What name would they give me? I wondered. And would they send me away afterwards? I liked Beth because Mum hated it. Elisabeth was the good girl they wanted me to be. Beth was rock and rebellion, the name I gave myself. How could they let me stay after seducing Mrs Harper and climbing naked into Mi Nu’s bed? It was strange, though, that she hadn’t been upset. Mi Nu hadn’t been upset that I hugged her and she hadn’t been excited either. Maybe that was how she was like Jonathan. I couldn’t touch her. And maybe calling myself Beth had become a kind of trap. Beth had to be young and rebellious. But now those days were over. The Beth days. Was changing names the price I’d have to pay for staying at the Dasgupta?
I didn’t want to start another retreat.
I didn’t want to leave either.
In the laundry room the washing-machine was busy and the floor stacked with plastic baskets. There was a mix of clean and dirty smells, soap and soiling, and every basket had a label on top: ‘Tea towels day 9’. ‘Aprons day 9’. ‘Harpers day 8’. ‘Maintenance crew day 8’. Had Mi Nu told Mrs Harper about my visit? Would she mention what I’d said about Mrs Harper trying to kiss me? I put the bloody sheets in a basket and filled out the label. ‘Beth, sheets, day 10. Sorry’.
On day ten there is an evening meal as well as lunch, to prepare people for the world again, for their departure the following morning. I went to the kitchen to help. Important things were about to happen, but I wanted to be back in the routine for a while. I needed a breather. Coming in from the service entrance, I’d barely got my hat and apron on when Kristin told me Rob and Meredith had done a runner. They’d been on breakfast together but cleared off. There’d been no porridge. Now there was an extra meal to cook, twice the normal washing-up, and two less people to do it.
The news cheered me up and I rushed around chopping leeks and stacking dishes. Rob and Meredith had absconded! Nobody could see the point of their screwing off on the last day, with only one more night and breakfast to go. What was so urgent? They’d let down their friends at the busiest moment. For what? A few hours.
‘Maybe we weren’t really friends,’ Ines said.
Ralph asked me to help him with the chocolate dessert. The day-ten treat. We checked the ingredients. I felt happy now, I felt myself again. Then I was just coming back from the cold room with the soya milk when he upended a two-kilo tub of cocoa powder into the big tin basin. He just opened the thing and tipped it upside down. Wham! It sent an explosion of powder to the ceiling. It was so thick we could barely see each other. We were breathing chocolate.
‘Bless you.’ I reached through the cloud and pinched his waist.
‘Sugar!’ he complained.
‘Actually, cocoa.’
Kristin burst out in one of her roaring laughs. It was definitely day ten.
Then, waiting till Mrs Harper was in earshot, I said: ‘I’ve got it. Meredith needed the morning-after pill. That would explain the hurry. She needed a prescription.’
Mrs Harper was staring through the glass of the Rational Oven. She didn’t even turn round.
‘They couldn’t be that stupid,’ Marcia said.
‘Whatever the reason, it was not respectful,’ Ines said. ‘What if everyone ran off?’
Paul felt personally let down, he said.
‘Breaking rules together can be a way of confirming love,’ Tony pronounced. ‘Alliance against the world kind of thing.’
Stephanie said she was d’accord. ‘Rob is in love.’
‘See what happens the moment Beth turns her back.’ I laughed.
Mrs Harper said, enough, we must concentrate on our work, we mustn’t be distracted by speculations and gossip. ‘They have let us down, but we don’t need to ask why. We will manage.’
Ralph plugged in the big whisk. The recipe said to stir in the cocoa by hand but with ten litres of soya milk it would have taken an age. We moved to the window near the plugs and I held the basin while he pointed the shaft.
‘Ralph, don’t turn the thing on before the whisk’s well in.’
He sent me a pained look.
The liquid swirled white and brown. Ralph was solemn, moving the heavy motor round and round while I kept the bowl still. I could see the concentration in his jaw. There was a veil of cocoa on his young man’s stubble. Honey on a razor’s edge. The heavy mix was lifting and falling in soft slaps. Under cover of the noise, he asked: ‘Can I kiss you again, Bess?’
Glancing round, I dipped a finger in the mix and dabbed it on his mouth.
‘No.’
‘Bess,’ he moaned.
‘I’m not Bess. I’m not even Beth.’
He smiled. ‘You can’t tell me you’re Merediz now.’
‘You should have run away with her. She was after you first.’
‘I like you, Bess.’
‘From now on,’ I said, ‘you must call me Lisa.’
Geoff
WHEN THE VOW of silence is dropped the screen in the dining hall is folded away. Men and women can mix. The servers eat with the meditators. Heads lift, people look you in the eye. It’s back to regular body language. Harper sets up a table in a corner to take people’s donations. You can pay with a credit card or cash, as much or as little as you want. There’s no fuss. They don’t tick off names or try to figure who paid what. The Dasgupta really is a free institution.
When we’d got all the food done and served, I found a place at the end of a table and listened to their conversations. There was such a buzz in the room. Somebody was convinced she’d levitated. One man was telling a story about how he’d sleepwalked and tried to get into the wrong bed. He was sharing a room with four others. He sleepwalked a lot. Then there was the problem that with the vow of silence he couldn’t explain himself to the bloke he’d woken up.
Everybody laughed.
‘Never heard so much bollocks in all me born days,’ an older woman said. ‘Karma bollocks, reincarnation bollocks, nirvana bollocks.’
I ate my risotto slowly. The woman saying ‘me born days’ and ‘bollocks’ had a posh accent. I let the grains dissolve on my tongue before swallowing. Rice turning into Beth who would turn it into shit soon enough. Anicca. Lisa, I mean. From now on I am going to be Lisa. I sat listening to the hubbub. I was swimming in noise, drifting on noise. There was a woman with a throaty voice giggling about bad karma and an older bloke braying he’d take reincarnation over Dante’s Paradiso any day.
Something has changed, I thought. I felt calm. I felt absolutely calm. I had no idea what I was going to do, even in the next few hours, whether I was going to stay or go, whether I was due for another conversation with Mrs Harper or Mi Nu, or whether they would never talk to me again. But I was calm. The past was here too. Right here in the dining hall. Jonathan and Carl and Zoë and Mum and Dad, they were all here, in the noise in my head, they hadn’t been removed, or buried, or forgotten. I could imagine them sitting at the table behind me, talking together. Like that night in Soho. Or times Carl came to dinner and talked fishing with Dad. They were all here for the day-ten party. But I wasn’t upset. I didn’t need to chase them away. I was calm. It wasn’t the stillness I’d had in the Metta Hall. But maybe it was to do with that.