The White Octopus Hotel, page 25
Eve scrambled up and started forwards.
“Don’t!” Clara said, looking frightened. “Matron said not to if this happens. It might not be safe. We’re supposed to call her.”
Clara reached for the nearby telephone, but Eve had no intention of waiting. A couple of lamps were kept burning low during the night, but the ward was filled with shadows she had to stumble through to reach Max’s bed. He was sat up and the wild look in his eyes made her heart sink. He looked feral, dangerous. As soon as he saw her, he lunged forwards and gripped her arm, squeezing it so hard that she could feel the bruises forming beneath the skin. When he yanked her closer, she had the sudden image of him wrapping his hands around her throat and snapping her neck. In her quiet, protected life, Eve had never been physically assaulted before and was unprepared for how frightening it was to be grabbed, or how powerless and helpless and small it made her feel. The sudden panic of it. The dread.
She dragged in a deep, shaky breath and let it out in a hiss. “Lieutenant! Let me go!”
To her relief, he released her at once. The fury faded from his eyes as suddenly as it had appeared, and now he just looked confused and lost.
“You’re safe,” Eve said firmly. “It’s time to sleep.”
He stared at her without seeing her for a moment, then lay back down in his bed. One of the other soldiers—a captain called Donald—struggled over to her side.
“You all right, miss?” he asked. “Can I help?”
“Thank you, everything’s fine,” she whispered. “Please go back to bed.”
By the time Matron arrived on the ward, all was quiet once again.
“You shouldn’t have approached him,” she said sternly to Eve. “When they’re like that, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. They think they’re back in the trenches. He might have mistaken you for a German and killed you. It’s no good. He’ll have to be transferred tomorrow.”
The possibility made Eve feel dreadful, which made no sense at all, because if she was successful in changing what had happened to Bella, then Max Everly would die in this hotel anyway. It suddenly seemed to her like Max had been right in what he’d said—that sometimes life simply dealt you a hand that meant you were always going to fail, no matter what you did.
Chapter 43
The next day, Eve had a few hours’ sleep in her own room before she was summoned back to the ward. Max was just the same as before and Matron had the transfer paperwork in front of her. Eve thought of what Clara had said yesterday about china plates and Paris-Brest cakes, and Matron’s words from last night replayed inside her head.
They don’t know where they are…. They think they’re back in the trenches….
An idea occurred to her, and when she finally got a spare moment, she went downstairs. The huge kitchen was deserted, but she poked into the many cupboards and storage areas until, finally, at the back of one of the larders, she found an old tin of bully beef and a packet of stale biscuits. She put two slices of the beef and a couple of biscuits on a tin plate and carried it back to the ward. Max was sitting up in bed, staring at the wall. He had a chilling expression, as if he really were seeing things that none of the rest of them could detect at all.
She stood beside his bed and held the plate out to him. “Your rations, Lieutenant.”
He looked around at her and, in a dreamlike sort of way, took the plate. He stared down at it and Eve wondered whether he might throw it at the wall, but almost immediately, he began to urgently shovel the food into his mouth. Eve went back to the nurses’ station.
“He ate the food,” she said to Mrs. Jones. “Please let him stay. You said yourself that it’s better for him here.”
She could tell that Matron was unsure, but in the end she nodded. “We’ll see how we go,” she said, filing the paperwork away in a drawer.
One day slipped into two, which slipped into three, and soon a week had passed and then a fortnight. During her breaks, Eve frantically searched the hotel, but there wasn’t so much as a tentacle. The birdcage lift had not yet been installed and the Palm Bar had no mirrored panels or golden palm trees. In fact, it didn’t even have the same name. In this time period, it was called the Nook and featured mahogany walls and etched glass panels positioned around Victorian-style snugs. The bar was made of polished wood and set with green leather bar stools. Bottles of whiskey and cognac lined the shelves behind it. The blue curtain on the wall remained and Eve had already seen the Eavesdropper’s shabby shoes poking out from beneath it a couple of times. She always said hello to him, although he never said anything back.
The Gatsby Room was much as it had been in 1935. Eve knew that the officers had a farewell dinner there, so she wasn’t surprised at first, but then she looked again at the plaque on the door and frowned. Hadn’t The Great Gatsby been written in the twenties? Which meant that it was not yet published. She reflected that perhaps the room had been named for some other reason—maybe the architect or an investor of the hotel had been named Gatsby. Then again, maybe some other time-travelling guest had brought a copy of the novel back in time with them and then left it behind when they checked out….
The only person who might have been able to shed light on these things was Nikolas Roth and he remained hidden away in his suite on the sixth floor. It was strange to think of the artist up there, so close and yet so unreachable. There were dozens of questions Eve longed to ask him, but he never seemed to set foot on the lower floors. Once a week, though, Eve found a delivery of fresh flowers on her bedside table in Room 17, along with a card from Nikolas Roth that always read simply: With my compliments, N. Roth.
Eve asked Mrs. Jones whether she might be permitted to meet Nikolas Roth, but the matron shook her head. “He won’t see anyone,” she said. “I only met him once, very briefly, when I first arrived. It’s a condition of our using the hotel that he’s not to be disturbed under any circumstances.”
