolly’s speech is off. He can’t control his arms and legs. But the chance of respiratory failure is past. I did call a friend of mine who is an attending at one of your local hospitals and he came over for a consult last night. And I’ve been monitoring him all night. Tolly will probably be more tired than normal in the next couple of weeks, but he’ll make a full recovery.”
If Anna thinks her words will reassure Ryan, she is wrong. “His speech is off?” Ryan splutters. “But he’s got a major event tonight!”
Which is precisely why Anna has a problem with the agent. His first thought is for Tolly’s engagements, not for Tolly’s well-being.
“It’s temporary,” she says. “It will wear off. Most people recover within twenty-four hours. The best thing for Tolly is to sleep as much as possible. The body heals faster with sleep. And the symptoms are less distressing if you are asleep for the worst of it.”
Ryan’s lips thin. “Where is he?”
Anna continues. “You should thank me, really. If anyone had got hold of footage of Tolly in the state he was in, your boy’s reputation would be blown.”
The agent does not look at all grateful. Instead, he repeats his demand: “Where is he?”
Anna opens the door to the bedroom. “Promise you won’t wake him?”
Ryan doesn’t answer but Anna matches his silence with her own until he capitulates. “Okay,” he says with an annoyed flick of his head.
“He’s in the living room. On the couch.”
The agent slips out of the room. Anna follows him back downstairs and into the lounge. She is pleased to see Tolly still sleeping soundly.
“See?” she says.
“Now get out.” Ryan’s words are harsh, but he does keep his volume low.
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard. You can leave voluntarily or I can call security to throw you out. I know which would give me more pleasure.”
Anna considers calling his bluff but only for a second. Tolly is through the worst. Repulsive Ryan may not be the world’s best nurse, but he can be trusted to look after his bankable client. And causing a ruckus being forcibly removed by security would only wake Tolly.
She nods. With a grin, she reaches into the bag Seth left and produces the bedpan and urine bottle. “You’ll probably need these when he wakes.” She shoves them at Ryan, but he recoils in horror. Admittedly, Ryan doesn’t know they are unused.
With a smirk, she places the equipment on the coffee table. “Take care of him,” she warns.
Then she heads into the foyer, slips her feet into her trainers and opens the door. She sees Tolly’s car abandoned on the drive and considers swiping the keys and driving back to her hotel. But driving in Los Angeles daytime traffic would be a vastly different affair to the free-flowing roads of last night. And what would she do with it at the other end? She is leaving on a jet plane today. No, she is best off walking out of the gated estate and finding a ride-share or a bus. She pulls her phone out of her pocket to locate the quickest route.
A twenty-minute walk brings her to a shopping area. Mercifully, it has all been downhill, but the heat of the day is building and she is feeling sweaty and sticky already. She perches on a low wall to order a ride. Five minutes later, a white car with the correct registration, an American model she has never heard of, pulls up. Anna climbs into the air-conditioned comfort with relief and sits back. She is bone-weary and soul-weary. She never thought she would say this, but all she wants to do is to go home.
When she finally lets herself into her hotel room – a shadow of the happy, effervescent woman who left it over twenty-four hours earlier – she wants to cry. She hasn’t felt life is this bleak since the peak of the pandemic. But she doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to give it any space to grow inside her. Instead, kicking off her shoes, she walks into the bathroom and turns on the shower full blast. She washes off every trace of Santa Catalina Island, of kayaking in the sunshine, of a kiss under the streetlight. When she is finished, she wrings out her hair, towels herself dry, and falls into bed, determined to sleep as hard as she can.
She wakes to the sound of her phone ringing. Bella. She can see a string of texts from her, too. Anna’s first thought is to cancel the call – there is a limit to the drama she can endure today, and she is beginning to understand Bella is all drama. Her younger self might not have noticed, but her older self is more aware. But Bella is likely to call back at regular intervals and Anna is reluctant to switch her phone off in the vain hope that Tolly calls, although she knows he is unlikely to recover properly for hours. In the end, she answers.
“Thank god! Where are you?” Bella cries.
“In my hotel room.” Anna’s tone is grumpily discouraging, and she is unsurprised when Bella disconnects. A few minutes later, though, just as Anna is drifting back to merciful oblivion, there is a tapping on her hotel room door.
“Anna!” Bella’s voice filters through the door. Again: “Anna!”
Dragging herself out of bed, Anna staggers to the door. She opens it with a short-tempered “What?”
But Bella ignores it all as she sweeps in. “You’ve got to help me,” she demands. “James is being all pissy. He’s cross I didn’t say goodbye to him. And he’s cross about the photos I posted.”
“Are you surprised?” Anna can’t help herself. Her own astonishment at Bella’s attitude shows in her voice.
“In case you’ve forgotten, I was helping you. You asked me to go to Tolly Hyde’s party with you. And you never did tell me how you know Tolly Hyde, either.”
Anna is disconcerted by Bella’s change of direction. But she feels the need to obfuscate, like she is somehow protecting Tolly. “His family is friends with my family.” It’s not a lie, but it’s far from the truth. She waves a hand in the air vaguely, as if the whole thing is not important.
Bella seems to accept it. She probably thinks the whole of the British nobility know one another, anyway. “Oh well. I was still doing you a favour.”
“I didn’t realise you were in bed with James at the time! I’d never have suggested abandoning him. I thought you’d already said your goodbyes. From your behaviour at the party, I reckoned you’d already moved on. When James called me the following morning, I didn’t know what to say.”
“He called you? When? What did you say?”
