Page 37 of The White Octopus Hotel
“Being a mother.” She tapped the napkin and Eve saw that she’d been making a list of girl’s names. “Bella” was there, right at the top, beneath the octopus crest.
“Oh.” Eve stared at her. “Well. I’m sure that’s not true.”
Jane smiled slightly. “Sadly, it is. Though I do try. Every day I try. But I get so impatient and cross with Eve and then I feel horrible. It’s impossible to get it right some days. Most days, really. I’ve quite enjoyed having some time away from her. Isn’t that awful?” Tears suddenly filled her eyes and she quickly tried to blink them away. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. You must think I’m horrible.”
“I don’t.” Eve pulled out the chair opposite and sat down. “Look, I don’t have children of my own but…well, I can imagine that being a mother must be hard. Really hard sometimes.”
Her eyes flicked to the napkin again, taking in the other names her mum had once considered for her sister. She was surprised to see “Anna” was on the list, right underneath “Bella.” And beneath that, she saw, was a combination of the two. She could read the name even though it had been crossed out—“Annabella.”
“It’s just that I’m so tired,” Jane went on. “All the time. I tried to tell Glen, my husband, about it once and he didn’t say much, but I could tell he was gobsmacked. Just gobsmacked. And a little appalled. I mean, we’ve got this beautiful, healthy, perfect daughter, so what am I complaining about? IknowI shouldn’t find it this hard. And Glen didn’t know what to say, and I could tell that what he wanted more than anything was for us to rewind the last five minutes, to go back to pretending that everything was fine. So that’s what we did.” She sighed, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “I just thought I would know what to do once I had my own child, but I’m making it up. I’m just making it up as I go along and most of the time it’s not right, and it’s not enough.”
“It sounds really hard,” Eve said. Her eyes went to the list ofnames again. She desperately wanted to choose the right words to say to her mum, here in this moment, but it was difficult to know what they ought to be. “Do you think it might be possible,” she finally said softly, “that you’re doing better than you think?”
Jane shook her head. “You wouldn’t say that if you saw me.”
Eve longed to tell her mother about all the good memories she had. From before. Life had been so happy when Bella was alive. And not just happy, but warm, and safe, and secure. Before she could speak, though, Jane stood up.
“I should go,” she said, reaching out for the napkin and slipping it into her pocket. “I need to fetch Eve. The hotel have agreed to keep the door to Room 17 open for me so I can fetch my daughter without checking out. I thought I’d bring her here before we go home. To have afternoon tea. It seems like the kind of thing she might like but…” She shrugged and attempted a smile. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes. What Eve will like, I mean. What will work. But all children like cake, don’t they?”
It will work,Eve wanted to say.It will be magical.
“That’s a great idea,” she said. “I think your daughter will love it.”
Jane wiped the remaining tears from her face, said goodbye to Eve, then made her way to the exit. Eve watched her go, and that was when she noticed Max on the other side of the room. He was sitting at a table drinking coffee, but he was looking right at her, and Eve wondered how long he’d been there, watching her interaction with Jane. There was a puzzled expression on his face, but when he saw her looking, he raised his coffee cup in a silent mockery of a toast, and the gesture reminded Eve of the photo she’d seen—the last photo of him before his disappearance.
She felt that magnetic tug towards him once again, and thought of going over, but there didn’t seem anything left to say after last night, so she followed Jane out of the door instead, in search of clocks and octopuses.
—
By the early afternoon, Eve had located five more clocks: one each in the library, the Music Room, the Veranda Restaurant, the ladies’ powder room, and the ballroom. She’d easily scooped up another fourteen octopuses too—mostly from the chandeliers. This seemed like quite a good start, and she was feeling tentatively pleased, but also unnerved by the number of guests she’d seen all over the hotel with scavenger cards in their hands, all clearly engaged in the same activity. She still had six clocks and seventeen octopuses to go.
She also hadn’t managed to track down the Sugar Room, which Alfie had mentioned, and whenever she asked a member of staff where she might find it, she received contradictory directions.
There were pale squares haunting the walls everywhere she looked, marking the places where paintings had once hung, and Eve guessed these were more of Roth’s missing artworks. She could see from the size of the ghostly imprints that they had been large paintings. It simply made no sense that they had vanished. But then, it didn’t make any sense that a human being could vanish either.
As if thinking of Max had summoned him, she walked into the Smoking Room to find him there with a couple of other guests. It was a small cubbyhole of a place, with a pair of dark green leather armchairs positioned in front of a lit fireplace. Hung over this was a painting Eve recognised, from nineteenth-century painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, of an angelic little girl holding a pile of green apples in her hands. The saccharine subject matter seemed an odd choice for the masculine Smoking Room. A larger, faded square on the wallpaper behind showed where a different painting—presumably one of Roth’s—had once hung.
The girl in the painting was older than Bella had been—perhaps three or four—and the apples were green rather than red, but still, Eve shuddered at the sight and didn’t linger on the art or attempt towork out whether it might be an original. Instead, she looked at the floor-to-ceiling humidors and the handsome cigar cabinet that seemed like a restored version of the broken one she’d noticed back in the derelict hotel.
And there was the mirror.
It was strangely difficult to take her eyes from it. Frameless and fan shaped, it was the type of mirror that had been fairly common during the 1930s, and there was nothing especially unusual about it, save for the fact that it was quite tall—tall enough for Eve to see almost the full length of her reflection in the glass. But something was…off. Like a clock that misses thetickto go straight totock.
There’s a mirror in the Smoking Room. Whatever you do, don’t look into it for too long….
What had the guest at the party said? Something about your reflection coming to life. Eve stared suspiciously into the glass, half hoping and half dreading to see such a thing, but there was nothing unusual about her reflection, save for the fact that she still wasn’t used to seeing herself dressed in this way. There was a pull towards the mirror, though. Maybe it was only because of what the guest had said, but Eve couldn’t help feeling that if she looked at the glass for too long, then she might not be able to look away.
She deliberately turned her head and saw that Max was speaking to a member of staff she didn’t recognise, perhaps asking more questions about the VAD he’d known. The staff member looked uncomfortable and kept glancing at the pocket watch he held in his hand.
“Am I keeping you from a pressing engagement?” Max asked, sounding irritated.
“Not at all, sir,” the man replied, hastily returning the watch to his pocket.
The other two people present were guests reclining in armchairs, enjoying their cigars and chatting. Eve was pleased to see a bronze octopus perched on top of one of the floor-to-ceiling humidors andmarked this off on her list. Sixteen to go. And then the telephone began to ring, its shrill tone cutting through the air.
It was a chunky black Bakelite model that looked like it belonged on the desk of a private detective. It sat on a dark wooden table in the corner of the room—the type of telephone table that had a curved seat built into it, so that a person might sit to receive their calls. There was a drawer beneath the telephone for keeping pens and paper too. The telephone, Eve noticed, was not plugged in. The wire trailed down the side of the table leg to where the plug lay upon the parquet floor. And yet, the phone rang and rang, most insistently. Curious, Eve took a step towards it.
“I wouldn’t answer that, if I were you,” one of the guests said. He leaned forwards to stub out his cigar in the ashtray and his companion quickly did the same.
