Page 54 of The White Octopus Hotel
Then both his hands were on the keys, and he was playing a piece he remembered from his childhood—a simple little tune that his mother used to play. A song that immediately brought back the safe feeling of arms wrapped around him in a hug, playing with a ball and stick in the garden as nightingales sang from the trees, lying in clean sheets at night as a fresh breeze brushed against the curtains and people who loved him moved about downstairs.
After that, his fingers ached to play every beautiful song he could recall. Songs that reminded him of friends and family, past joys and hopes, every moment that had in any way been good, and true, and worth something. He was glad of Eve still sitting beside him, because music meant more if there was another person there to hear it too—especially if it was a person you cared for. He didn’t know why that should be, but it simply was. The music yearned for an audience. He played for hours, until the sun rose outside and light spilled in through the windows, painting the pillars golden.
“Can I come back?” Max asked. “To play the piano again?”
“Whenever you like,” she replied.
Max looked at her. The morning light across her face was beautiful—shewas beautiful—and he felt that familiar intense gladness that came from being close to her. He thought again that she must be a witch who had cast a spell over him. He didn’t want to feel this way. He didn’t want the tormented tug that comes from yearning to see a person day after day. He told himself it was a good thing that he would leave the hotel soon and never see Eve Shaw again. He hoped that she would return to England and meet a nice fellow who had survived the war with his soul intact, and would treat her well, and make her happy.
“If you ever need anything,” he found himself saying, “anything at all, then just send word. It won’t matter what I’m doing or where I am. I’ll come and find you.”
Chapter 36
Max—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935
The previous night, Max had helped Eve locate several more octopuses and another clock for the list. There were just eleven octopuses and four clocks to go now. During their search, Eve had shown Max the octopus sculpture she’d told him about too, the one with the hook on its head that he had apparently travelled through time to deliver to her himself. There was something maddeningly, infuriatingly familiar about it, as if he had seen it many times before, yet he couldn’t place where. And although they searched the hotel together, they found no place where it might conceivably belong.
They’d made no firm arrangement about where they would meet the next day, so Max found himself heading to the Music Room—a place he had returned to several times since his arrival. It contained a gramophone and a vast number of records, but he was more interested in the music boxes. They lined the shelves in every conceivable design, from enamelled musical powder compacts and Reuge singing birds to golden ormolu musical clocks and shimmering Bakelite boxes in geometric panels of ruby and pearl. As with the hotel walls, there was a great deal of empty space on the shelves. Some items in the collection were clearly missing.
Max had listened to all the music in the boxes that remained, and none could claim to be the most beautiful in the world or even come close to such an absurd standard. But there was one that he’d returned to several times now. All gleaming golden wood, it was an Italian musical lipstick box by Lador. Once wound, the six glossy doors opened out and spun around the core in a slow circle, showing off the brass lipstick holders nestled into their red velvet linings. At the very centre was a small ornamental mirror.
He wound this music box now and marvelled at the perfect grace of the mechanism as it opened out and started to spin. The box played a rendition of “Valzer delle candele”—or “Auld Lang Syne” as it was better known back home:For the sake of old times.Max loved the tune, but it made him ache inside as well. There were too many old times that were gone, and gone for good, and it hurt to remember them and the friends and family he’d never meet again.
He took a deep breath as the song played on. Some days Max didn’t want to forget, but there were times when he couldn’t bear to remember either. Yet this was the music box that he had wound over and over again. The tiny mirror at the centre reflected back a small fragment of the room, but the image was permanently interrupted by the revolving carousel of doors. Max saw Anna, though, when she appeared behind him, her scarlet dress catching his eye in the glass.
“That was one of my mother’s favourites,” she remarked. “She always kept it on her dressing table.”
“Did she mind?” Max asked without turning around.
“About?”
He shrugged. “All of it, I suppose. The fact that she was hidden away in Nikolas Roth’s shadow. The fact that her husband was sending flowers to another woman.”
“What other woman?”
“The VAD who took care of me when I was last in the hotel.”He deliberately did not mention her name. “Your father sent her flowers, every week.”
Anna lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t suppose any wife would much like her husband sending flowers to another woman.” But there was something oddly smug in her gaze that set his teeth on edge.
“No, I don’t suppose they would. You told us that night that it was Nikolas Roth who suddenly wanted to see Eve, but that was a lie, wasn’t it? It was his wife who sent for her.”
“It was time for her to check out.”
“And you’re angry that she came back, is that it? Is that the reason for the charade?”
Anna slowly shook her head. “Why should I be angry? I wanted her to come back. It’s what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”
“Then why did you pretend that you didn’t know her?”
“Well, I don’t,” Anna said with a shrug. “Not really.”
I desperately need your help….
The words from Eve’s postcard were burned into his mind.
Please come to the White Octopus at once….
He saw Anna as a girl back in 1918. The snow melting on her boots, that strange expression on her face as she summoned Eve back to the hotel, and that was it—the last time he saw Eve Shaw until she walked into the Palm Bar seventeen years later in that extraordinary black-and-gold dress. His brain ached with the riddle of it all, of trying to assemble all the pieces in the correct order to work out what happened to Eve, andwhenit happened, and what could be done about it.
