Page 66 of The White Octopus Hotel
“He’s only just arrived,” Eve pointed out. “Perhaps he needs time to adjust.”
“He doesn’t have time,” Matron said. “He needs to start eating straightaway, even if he chooses not to speak to anyone. If he hasn’t had anything by the end of tomorrow, I’ll have to put in a referral to move him.” She sighed. “They’re unpleasant places, the asylums. I’ve heard reports of force-feeding and electric-shock therapy. It’s hard to know what’s true, because many men don’t ever come out. He’d be much better off here, with the fresh air and the mountains.”
Eve glanced at Max, feeling a new flicker of worry. But she already knew that hedidstay here at the White Octopus, so surely that must mean that he would eat something soon?
Mrs. Jones told Eve to go and get some rest, since she and one ofthe Swiss nurses would be on the night shift later. Eve left the ward, but she didn’t return to her room. Instead, she began her search for the final scavenger hunt items. The hotel was like a ghost building, reminding her of the way she’d first seen it in 2016. It had that same eerie sunken-ship atmosphere. It seemed that there was hardly anything or anyone there except for the wounded men and the nursing staff. The majority of the rooms were empty, and many of the public rooms were shut up, the furniture covered in dust sheets. Eve peered beneath them all, but there was nothing. No octopus, no clocks, no Sugar Room, no magical objects.
She returned to the ward that evening in a bad mood. Max was still refusing food, even though Clara, the Swiss nurse, told her that she’d offered him slices of the best Gruyère cheese, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a Paris-Brest cream cake from the local bakery.
“He threw the cake on the floor,” she whispered. “The plate broke. Matron wasn’t happy. The porcelain all belongs to Nikolas Roth. She says that he’s to have only tin mugs and plates from now on.”
Eve glanced at the broken pieces of the plate in one of the bins at the nurses’ station. She saw it had been one of the lavender-grey ones with the octopus print, just like the tea set she’d discovered in France. And the teacup she’d smashed when she was three.
It was a restless night. Some of the men were in pain, some needed help getting themselves to the bathroom. And at about 3a.m.,Max woke up screaming.
It was a sound that Eve would never forget. Something about it made her think of the unseen Eavesdropper hiding behind the curtain in the Palm Bar and his dreadful, inhuman cough. This scream was so filled with agony that it almost did not sound like a noise a person should be able to make. Some of the other men were muttering and Clara had sat up on her bed, looking frightened.
“He’s gone mad,” she whispered.
Eve scrambled up and started forwards.
“Don’t!” Clara said, looking frightened. “Matron said not to if this happens. It might not be safe. We’re supposed to call her.”
Clara reached for the nearby telephone, but Eve had no intention of waiting. A couple of lamps were kept burning low during the night, but the ward was filled with shadows she had to stumble through to reach Max’s bed. He was sat up and the wild look in his eyes made her heart sink. He looked feral, dangerous. As soon as he saw her, he lunged forwards and gripped her arm, squeezing it so hard that she could feel the bruises forming beneath the skin. When he yanked her closer, she had the sudden image of him wrapping his hands around her throat and snapping her neck. In her quiet, protected life, Eve had never been physically assaulted before and was unprepared for how frightening it was to be grabbed, or how powerless and helpless and small it made her feel. The sudden panic of it. The dread.
She dragged in a deep, shaky breath and let it out in a hiss. “Lieutenant!Let me go!”
To her relief, he released her at once. The fury faded from his eyes as suddenly as it had appeared, and now he just looked confused and lost.
“You’re safe,” Eve said firmly. “It’s time to sleep.”
He stared at her without seeing her for a moment, then lay back down in his bed. One of the other soldiers—a captain called Donald—struggled over to her side.
“You all right, miss?” he asked. “Can I help?”
“Thank you, everything’s fine,” she whispered. “Please go back to bed.”
By the time Matron arrived on the ward, all was quiet once again.
“You shouldn’t have approached him,” she said sternly to Eve. “When they’re like that, they don’t know where they are or whatthey’re doing. They think they’re back in the trenches. He might have mistaken you for a German and killed you. It’s no good. He’ll have to be transferred tomorrow.”
The possibility made Eve feel dreadful, which made no sense at all, because if she was successful in changing what had happened to Bella, then Max Everly would die in this hotel anyway. It suddenly seemed to her like Max had been right in what he’d said—that sometimes life simply dealt you a hand that meant you were always going to fail, no matter what you did.
Chapter 43
The next day, Eve had a few hours’ sleep in her own room before she was summoned back to the ward. Max was just the same as before and Matron had the transfer paperwork in front of her. Eve thought of what Clara had said yesterday about china plates and Paris-Brest cakes, and Matron’s words from last night replayed inside her head.
They don’t know where they are…. They think they’re back in the trenches….
An idea occurred to her, and when she finally got a spare moment, she went downstairs. The huge kitchen was deserted, but she poked into the many cupboards and storage areas until, finally, at the back of one of the larders, she found an old tin of bully beef and a packet of stale biscuits. She put two slices of the beef and a couple of biscuits on a tin plate and carried it back to the ward. Max was sitting up in bed, staring at the wall. He had a chilling expression, as if he really were seeing things that none of the rest of them could detect at all.
She stood beside his bed and held the plate out to him. “Your rations, Lieutenant.”
He looked around at her and, in a dreamlike sort of way, tookthe plate. He stared down at it and Eve wondered whether he might throw it at the wall, but almost immediately, he began to urgently shovel the food into his mouth. Eve went back to the nurses’ station.
“He ate the food,” she said to Mrs. Jones. “Please let him stay. You said yourself that it’s better for him here.”
She could tell that Matron was unsure, but in the end she nodded. “We’ll see how we go,” she said, filing the paperwork away in a drawer.
