Page 69 of The White Octopus Hotel
Finally, Eve stood in the empty frigidarium at midnight and put her hand in the pocket of her nurse’s dress, looking for the fumsup that was no longer there. Instead, her fingers stroked the cold metal of the key to Room 17. There had to be something here. Something that she was missing. Perhaps she should try the balconies. She’d wandered the corridors and rooms at night over and over again, but she hadn’t been out to the balconies or the roof after dark. It would be foolish to go back to 1935 before making sure there were no stones unturned. It was, she told herself, the only reason she was staying. It had nothing whatever to do with Max.
Chapter 44
For a little while, Max wrote a letter to his parents every day. And then, abruptly, the letters stopped. The next time Eve saw him scribbling on the balcony, she realised he wasn’t writing a letter at all. He was writing music. The notes sprawled out across the paper and even onto the envelopes. He saw her looking and said, “Can you read music, Eve?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He looked back down at his work. “It’s so quiet in the mountains, I can hear it again, inside my head.”
Eve wondered which piece he was working on and how many times she might have listened to it and been comforted by it.
“I was going to be a musician, you know,” he added. “Before the war.”
Eve was tidying some blankets into a pile. “The war will be over one day.”
“Will it? It feels like it will continue until everyone’s dead.”
Max was scratching something on his paper and when she glanced down, she saw that he’d just given his song a title: “Afternight.” She stopped what she was doing with the blankets. She knew that song. Oh, she knew it well. It was soft and mournful,haunting, but somehow hopeful too. She must have listened to it thousands of times. It was one of the hands—the ones that came to hold on to her when she was lost in the dark.
Max glanced up then and frowned at the expression on her face. “Something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No. I was just thinking it must be wonderful. To hear music inside your head like that.”
“It’s everything. When I’m composing, I’m myself again. The real me, I mean. Not that other chap.”
“I draw,” Eve found herself saying. “To make sense of my thoughts. The ones I can’t put into words. The darkness.”
She fell silent, embarrassed at revealing a little bit more than she’d intended.
“Yes,” Max said quietly. “That’s it. Some things just…can’t be said out loud. Put all the devils into music instead, that’s the best place for them.” He looked back at her. “What do you like to draw?”
“Octopuses.”
“Why octopuses?”
She paused. “I’m not sure. I think they’re strange and beautiful. But also…” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think grief is a bit like an octopus. That sprawl of tentacles that reaches into every corner of your life and you can’t beat it or banish it, so you have to…find a way to make it your own somehow. A part of you that you can live with. A friend. And I like octopuses.”
Max nodded and flashed her a sudden smile—the first time he’d done so since he’d arrived at the hotel. It was there and gone in a moment, but it made him appear younger and boyish. Sometimes looking at Max felt to Eve like staring at an optical illusion. She could see the young man, but she could also see the thirty-six-year-old Max she’d known in 1935, as well as the elderly man from 2016.
She left him to it. In the weeks and months that followed, she concentrated her scavenger hunt search on the exterior of thehotel—the balconies and verandas—checking them at different times of the day and night. The weather turned frozen and the hotel was bitterly cold. Hardly any of the rooms were heated thanks to fuel restrictions. The ward itself was one of the few rooms in the hotel that was warm, but sleep there wasn’t restful. Max often woke from night terrors, screaming and sweating. He hadn’t grabbed Eve since that first occasion, but it would take time for him to realise where he was and even longer for the shaking to stop. The other nurses were all scared of him when he was like that, so Eve was always the one who sat at his bedside and held his hand for hours until he finally fell asleep.
And then, one night after the armistice was announced, she was off duty, and it was late, and she was checking the roof. It was the last place left to look. When the door opened and a man walked out, she thought it must be Nikolas Roth to begin with, but then she saw it was Max, wearing only his pyjamas and the dazed expression of a sleepwalker. He didn’t notice she was there until she climbed up onto the wall beside him.
Eve had hoped that Max had exaggerated when he’d told her about this night in 1935. That maybe it didn’t really matter whether she was there on the roof or not. But when she saw the look in his eyes and heard the way he talked and the things he said, she knew. She knew that he would do it. And part of her wondered why she was allowing herself to care anyway, because she was still committed—fully and completely—to finding that writing paper and rewriting the past. What would be the point of saving someone now only for them to die later?
And yet.
Maybe she wouldn’t win the scavenger hunt. Maybe there was no writing paper. Maybe her plan wouldn’t work, even if there was. Maybe there was no hunt or prize at all; perhaps this was only a game that Nikolas and Anna Roth were playing. There were many, many unknowns, but there was nothing unknown about Max orthe current situation, so she did what anyone would have done and she climbed up onto the wall to try to stop him. When he slipped on the wall and tried to let go of her hand, there was a littlesnapinside Eve’s head. Or was it a click? Perhaps it was a tick. Or a tock. Time stopped.
And then she saw him, the man stood below in the grounds, dressed in a long, dark coat.
The POWs were not permitted to leave the hotel after dark. A reminder that they were, in fact, still very much prisoners. And so, this could surely only be one person—Nikolas Roth. Eve felt a flicker of relief. He would do something—call for help, or try to get up onto the roof, or, well, she didn’t know what, but he would try to help in whatever way he could.
Yet he didn’t. He only stood there, painted silver by the moonlight, watching in unnaturally still silence.
We always got the impression that he didn’t much care for the servicemen,Max had said,that he would have preferred it if we’d never come to his hotel at all….
No one was going to help. It was up to Eve alone. Her gaze locked with Max’s and she thought,No. You’re not leaving like this.
