Page 45 of The White Octopus Hotel
You would be proud, Mother, my peonies are topping….
Charlie had died the day before the seeds arrived. As he stared down at the garden, Max still had some of Charlie’s blood on his boots. And there were hundreds of Charlies he’d left back there, thousands of them.
It will be your duty to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire….
Lord Kitchener’s words to the troops rang around Max’s head. Yet there was no longer anyone from his company to set that example for. They were gone, all gone.
It had seemed possible to bear it in the trenches because there was no alternative, but here, now, surrounded by all these normal people who were still a part of the normal world, it was suddenly impossible, intolerable, insane.
The children sang and Max felt something inside him break.
There was a young man about his own age on the platform beside him, dressed in a hotel uniform with a name badge that readHarry.He was smiling as he asked Max for his luggage ticket, looking at him with a fascinated, wondrous sort of expression, as though Max were a rare bird he’d never spotted before, never thought to see at all in the wild. Max didn’t know where the ticket was, couldn’t remember what he’d done with it, and nor did he care. For a moment he thought he saw Charlie in the crowd, grinning widely.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t.”
There was something wrong with his legs; they wouldn’t hold him up. He crumpled to the floor in the middle of the platform, and everything unravelled; he was sobbing. Even now, part of him—the part that could still forget—was shouting,My men mustn’t see me like this!But the men were gone, and it didn’t matter now if he cried. Nothing much mattered anymore. The tears burned, along with the shame, and Max wished he were back there with the rest of them, back where he should have been. For a moment it felt like hewasthere, lost and dying alone in the dirt.
Then there was a woman crouched on the ground beside him. She wore a nurse’s starched white uniform, and reached for hishand and squeezed it in her own. Max wondered how long it had been since someone had held his hand. He didn’t think he’d ever been so glad to feel the touch of another person or so grateful for the fact that she didn’t say a word. She just quietly sat beside him, her fingers wrapped tightly around his.
Chapter 28
It was confusing, at first, to see a nurse in the trenches. Max would notice her walking past his dugout sometimes, lit up by the flash of shells. Or she’d be there handing out pretzels in the mess, which made no sense because they had no bakery at the front, yet sometimes Max could smell the bread baking. The nurse wasn’t covered in mud like the rest of them. Her uniform was blue and white and pristine. And that made no sense either. She looked a bit like the VAD from Thomas’s cigarette card, even had the same chin-length black hair. It was as if the miniature painting had come to life.
Once, while he was on watch, he spotted her in no-man’s-land, crouched by the side of a fallen soldier. She was just right there, out in the open, where any stray bullet could take off a piece of her head. He shouted out a warning and she looked up, straight at him. He noticed then that her eyes were different colours—one was blue and the other was green. His mother would have said that one of them must be a ghost eye or a witch eye, meaning the woman could see into the afterlife, converse with ghosts, glimpse things other people could not.
He blinked and the nurse vanished. Had he imagined her? Wasthis how he knew he was losing his mind? What other explanation could there be? Max didn’t believe in ghosts. Or angels. Or cigarette card paintings that came to life. But the more he saw the nurse, the more the trenches were the thing that started to seem unreal. Sometimes they would fade away altogether and he’d be somewhere else entirely—somewhere clean, and warm, and safe. The first time the trenches vanished, Max truly thought he must be dead. But the nurse was still there—the one with the black hair and the different-coloured eyes.
“Are you real?” he finally asked her one day.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is your name really Eve Shaw? That’s what I’ve heard them calling you.”
She nodded.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Even now, he didn’t entirely trust that she was a real person. It seemed far more likely that he had invented her. “But are you…can you be the same person who sent those parcels to me out at the front? Itwasyou, wasn’t it? I’m glad I get to thank you in person. The records you sent. They meant a lot to my friend. Thomas.”
Suddenly, Thomas was there, standing outside on the balcony and looking through the window at him with half his head blown away. Max’s hands began twitching and then that fog came down and the hotel vanished and all around was mud and barbed wire. It took him the rest of the day to find his way back to the White Octopus. He fought hard to do it, wandering trench after trench, pushing his way through piles of bones and the buzzing of flies.
It was a path he had to travel over and over again in the days and weeks that followed—one that shifted and twisted like a maze, always trying to trick him into going the wrong way. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he would stumble across Charlie’s trench garden and stop to rest amongst the flowers for a while. A sign propped upagainst the trench wall read:Come into the Garden and Forget the War.Which was odd because Max remembered that sign being in the conservatory of a nearby hotel where they’d been billeted, but otherwise it was all just as it had been, and there was Charlie, watering his flowers with his petrol can, whistling “Auld Lang Syne.”
One day, another soldier, Jeffries, even came out, just like he had before, and Charlie stopped what he was doing and tried to point out all the work he’d done, so proud and pleased, but Jeffries only sneered a little and said, “Well, Benson, you know it’s all a waste of time, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“We head north tomorrow.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, but left Charlie looking around his garden. There were tears glimmering in his eyes, and he furiously tried to blink them away as he threw the tin watering can into the mud.
And Max said, “It isn’t a waste.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
There was a cigarette in his hand, just like there had been before, and he took a drag as he nodded at the garden. “The next fellow will get the benefit.”
Charlie paused for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Max wondered how many times he’d had this same conversation with Charlie, how many times he’d gone around this same loop, and how many more circuits he still had to do before he found his way out. Part of him believed he would be lost in the trenches forever.