“But he sends me flowers every week,” Eve said.
Matron seemed startled by this news. “Be that as it may,” she said disapprovingly, “he won’t see you. He won’t see anyone. He even sent his wife and children away before the servicemen started to arrive. You’re here to tend to the men. There is no reason why you should cross paths with Mr. Roth.”
Eve hadn’t yet been up to the sixth floor. She’d been leaving it until last because she was worried that if she broke the one rule Nikolas Roth had specified, then there might be consequences and she might have to check out. She didn’t want to jeopardise her stay, but nor did she want to leave any stones unturned. And she was running out of options.
Eventually, she waited for an evening off and then went up to the top floor of the hotel. It looked much as it had in 1935, except for the fact that the door at the end of the corridor had a brass plaque that read The Roth Suite. When Eve paused outside, she could hear the faint strains of ragtime music playing from within. She recognised it, but it took her a moment to place it as the “Frog Legs Rag” that she’d heard from that painting inside the walls, what felt like a lifetime ago.
She raised her hand and knocked. The sound echoed down the empty corridor, but there was no response from inside. Light and shadow flickered through the small gap at the bottom, though, and Eve knew that someone was there, standing just on the other side of the door.
“I know you’re there,” she said, watching the shadow.
A man’s muffled voice came back to her. “You cannot be here, Miss Shaw. If you ever come near my door again, I will have you evicted from the hotel.”
She was this close to Nikolas Roth. He was right there on the other side of the door, the only person who might be able to answer her questions. Why is there an octopus hidden in the walls? Why were you so secretive about your paintings throughout your entire career? How do I win the scavenger hunt? Why am I here in the first place?
She slammed her hand against the door, suddenly angry. “But there are things I need to ask—”
“One more word,” Roth said quietly. There was something low and dangerous in his voice, something that was impossible to ignore. “One more word out of you, madam, and I promise you will never set foot in this hotel again.”
Eve shivered. She believed him, so she turned away and stalked back to the lower floors. And yet…in the days that followed, when she was outside, octopus-hunting around the grounds of the hotel, she had the strongest feeling that she was being watched. She could feel unseen eyes staring at her, and on a couple of occasions when she glanced back, she saw a curtain twitch on the sixth floor, as if someone had just stepped quickly back from the glass.
* * *
—
Up in the ward, Max was eating, but he still wasn’t speaking. Eve didn’t like how everyone else looked at him. In fact, she couldn’t stand it. No one spoke the word “coward” aloud, but there were judgements in the way that people looked at Max, and in the way they didn’t look at him, and the things they said, and didn’t say. There was a respectful tone in the nurses’ voices when they talked to the other POWs, but they spoke to Max like he was a child, and that made something furious stir in Eve.
Much of the time Max did nothing at all, just stared that dreadful stare, but after a couple of weeks, Eve noticed him sometimes watching her—looking at her and actually seeing her as she moved about the ward. And she thought that had to be a good sign, that he was seeing what was in front of him now rather than looking at whatever horror he’d left back there, in France.
Reporting for duty on the ward had been a nuisance to begin with, but after a while Eve realised she enjoyed her time there and felt at home with the wounded servicemen, experienced a greater sense of belonging with them than she’d ever felt with any other group of people. And before long, the men started to speak of seeing a war horse in the steam baths—a grey horse that returned lost items.
Almost three weeks after Eve had arrived in 1918, Max spoke to her for the first time. She was bringing around cups of coffee one morning when he held a letter up and said, “Would you post this for me, miss?”
It was strange hearing his voice after so many weeks, but Eve simply took the letter. “Of course. I’d be glad to.”
She was pleased that he’d spoken to her, but when she told Matron about it and showed her the envelope later, the other woman shook her head.
“That’s addressed to his mother,” she said.
“Well, yes. I suppose he wants to tell her where he is now and that—”
“She’s dead,” Matron cut her off. “Both his parents are. They caught Spanish flu, back in London.”
“Oh.” Eve looked at the envelope in her hand and the letter it contained that would never be read.
“He’s been informed,” Matron said. “His aunt wrote to him the first week he was here. I saw the letter when I was tidying away his things. I suppose he can’t take it in at the moment.”
“It’s been really bad in England,” Clara put in. “The flu pandemic. One of the other men told me that his sister wrote to say that they can’t build coffins fast enough for everyone. The dead bodies just have to lie there. In the houses.”
Eve looked over at Max, who was staring at the wall again.
“I could bring a gramophone up,” she said. “I saw one downstairs. The men have nothing to do all day and it might help if they could listen to some music—”
Matron was shaking her head. “We can’t move anything without Mr. Roth’s permission.”
“Well, let’s get his permission, then,” Eve said. “Why would he mind anyway? He’s shut away being mysterious on the sixth floor.”
