Page 65 of The White Octopus Hotel
Nikolas Roth
The card was dated 12th June 1918.
I did it. I went back again….
There was a rap at the door, sharp and impatient. Eve opened it. This time there was no bellhop, no cocktail or sugar octopus. Instead, a hassled-looking woman of about fifty stood on the threshold, dressed in a pristine matron’s uniform.
“Here you are at last,” the woman exclaimed. “I expected youhours ago. Good grief, what on earth are you wearing? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m Mrs. Jones. You may call me Matron.”
“I’m Eve Shaw.”
“Well, Eve, you’d best get into your uniform quickly. Our men will be arriving at the station in an hour, and we ought to be there to greet them.”
Eve realised she must mean the POWs.
“Hurry up, for goodness’ sake,” Matron went on. “I’ll expect you in the lobby in five minutes.”
Then she was gone. When Eve looked out into the corridor a moment later, the lights were powered by gas rather than electricity, and there was the antiseptic smell of a sanitorium. She closed the door and turned back into the room. She wanted to go hunting for the last octopus and missing clocks at once but supposed she would have to play the part of a nurse in order to fit in here. She didn’t intend to do anything to risk being thrown out of the hotel.
She went to the wardrobe and found a nurse’s uniform hung up inside it. Within a few minutes she’d changed into the long, blue belted dress and slipped the white apron over the top, a Red Cross emblem emblazoned across the chest. It took a few attempts to pin the white cap to her head.
Then she went down to the lobby. The hotel in its new formation was both familiar and unfamiliar to her. Some parts remained the same, but there was no sense of celebration here anymore. No champagne or jazz. No elegant guests walking over the tiled floor and no one manning the reception desk. But the fountain still splashed and the grandfather clock continued to tick. Mrs. Jones was waiting by the front door, tapping her foot impatiently.
“At last,” she said. “Come along. The boat is waiting.”
Eve hurried after her out the door and onto the boat floating on the perfectly still lake. It seemed odd somehow, for the lake and mountains to be exactly as they’d been before. And the seasonswere different here too, she realised. It was now summer, the air warm on her skin.
“You should know that I don’t have any nursing experience,” Eve began as the boatman pushed them off from the shore.
Matron gave a short laugh. “You’re a VAD. Of course you don’t. Pay close attention and do as I say and perhaps you might be some use to me in the end.”
The cable car had not yet been built, so they travelled by carriage, arriving at the station just as the train was pulling in. The Swiss townspeople were cheering and clapping and had even organised a children’s choir. When the train stopped and the servicemen began to step down onto the platform, Eve felt that same sense of disorientation that she’d experienced on first encountering people from the 1930s in their glamorous evening wear. It was hard to believe that these bewildered-looking men in their tattered uniforms were real, that they had actually fought in the First World War.
And then she saw him. Max Everly stood a few feet away and Eve was shocked by his appearance. She’d seen an old photo of him in his lieutenant’s uniform, but that had been right at the start of the war, when he’d first enlisted. Two years later, he looked older than nineteen and painfully thin, with dark hollows beneath his eyes, and cheekbones that pressed through his skin.
He folded up suddenly, like he was made from paper, and then he was on his knees on the platform, crying. Eve could feel the despair radiating from him—a feeling she could still remember experiencing herself, with perfect clarity, although it had taken place in a different world, and for different reasons. She went to kneel beside him, reached wordlessly for his hand. Max flinched at her touch at first, but when he saw her nurse’s uniform, he wrapped his fingers around hers and held on to her tightly. He was covered in dirt and grime, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d been able to wash.
Eventually, after the other men had been taken to the waiting carriages, Mrs. Jones returned and helped Eve to get Max loaded on too. He did as they told him but didn’t speak during the entire journey back to the hotel. There were twelve servicemen in total, and they took them straight to the steam baths to wash. Those who could manage unattended—including Max—went through to the showers alone. But a few of the men, including one with an amputated leg, required help. Eve found herself assisting Matron to strip off their filthy clothes and then wash all the dirt and grime and lice from their gaunt bodies. There wasn’t room for embarrassment or awkwardness from anyone present. It was simply a job that needed to be done.
Afterwards, they escorted the men to the suite where they’d be staying. All the furniture had been removed to make space for single beds and there were a couple of nurse’s cots in the corner behind a curtain. Mrs. Jones informed Eve that she’d be on a rota of night duties along with the Swiss nurses also staying at the hotel. Once the men were settled in, Mrs. Jones sent Eve around with a brown paper bag full of pretzels. When she held one out to Max, he stared at it like he’d never seen anything so extraordinary. She expected him to take it eagerly, as the other men had done, snatching it straight from her hand, but instead he frowned and shook his head. He suddenly looked so angry that Eve didn’t know what to do. She thought of the things his future self had told her in 1935. The terrible sights he’d witnessed in the trenches. The fact that he’d had to shoot his friend to spare him the agony of a drawn-out death. No wonder he was angry. She would have been too.
“Perhaps later,” she said quietly, putting the pretzel down on the table.
She remained busy the rest of the afternoon, helping Mrs. Jones to change dressings and apply delousing tonics to the men’s hair. They were all crawling with fleas and lice.
“We’ll have to do several rounds of this,” Mrs. Jones told her. “And change the bedding and pyjamas daily for a while.”
“There’s no getting rid of ’em,” one of the men said. “You know, back at the camp, I once picked three hundred sixty-five lice off my shirt in a single night.”
“We shan’t have any lice here,” Mrs. Jones said firmly. “A couple of weeks at the most and they’ll all be gone, I promise you.”
The men all seemed pleased to be there—all except for Max, who still hadn’t spoken since he’d arrived and had refused to eat any of the food they’d offered. He simply sat, staring out the window in an unfocused way, like he wasn’t really seeing any of them at all.
“He’ll have to be sent away if he doesn’t eat,” Matron said to Eve later that afternoon.
“Sent where?” she asked.
Mrs. Jones shrugged. “To one of the military asylums, probably. We can deal with physical injuries here, but we’re not set up for broken minds.”
