Nine Perfect Strangers

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sp; Jessica was given a really delicious-looking stir-fry, which was the wrong dish for the poor girl. She spent ages laboriously twirling the long noodles around her fork and then dabbing worriedly at her face with her napkin for splashes of food.

Nobody broke the silence or made eye contact. When Napoleon sneezed again, nobody responded in any way. How quickly people adapted to strange rules and regulations!

Heather ate less than half her steak before putting down her knife and fork with a little puff of irritation. Frances had to restrain herself from leaping on it like a wolf.

Throughout the meal, Yao and Delilah stood silent and unmoving. They were like footmen, except you couldn’t snap your fingers and tell them to let Cook know that my lady could do with a larger portion of quinoa, and perhaps a medium-rare sirloin.

The sound of strangers chewing and clinking and scraping their cutlery just about did Frances’s head in. Hadn’t she once read there was an actual disorder where people suffered real psychological distress at the sound of others eating? There was a name for it. Frances probably had that disorder and had never been diagnosed because you were meant to talk while you dined. Something else to remember to Google once she got her phone back.

Eventually they were done, and they all pulled back their chairs and returned to their rooms. You couldn’t even say, ‘Goodnight! Sleep well!’

Now, as Frances drank the last of her smoothie, she thought about the number of silent insufficient meals ahead of her and considered leaving in the morning.

‘No-one leaves early, Frances,’ Yao had said today. Well, Frances could be the first. Set a new precedent.

She thought of her massage therapist’s whispered warning just before the silence began: Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with. What did she mean by that? Frances would certainly not do anything she didn’t feel comfortable with.

She recalled what Ellen had said when she suggested this place. ‘Their approach is really quite unconventional.’ Ellen was her friend. She wouldn’t send her somewhere dangerous . . . would she? Just to lose three kilos? You’d want to lose a lot more than three kilos if they were doing something dangerous. What could it be? Walking across burning coals for enlightenment? Frances would absolutely not do that. She didn’t even like walking across hot sand at the beach.

Ellen would have told her if there was walking across hot coals. Ellen was a dear friend.

‘I’ve never trusted that Ellen,’ Gillian once said, darkly and knowledgeably, but Gillian was always making dark, knowledgeable comments about people, as if everyone had secret mafia connections that only Gillian knew about.

Frances missed her greatly.

A wave of exhaustion hit her, not surprising after that long drive. She switched off her bedside lamp and fell instantly sound asleep, flat on her back like a sunbaker.

*

A light shone in her face.

Frances woke with a gasp.

chapter fifteen

Lars

‘What the actual fuck?’

Lars sat up, his heart hammering. A figure stood at the end of his bed shining a small torch in his face like a nurse doing hospital rounds.

He switched on his bedside lamp.

His ‘wellness consultant’, the delectable Delilah, stood next to his bed holding up the Tranquillum House dressing-gown with one hand. She didn’t speak. She lifted one finger and beckoned, as if he would just obediently and silently follow her instructions.

‘I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It’s the middle of the night and I like my sleep.’

Delilah said, ‘It’s the starlight meditation. It’s always on the first night. You don’t want to miss it.’

Lars lay back in bed and shielded his eyes. ‘I do want to miss it.’

‘You’ll like it. It’s really beautiful.’

Lars removed his hand from his eyes. ‘Did you even knock before you came into my room without permission?’

‘Naturally I knocked,’ said Delilah. She held up the dressing-gown. ‘Please? I’ll lose my job if you don’t come down for it.’