She looked in the other direction and saw a row of identical balconies stretching to the end of the house. All the guest rooms shared this same view. The other balconies were empty, although as Frances watched, the figure of a woman emerged from the room at the farthest end of the house. She was too far away to distinguish her features, but Frances, keen to be friendly, gave her a wave. The woman instantly spun around and went back inside her room.
Oh, well, perhaps she hadn’t seen Frances. Or perhaps she suffered from tremendous social anxiety. Frances could handle the dreadfully shy. You just needed to approach slowly, as if they were little woodland creatures.
Frances turned back to Ben, and saw that he’d also gone back inside. She wondered if he and Jessica were still arguing. Their rooms were adjoining, so if things got heated Frances might overhear. Once, on a book tour, she’d stayed in a thin-walled hotel where she had the pleasure of overhearing a couple argue passionately and descriptively about their sex life. That had been great.
“I don’t get the obsession with strangers,” her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.
She went back inside her room to unpack. It might be nice to have a cup of tea and a few squares of chocolate while she read her information pack. She was sure it was going to have rules she would prefer not to follow; the noble silence that was beginning shortly sounded foreboding and she would need sugar to cope. Also, she hadn’t exactly followed the suggestion about reducing her sugar and caffeine intake in the days leading up to the retreat so as to avoid withdrawal symptoms. Frances couldn’t be dealing with a headache right now.
She went to pull out her contraband from where she’d carefully hidden it right at the bottom of her bag, underneath her underwear, wrapped in her nightie. She’d laughed at herself for hiding it; it wasn’t like they were going to be checking her bag. This wasn’t rehab or boarding school.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said out loud.
It wasn’t there.
She emptied all her clothes onto her bed with a growing sense of fury. They wouldn’t, would they? It was unconscionable. Illegal, surely.
It was very bad manners!
She turned the bag upside down and shook it. The nightie was still there, neatly folded by invisible hands, but the coffee, tea, chocolate, and wine were most definitely gone. Who had been through her bag? It couldn’t be Yao; he’d been with her the whole time from when she arrived. Someone else had rifled through her underwear and confiscated her treats.
What could she do? She couldn’t ring reception and say, “Somebody took my chocolate and wine!” Well, she could, but she didn’t have the requisite chutzpah. The website made it clear that snacks and coffee and alcohol were all banned. She’d broken the rules and she’d been caught.
She would say nothing and they would say nothing and on the last day they would hand it all back to her with a knowing smirk as she checked out, like returning a prisoner’s personal effects.
This was deeply embarrassing.
She sat on the end of her bed and looked dolefully at the lovely fruit bowl. She laughed a little, trying to turn it into a funny story her friends would enjoy, and selected a mandarin from the bowl. As she plunged her thumb into its fleshy center, she heard something. A voice? It didn’t come from Ben and Jessica’s room. It was the other room adjoining hers. There was a thud, followed immediately by the unmistakable sound of something breaking.
A male voice swore, loudly and forcefully. “Fuck it!”
Indeed, thought Frances, as the malevolent beginnings of a headache crept slowly across her forehead.
7
Jessica
Jessica sat on the four-poster bed and tested the mattress with the palm of her hand while Ben stood on the balcony, one hand shielding his eyes. He wasn’t enjoying the beautiful view.
“I’m sure they haven’t stolen it,” she said. She meant to sound funny and lighthearted but she couldn’t seem to get the tone of her voice to come out right these days. A hardness kept creeping in.
“Yeah, but where have they parked it?” said Ben. “That’s what I don’t get. I’d just like to