Page 76 of The White Octopus Hotel
“Eve?” Max’s voice called. “Are you in there?”
Luca swiftly crossed to the door and opened it to reveal Max on the other side.
“Welcome to the Sugar Room, Mr. Everly,” Luca said.
Chapter 47
Max stared at Eve, taking in her nurse’s uniform. “Is this…is this 1918?” he asked hoarsely.
“It’s 1935, sir,” Luca replied.
“Ah. Did you find them back there then?” Max asked quietly. “The last clocks? The octopus?”
She shook her head. “No clocks. I thought I found the octopus, but the scavenger card won’t let me add it. The words keep disappearing. How long have I been gone?”
He glanced at his watch. “About two minutes. When you vanished, I went upstairs to your room in case you were there. I was sure I was knocking at the door of Room Twenty-seven just now.”
Luca cleared his throat. “As you will see from the clock, it’s time for champagne and cake.” He set two plates down on Eve’s table. The cakes were a work of art. Eve stared at the white chocolate octopus closest to her, its tentacles unfurling in elegant loops, the green ripple of pistachio making it look like a sculpture carved from marble. “I’m going to get some sleep while I still can,” Luca went on, “and I suggest you both do the same once you’re finished here. Tomorrow is a big day. In the meantime, take anything elseyou’d like from the cake counter. I highly recommend the gâteaux de voyage.”
He disappeared out the door, leaving the two of them alone. Max joined her at the table, and she found it impossible to stop looking at him. She was mesmerised by all the ways he was different and all the ways he was the same. A person could change a lot in seventeen years and for a moment, she missed the twenty-year-old she’d known and wondered how much of him was left in the different man sitting across the table from her. She suddenly recalled Max’s words from that first night in the Palm Bar.
You marry some woman, and you vow to honour and love her for the rest of your days, but she won’t stay the same person and nor will you, so how can you possibly promise to love a person you haven’t yet met?
But as Eve looked at Max, it didn’t matter that time had passed. She could see the twenty-year-old still there beneath the surface, and she knew that he wasn’t a different person, not really, only a new version of the same soul that she had loved before. And she knew in her bones that she would love him as he was now, and in all the versions of him that would come after that, and she wanted to see him tomorrow, and next week, and next year, for the rest of her life. Or, at least, in a different life. But not here and now. Not when there was Bella to think about.
“You told me something a couple of days ago,” Max said, lighting up a cigarette.
Eve tried to order the days inside her head, searching for the one he was referring to, but her mind kept going back to the POWs on the ward.
“What did I say?” she finally asked.
“You said that you’re not beautiful.” Max inhaled smoke, breathed it out slowly. “But that’s not true. Some types of beauty aren’t visible at first glance. Seventeen years ago, and now still, youare the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. My music is for you. It’s all for you, every note and bar.”
In another version of this moment—one where they had both been born in the same time period and met in the normal way—these would have been the words Eve most wanted to hear. They would have filled her up with such joy. But here they were no use to her at all, they were just ash in a long-cold hearth. She couldn’t see any rabbits in the room, but they might as well have been there; they were always there inside her head, sniff-snuffling about in all the dark corners.
“Don’t,” she said. It was difficult to look at Max, so she looked at the clock instead and saw that both hands were pointing toTruth.
“No, I’ve waited seventeen years to say this and I’m not waiting any longer.” Max took another drag of the cigarette. When he exhaled, the smoke seemed to twist itself into tentacles in the air between them for a moment. “I know you regret what happened in the steam baths,” he said. “I was never quite sure why, or where exactly it went wrong between us, but I must tell you that I don’t regret it and never have.”
“Why are you saying this?” Eve asked. “Are you hoping to persuade me to give up the writing paper? To choose you instead?”
Max looked startled. “No,” he said at once. “No, that’s…That’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“Then what—?”
He paused, his cigarette burning forgotten for a moment between his fingers. “It’s a maze,” he said.
“What is?”
“All of it. This hotel. The octopuses. The loop of time that keeps playing out. The music.”
“The hand,” Eve said quietly. “The hand holding mine in the dark.”
“The horse,” Max added. “The birds.”
For a moment, Eve could almost see them, the dark wings fluttering and flapping in the corners of her vision. And her octopus didn’t like that. She felt the burn as it slid over her skin, preparing to flail its tentacles, if need be, to squeeze and squeeze until fragments of beak and bone were all that remained. The birds vanished then, and Eve’s octopus stilled.
“But mazes,” Max said, “have exits. And you can find your way out.”
