Page 33 of The White Octopus Hotel
Max glanced around to see Second Lieutenant Rupert Lawson had entered the dugout and was peering over his shoulder, smirking at the note. Rupert was seventeen, a couple of years younger than Max, tall and gangly with red hair and a freckled face. He elbowedMax in the ribs. “Thought you didn’t have a sweetheart back home.”
“I don’t.” Max shrugged and rummaged through his bag for a box of Black Cat cigarettes. “It’s probably someone’s old granny who’s got confused and sent it off to the wrong chap.”
“A likely story!” Rupert scoffed. “What kind of chocolate is it, anyway? I wonder if Mabel would like it.”
“I’m not sure you should be feeding chocolate to a duck,” Max said doubtfully as he opened the cigarettes. “It can’t be good for her.”
“If you’re that much of a duck expert, then go find your own,” Rupert replied. “She likes trench cake well enough, doesn’t she?”
Rupert had a fiancée back home—a girl called Betty, who lovingly baked and sent him a trench cake almost weekly. Max slid the cigarette card from the box. Black Cat were running a Women at War Work collection, which many of the men were collecting.
“Grocer’s Assistant,” he said, looking down at the card. “I’ve already got it.”
“I’ll swap you for the Milk Woman,” Rupert replied.
Max nodded. “Look, you’d best move that duck before Thomas gets back.” He nodded towards the corner of the room, where the duck in question was perched on top of Thomas’s prized gramophone. “There’ll be hell to pay if it shits on one of his records.”
“Come along, old girl.” Rupert scooped up the duck. “Come have a chocolate. I say, are there any dark ones?”
“Help yourself.” Max pushed the box over.
He barely gave it a second thought in the days that followed, but the gifts continued to arrive. Every week or so there would be another parcel. Sometimes it might contain chocolates, others it would be a box of Maria Mancini cigars, which happened to be a great favourite of John’s. Officers always shared their gifts in the mess, but Max was especially pleased to be able to do so with the three other junior officers he’d become close with. Aside fromRupert there was Lieutenant John Waugh, a twenty-four-year-old, softly spoken solicitor. He wore a neat pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and wrote home to his mother every week to anxiously enquire about the health of his elderly tortoise, Herbert.
“I don’t know who your mystery girl is, but these cigars are absolutely first-rate,” he said, delighted.
“Almost gets rid of the taste of petrol.”
Their drinking water was transported in petrol cans and the taste of it never quite went away. Chloride of lime tended to get stuck in the back of the throat too. Rich cigars, with their flavours of leather, and wood, and nuts, were infinitely preferable. On another momentous day, Eve sent a box of ragtime records, an entire box—a gift that equally delighted both Max and his friend, twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Thomas Jones. Thomas was the best person to be with in a dugout because of the gramophone he’d brought from home. He hoped to be a professional saxophonist once the war was over, preferably on board a transatlantic liner as a member of the shipboard orchestra.
The day the ragtime records came, Max and the others were so thrilled that they decided to throw a dinner party in their dugout. Max’s servant, William, rose to the occasion, producing four courses consisting of turtle soup, jam omelettes, mushrooms on toast, and a dessert of apricots and cream, served alongside a bottle of champagne. The food was excellent, the candlelight glowed, and they were warmed by their shared laughter. It was almost like having a party back at his accommodations at the Royal College of Music. Until Rupert lit a cigarette and said, “Say, did you hear what the papers back home are calling us? The officers, I mean?”
“What?” Thomas asked from the corner, where he was replacing the record on the gramophone.
Rupert grinned widely, as if he was about to deliver the punch line of a splendid joke. “The Suicide Club.”
The record stuck and stopped. A silence fell upon the group.Although it wasn’t silence at all, was it? Max heard shells dropping in the distance and—closer to home—the ping of a bullet hitting the parapet, and then another. And the ever-present scuffle of rats scrabbling over the sandbags above them.
“They’re saying an officer lasts a matter of weeks on average,” Rupert went on. “At the front.”
They stared at him. It wasn’t news to any of them, of course, but hearing the words said aloud gave them a different weight. A different flavour. They tasted of petrol and blood. Max put his hand in his pocket, oddly and unaccountably comforted by the smooth wooden head of the fumsup. It was a hideous little thing, but it was a link to his mother, whom he loved more than anyone in the world. And it was a link to normality, and England, and home. A place where things made sense and there wasn’t death and the most sickening violence everywhere you looked.
“You know what my favourite thing about you is, Rupert?” John finally asked, pushing his spectacles up his nose.
“My magic tricks, obviously.”
“Not those, although I must say they’re topping. It’s that you always know precisely the right thing to say to cheer everyone up.”
Max gave a snort of laughter, then Thomas joined in and suddenly everyone was laughing again. But still, Max wished Rupert hadn’t spoken as he had. In that moment he was grateful for the ragtime filling the dugout and the way it helped ease the tremor in his hands. Max was afraid of the war, and he was afraid of the Germans and their shells and their poisonous gas, and he was afraid of the dead bodies of fallen soldiers they sometimes unearthed in the mud. But worse—far worse than all of that—he was afraid of being afraid. One could not be afraid here. One could not. If Max showed fear, then he would be committing the worst sin of all, by letting down his men.
It will be your duty to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire,Lord Kitchener had told them.
The gifts from Eve Shaw continued and Max soon unravelled the mystery. One of his company commanders had also been receiving gifts from a girl back home he’d never heard of. But in her accompanying note she’d explained that a photo of some of the officers had been printed in a local newspaper, so a group of the village girls had decided to send little gifts to them at the front.
“Chances are you’ll never meet her in person,” Captain Johnson told him. “Nice enough perk, though, eh?”
Max had to agree. His friends were certainly delighted with the chocolates, and the cigars, and the ragtime records, and Max was especially pleased with the books she sent at Christmas. There wasA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Courtby Mark Twain, andThe Time Machineby H. G. Wells—stories that took him far away from the trenches and transported him somewhere else entirely. But the gift he treasured the most—more than the chocolates, or the cigars, or even the ragtime records and books—was an entire box of brand-new candles that Eve sent him. He almost wept with relief when he unwrapped them, because they’d run out in the dugout the night before and he’d been in the trenches long enough by now to know that a candle made all the difference in the dark.
Chapter 21
