Page 46 of The White Octopus Hotel
But then, somehow, Eve started to find him there and would lead him back to the hotel. She always seemed to know the way and sometimes, like tonight, the light of her candle shone straight through the trenches, revealing them for the shadows that they wereand not reality at all. He could see a dark room beyond, with other men sleeping in their beds, and the icy glitter of stars on the other side of the windows.
“You’re at the hotel,” Eve was saying. “The White Octopus. You’re safe.”
Max looked down and saw she was holding his hand. And there was an octopus there as well, a tattoo, only tattoos didn’t move and this octopus was drifting and its tentacles were unfurling until they wrapped around Max’s hand too and he noticed that one of them had a black tip. He looked up at Eve, trying to work out if she could see it.
“What’s that?” he whispered, flicking his eyes back down to their entwined hands.
“That? Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s just my octopus.”
Max stared. It was hard to tell where the octopus ended and Eve began. It was like they were one and the same.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
Eve smiled. It was the first time he’d ever seen her do so, and suddenly Max felt a glow, a feeling of having achieved something extraordinary. It made him want to keep hold of her hand and never let it go, but he knew he would have to return to the front eventually. There was still a war to be won. Or lost. It hardly mattered at this point; they’d all lost. But in the meantime, he enjoyed the peace and the quiet of the hotel. He relished the pure air. Sometimes the nurses piled a load of blankets on top of him and sat him out on the balcony to bask in the silence of the mountains and soak up the warmth of the sun. It was good to feel clean again. It was good to sleep in a bed. It was good to lay down the burdens of command, just temporarily. To not have to make decisions that led to whether men lived or died. To not watch friends perish in the mud.
The POWs were all supposed to be sitting out the war in Switzerland. That was the agreement that Britain had entered into with Germany, but it wasn’t whatMaxhad agreed to. His chest stillached from the piece of shrapnel that had gone into his lung, but the infection was clearing up now. Soon he would recover and then he would make his escape—back to the front. He realised they’d sent the POWs to remote mountain resorts in order to make escape more difficult, but he would find a way somehow. As soon as he was better and the snow had melted in the spring. In the meantime, perhaps it was all right to have a rest.
Max didn’t normally chat much with the other officers sharing the large room with him. This morning, though, a couple of them were prattling on again about an armistice and Max couldn’t prevent a scornful snort. The other two men glanced over. “What?” one asked. “You don’t think it will happen?”
Max shook his head. “They’ve spoken of armistice before. It came to nothing then and it’ll come to nothing now.”
He found it impossible to imagine there ever being peace again after all this. Normal was gone for good, for all of them. But then one of the nurses switched on the radio and they heard it. An armisticehadbeen declared. And the warwasover. There would be no escape, no return to the front. They could hear cheers of jubilation over the airwaves, yet the room inside the White Octopus was strangely silent. None of the soldiers cheered. Most barely smiled. Max had thought he’d feel relief and joy if and when the war finally came to an end, but it was too late for that. How could he feel joy when so many of his friends had lost their lives? And how could he possibly feel relief when he’d seen for himself how quickly and devastatingly life could unravel? If it had happened once, it could happen again. What was he even supposed to do with himself if he couldn’t return to the front? The thought of going home and trying to pick up where he’d left off was unthinkable. As the next few hours passed by, it started to sink in for Max that he quite simply had nowhere to go.
“Do you need anything?”
He looked up to see Eve at the foot of his bed, watching himwith her steady, calm gaze. Max found himself blurting the words before he had a chance to reconsider. “I need for the war to not be over.”
“Why would you say something like that?” Eve asked.
“Because I’m not finished. I need to make amends.”
“How?”
Max searched his mind for the answer but came up empty and the silence stretched on between them. The fact was that he would never be able to kill enough Germans or save enough British soldiers. There was no making amends—not now, or ever. It didn’t matter whether the war ended or not. It was hopeless. And now he could feel himself dissolving once again, into that flock of frenzied black birds, the carrion crows that had been all over no-man’s-land. What was the point? What was the point of any of it now? There was nothing good left. He didn’t want to be here at the hotel, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else either.
“Maybe there are some things that we can’t make amends for,” Eve said, somewhere through the storm of wings. “Maybe we can only make peace with the past.”
Max said nothing. How could he ever make peace with the things he’d seen and the people he’d lost? The things he’d done?
“You’ve done everything that was asked of you,” Eve said, but he couldn’t see her at all now, through all those birds that had once been pieces of his soul. “It’s over. You deserve to return to a normal life.”
“People don’t often get what they deserve in life, old boy,” said a voice at his elbow. “You know that.”
Max gritted his teeth. He recognised that voice and knew if he looked up, he would see Thomas standing there beside his bed, but Thomas was dead, dead, dead. Max screwed his eyes up tight. And when he opened them and looked around, he was alone.
Chapter 29
After the armistice was announced, there were dark days when he couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t summon the will to speak to anyone—not even Eve. For days and days, he uttered no words at all. Then one morning, Eve brought a gramophone onto the ward, along with a selection of ragtime records. Many of Thomas’s favourite songs were there, and hearing the music his friend had loved so much filling the air around him was a torment to begin with. A couple of times, Max saw him standing beside the gramophone, rifling through the box of records.
“ ‘Frog Legs Rag’ next, I think…”
And then Thomas was sitting on the edge of the bed, the record on his lap, a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers.
“So?” Thomas prompted. “What do you think?”
“About what?” Max asked. His thoughts were sluggish and as sticky as the mud in the trenches all around him. A rat scuttled over his pillow, and he felt the flick of its tail as he batted it away.
“Keep up, Everly.” Thomas rolled his eyes. “The dinner? For John? Might help cheer him up a bit. There’s still no word about Herbert, you know.”