Anna tries to recall another life. She feels there will always be a marker in her timeline – before Tolly’s kiss and after, like she has before the pandemic and after, before Eleanor’s epilepsy and after. She shuffles to the bed and sits on the end. “Early yesterday morning,” she says. “He was in a tizz because he couldn’t get hold of you. I said you were probably asleep. That’s all.”
“Oh!”
“Anyway, what do you care? Aren’t you busy with your new Hollywood friends? What about the guy you were with by Tolly’s pool?”
“He’s not replying to my calls.”
Anna forbears to point out the obvious. Then she remembers Randy. “Or your writer friend? Isn’t that what all those photos were about?”
“I was high! You can’t blame anyone for what they do when they are high!”
“The courts would beg to differ. And I’m not sure how well that line will go down with James, either.”
Bella groans. “It didn’t. Anna, you’ve got to help me.”
Privately, Anna doesn’t feel in the least obliged. Aloud, she says, “I don’t think there is anything I can do.”
“Talk to him for me. He likes you, respects you. If anyone can make him see sense, you can.”
“I think you are vastly overestimating my capabilities.” Purely to get Bella out of her room, she says, “I will talk to him, but I doubt it will help. James is his own person.”
But Bella continues to flounce around the room. Anna shuts her eyes, then has an idea. “Why don’t you talk to your brother?” she suggests. “Get the male perspective. He might have some ideas.” Although Anna believes the day John has an original idea, pigs will fly, it seems to work on Bella.
Her friend stops, electrified. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she says. Then she turns and barrels out of the room.
The quiet left behind her feels blessed. Until Anna remembers what task she still has to do. One final message to Tolly. It takes her ages. Frequent deletions, some additions and endless variations later, she has her message ready.
I am sorry I was not with you when you awoke but Ryan asked me to leave .
It takes every iota of charity in her not to dob the agent in, but it would serve nothing to drive a wedge between Tolly and the man who is charged with furthering his career.
I wanted to ask if you can find space in your calendar, please could you squeeze in a celebrity visit to Seth’s hospital? It was good of him to come out in his own time to help us on a Friday evening.
I also wanted to thank you. I had a wonderful time yesterday, perhaps the best time of my life. But all good things come to an end and I return home today. My work is in London and yours is in Los Angeles. There can be no future in that. I think it is easier if I leave now for good. So please don’t call or text. This is how it has to be.
Her eyes are watering so badly, she struggles to read the message through. Then she takes a deep breath and presses send.
She wants to bury her head in a pillow and howl, but she long ago developed the iron control that enables her to continue functioning in the face of emotional pain. She has a plane to catch and a suitcase to pack and a man to forget. Best to get started.
It is a very subdued Anna who stands in the bag drop queue. The flight is full and the queue is shuffling forwards slowly. She ignores the attempts at conversation from the youth in front of her, who inches his enormous rucksack forwards with his high-top-clad toe, focussing intently on her phone. It is a ruse. She is on a Hollywood gossip site, regularly refreshing, hoping to see news of Tolly. She kicks herself for not ensuring he was okay before sending her message. For now, she has no way of knowing how well he has recovered other than a news feed. Tolly and Ryan had both mentioned his scheduled evening appearance at an event tonight. If he makes it, she will know he is recovered.
As she approaches the bag drop desk, she gives up. She schedules an alert for Tolly’s name and drops her phone back into her jacket pocket. It will have to do until she is through security. Once she is airside, her stomach reminds her it needs feeding. She finds a burger place and orders before sitting down and checking her phone again. Nothing. She wonders if he or Ryan has cancelled. A finger of fear licks up her spine at the thought of Tolly experiencing complications, but logic prevails. It is extremely unlikely. While she has never encountered paralytic shellfish poisoning before, she did a thorough review of the literature available on it last night. Neither had Seth flagged any additional concerns aside from the known issue of respiratory trouble, and by the time she had left him, he was clear of that problem. She is jumping at shadows.
After boarding, she turns her phone to flight mode, although still no report of Tolly has hit the internet. With her window seat, she is hemmed in by a middle-aged woman and her teenaged son, both of whom switch on the in-flight entertainment and disappear into their respective universes. Probably for the first time in her life, Anna could have done with a chatty seat companion. She knows she is too sleep-deprived to read anything that requires focus. Instead, she puts in her earbuds, starts an audiobook, and tries to become immersed in a prize-winning but turgid literary novel she has been postponing reading for a long time. It is not long before she is asleep.
She wakes a couple of times, peering round at the darkened, sound-deadened plane, but each time she settles back down once she establishes where she is. In the early hours, while the sky is still dark outside, the plane begins to descend. The cabin lights come up and a quiet rustle develops as passengers clear rubbish and stow their belongings in anticipation. The plane lands with the usual accompaniment of the wail of small babes. By the time the aircraft taxis to the airbridge, Anna has switched her phone off flight mode. While the passengers leap up to extract belongings from overhead lockers, Anna stays in her seat until she receives the first alert. There he is, Tolly, looking suave and delectable, entirely unaffected by his nighttime misadventure. Once again clean-shaven, his hair immaculate, he is posed on the red carpet, all polish and charm. His smile to the cameras makes Anna’s belly ache. There is no trace of the rugged voyager she met. And no trace her absence might be affecting him in any way. But it is enough. She knows now he is well and there are no lasting effects. Tolly will be okay.
Unlike herself. Anna exits the terminal building in search of a taxi. She stands for a moment in the cold air with wind-driven rain splattering her coat, turning her face to the weather, breathing in the damp, fuel-infused scents of Heathrow.
She is home, but the world is different.