“I’ve already told you that we’re not to disturb Mr. Roth,” Matron said sternly. “We’re not to go up to the sixth floor under any circumstances. Now, I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
Eve let the conversation drop, but a couple of hours later she went down to the music room and got the gramophone, lugging it all the way up the stairs, along with a box of records. Matron was furious.
“If you ever defy one of my instructions again, I will put in a request for you to be moved to a different hotel,” Matron said. “You’ll be gone by the morning.”
But the men were so delighted by the gramophone’s presence that there was no talk of taking it back downstairs. Max didn’t say anything about the music, but he kept looking over at the gramophone and focusing on it instead of doing that chilling stare into the past.
The next day, when Eve brought him his lunch, he looked up at her in a curious sort of way and said, “Are you real?”
For a moment, she was back in the Palm Bar, surrounded by black velvet and golden palm trees, a chilled Aviation in her hand.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Is your name really Eve Shaw?” he pressed on.
She nodded.
He continued to stare at her as if she was a puzzle. “But are you…can you be the same person who sent those parcels to me out at the front?”
Eve paused. Had she done this? Max hadn’t said anything about parcels back in 1935. Perhaps he was confused and thinking of some other girl. Perhaps he had a sweetheart back home in England—one of those many platinum blondes. She was about to tell him it hadn’t been her when he said, “It was you, wasn’t it? I’m glad I get to thank you in person.” His eyes flicked towards the gramophone. “The records you sent. They meant a lot to my friend. Thomas.”
His hand gave a sudden convulsive twitch then, and he stopped speaking abruptly.
I shot him in the head….
His words from 1935 echoed back to her.
There’s no forgiveness for that, no coming back from it….
Our nightmares will never go away….
“I’m glad about the records,” Eve said quietly. “And so sorry about your friend.”
Max didn’t reply. He didn’t say another word for the rest of the day, but the twitches and tremors were bad. The next morning Eve found him out on the balcony. It was the first time he’d agreed to go outside, and she could tell that he was looking at the mountains and actually seeing them.
I ought to go now, Eve thought. Back to 1935. This isn’t helping me with the scavenger hunt. So why am I still here?
Surely if she was going to find any clocks or octopuses in 1918, then she would have done so by now. But she couldn’t shake the conviction that the key to Room 17 had come to her for a reason. She tried not to think about the possibility that it was to save Max on the rooftop, like he’d said. This wasn’t about him. It was about the scavenger hunt. Maybe the final octopus hiding here in the past was one like Cleo, only appearing in certain circumstances. If she just stuck it out long enough, then perhaps she would find it. But she couldn’t deny that she looked forward to seeing Max each day. She looked forward to it so much that she was not quite ready, deep down, to give it up.
“Thank you, miss.” He took the pretzel from her.
“Call me Eve, if you like.”
“If you’ll call me Max.” He held out another letter addressed to his mother. “Would you mind posting this?”
“Of course.”
She took the letter and tucked it into her pocket. She wondered when and how the subject of Max’s parents should be broached with him again, but then he surprised her by saying, “I know they’re dead. Everyone thinks I don’t, but I do. My head isn’t quite that cracked.”
“Then…why the letters?”
“I can’t explain. I don’t know why I keep writing to them.” He looked down at the pretzel. “You know, we got one piece of bread a day in Germany. It was about half the size of the palm of your hand. We used to boil snails and grind them up with nettles into a spread to bulk it out. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to food like this.”
For the next week, Eve walked around the hotel at different hours of the day. She tried midnight, 3 a.m., sunrise, 9 p.m., just in case a clock or octopus only appeared at a certain hour; just in case she stumbled across the Sugar Room. Occasionally, when she was walking around the hotel, she thought she caught the faintest scent of freshly baked cakes, creamy chocolate, and roasting coffee. This happened more often in the middle of the night, but there was never any sign of a patisserie. Despite Nikolas Roth’s instructions, Eve tried returning to the corridor of floor six, in case that tentacle should appear to pull her through the wall again. She even laid her hands flat against the wallpaper, reaching for the octopus with her mind, begging it to come for her, but there was no sign of it. She wandered the steam baths, the tread of her heels echoing over the tiles, but there was no octopus and no trench horse. There was, perhaps, nothing here in 1918 for her at all.
Finally, Eve stood in the empty frigidarium at midnight and put her hand in the pocket of her nurse’s dress, looking for the fumsup that was no longer there. Instead, her fingers stroked the cold metal of the key to Room 17. There had to be something here. Something that she was missing. Perhaps she should try the balconies. She’d wandered the corridors and rooms at night over and over again, but she hadn’t been out to the balconies or the roof after dark. It would be foolish to go back to 1935 before making sure there were no stones unturned. It was, she told herself, the only reason she was staying. It had nothing whatever to do with Max.
Chapter 44
For a little while, Max wrote a letter to his parents every day. And then, abruptly, the letters stopped. The next time Eve saw him scribbling on the balcony, she realised he wasn’t writing a letter at all. He was writing music. The notes sprawled out across the paper and even onto the envelopes. He saw her looking and said, “Can you read music, Eve?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He looked back down at his work. “It’s so quiet in the mountains, I can hear it again, inside my head.”
