Silence.
‘It’s funny, because I’m a romance writer. I create fictional characters for a living, and then I fell for one.’
Still nothing. Jan mustn’t be a reader. Maybe she was just embarrassed for Frances. Wait till I get home and tell Gus about this loser.
Gus would give a long, low (tuneful) whistle of surprise and sympathy. ‘That’s what happens in the big smoke, Jan.’
Frances managed to stay silent for a few moments as Jan kneaded her knuckle into a spot on her lower back. It hurt in a glorious, necessary-feeling way.
‘Do you work full-time here, Jan?’
‘Just casual. When they need me.’
‘You like it?’
‘It’s a job.’
‘You’re very good at it.’
‘Yup.’
‘Extraordinarily good.’
Jan said nothing and Frances closed her eyes. ‘How long have you worked here?’ she asked sleepily.
‘Only a few months,’ said Jan. ‘So I’m still a newbie.’
Frances opened her eyes. There was something in Jan’s voice. Just a shadow. Was it possible she wasn’t quite sold on the Tranquillum House philosophy? Frances considered asking her about the missing contraband, but how would the conversation progress?
‘I think someone went through my bags, Jan.’
‘Why do you think that, Frances?’
‘Well, some things were missing.’
‘What sort of things?’
She was too ashamed and too vulnerable without her clothes on to confess.
‘What is the director like?’ asked Frances, thinking of the reverence with which Yao had looked at that closed door.
Silence.
Frances watched Jan’s feet in their chunky sneakers. They didn’t move.
Finally, Jan spoke. ‘She’s very passionate about her work.’
Yao had also said he was passionate about his work. It was the theatrical language of movie stars and motivational speakers. Frances would never say she was ‘passionate’ about her work, although she was in fact passionate about her work. If she went too long without writing she lost her mind.
What if she was never published again?
Why would anyone publish her again? She didn’t deserve to be published.
Don’t think about the review.
‘Passion is good,’ she said.
‘Yup,’ said Jan. She chose another spot for knuckle-digging.
‘Is she possibly too passionate at times?’ asked Frances, trying to understand the point, if any, that Jan was trying to make.
‘She cares a lot about the guests here and she’s prepared to do . . . whatever it takes . . . to help them.’
‘Whatever it takes?’ said Frances. ‘That sounds –’
Jan’s hands moved to Frances’s shoulders. ‘I need to remind you that the noble silence will begin in just a few moments. Once we hear the third bell we’re not allowed to talk.’
Frances felt panicky. She wanted more information before this creepy silence began.
‘When you say “whatever it takes” –’
‘I only have positive things to say about the staff here,’ interrupted Jan. She sounded a little robotic now. ‘They have your best interests at heart.’
‘This is sounding kind of ominous,’ said Frances.
‘People achieve great results here,’ said Jan.
‘Well, that’s good.’
‘Yup,’ said Jan.
‘So are you saying that some of their methods are possibly a little . . .’ Frances tried to find the right word. She was remembering some of those angry online reviews.
A bell rang once. It reverberated with the melodic authority of a church bell, clear and pure.
Damn it.
‘Unorthodox?’ continued Frances hurriedly. ‘I guess I’m just cautious now, after my experience with that man, that scammer. Once bitten –’
The second bell, even louder than the first, sliced through the middle of her cliché so that it hung foolishly in the air.
‘Twice shy,’ whispered Frances.
Jan pressed her palms down hard on Frances’s shoulder blades as if she were performing CPR and leaned forward so that her breath was warm against Frances’s ear.
‘Just don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with. That’s all I can say.’
The third bell rang.
chapter nine
Masha
The director of Tranquillum House, Maria Dmitrichenko – Masha to everyone except the tax office – sat alone in her locked office at the top of the house as the third bell rang. Even from all the way up here she could sense the silence fall. It felt like she’d walked into a cave or cathedral: that feeling of release. She bowed her head towards her favourite fingerprint-shaped whorl in the surface of her white oak desk.
She was on her third day of a water-only fast, and fasting always heightened her senses. The window of her office was open and she breathed in great gusts of clean country air. She closed her eyes and remembered how she’d once breathed in all the strange, thrilling scents of this new country: eucalyptus, fresh-cut grass and petrol fumes.
Why was she thinking about this?
It was because her ex-husband had emailed yesterday, for the first time in years. She’d deleted his email, but just seeing his name for even an instant had infiltrated her consciousness, so that now the merest scent of eucalyptus on a breeze was enough to transport her back thirty years to the person she’d once been, someone she could barely remember. And yet she did remember everything about that first day, after those endless flights (Moscow, Delhi, Singapore, Melbourne); how she and her husband had looked at each other in the back of that little van, marvelling at all the lights, even in the middle of the street. They’d whispered to each other about the way strangers kept smiling at them. It was bizarre the way they did this! So friendly! But then – it was Masha who first noticed this – when they turned their heads, their smiles shrank to nothing. Smile, gone. Smile, gone. In Russia, people didn’t smile like that. If they smiled at all, they smiled from the heart. That was Masha’s first-ever experience of the ‘polite smile’. You could see the polite smile as a wonderful or terrible thing. Her ex-husband smiled back. Masha did not.
Nu naher! She did not have time for the past right now. She had a health resort to run! People were depending on her. This was the first time she’d begun a retreat with a period of silence, but she knew already that it was right. The silence would give her guests clarity. It would frighten some of them, they would resist, and people would break the silence, accidentally or deliberately. Couples might whisper in their beds, but that was fine. The silence would set the right tone going forward. Some guests treated this place like summer camp. Middle-aged women got overexcited at not having to cook dinner each night. All that high-pitched chatter. If two men became ‘mates’, you could be sure rules would be broken.
In the early days, when Masha first opened Tranquillum House to the public, she’d been shocked to discover an order for a family-sized meatlovers pizza being delivered at the back fence. ‘Nu shto takoye?’ she shouted, scaring the life out of both the poor delivery boy and the guest. What’s going on here?
She had learned the funny ways of her guests. Now she took precautions. Security cameras around the property. Regular monitoring. Bags were checked. All for their own good.