PART 1
When I came into that cabin, she was sitting in my seat beside my husband.
Aurelio’s new secretary, leaning towards him, smiling, feeding him pieces of peeled orange.
She saw me and did a small gasp that was about two sizes too big for the moment.
That is the thing I keep returning to. Not the seat and not the orange.
The gasp was a performance, and a performance requires an audience, and the audience was eleven members of his executive team.
A segment fell onto his thigh and she immediately started brushing at his trousers.
She said: I’m so sorry, Mr Vantrelle.
Mr Vantrelle. Eleven months in that role and she was still using the surname, in a cabin, with her hand on his leg.
Nobody does both of those at once by accident.
He made no attempt to move her hand.
Four seconds, maybe five, of a woman’s hand on his thigh in a cabin containing his wife, his mother, and eleven people who report to him.
He did not move it and he did not move himself.
Instead he looked at me with irritation, as though my arrival had interrupted something important.
He said: she gets terrible airsickness. I told her to sit here. Go back to row five.
Row five is behind the galley, eleven rows back.
It is where the junior analysts sit, next to the toilet, in the two seats that do not recline because of the bulkhead.
He did not pick a row at random. He picked the furthest seat on that aircraft from the one I was standing next to.
His executive team watched from their seats. Eleven of them, plus crew, plus his mother.
And before I could answer, his mother spoke from behind me.
Which means she was already standing in that aisle. Behind me. Close enough to be heard by the first four rows.
A woman of sixty-eight does not happen to be standing in the aisle of an aircraft at the exact moment her son’s wife walks into a problem.
She said: she worked for Aurelio until three this morning, Anneke. The least you can do is be considerate.
I looked at the chair I had sat in on about forty flights beside that man.
Seat 2A. It is not a better seat than any other seat on that aircraft. They are all the same seat.
That is worth saying because people assume it was about comfort or about status, and it was about neither. It was about where I had always been.
