Chapter 53
It had been there during those difficult wartime years when part of Max had longed to return to the front.
To see his friends again, to maybe even try to save them.
Yet he knew he had to let them go—just as Eve had released Bella—or else their life together at the White Octopus would unravel.
But it was agonising, knowing that the trenches were out there, that it was happening all over again in France.
He helped Eve with the packages she sent to the front sometimes.
He told her about the particular records and cigars that his friends liked. It was all he could do.
The clockwork mouse played on throughout the war and the years that followed.
It was still playing now, right at the end, when Eve was old and ill.
She knew she wouldn’t leave her sickbed.
That she’d never again sail across the lake outside or go for a sleigh ride in the mountains or sip a cocktail in the Palm Bar, and there was grief in that.
Her time was finished. But it was all right, in the end.
Because she’d had so much, and done so much, and loved so much.
She minded that she had to go, of course she did.
She would have liked a few more years. But it was harder for Max than it was for her.
He was the one who was going to be left behind. Her mother too, of course.
“I know I got so much of it wrong,” Jane had said when Eve first brought her to live at the hotel all those many years ago. “But I always cared. I always loved you. And I would have followed you to the ends of the earth, if you’d asked me to.”
Jane was extremely old now, and so was Max.
At last, Eve’s husband appeared just as he had when she’d first seen him in London, frail and thin, yet whenever she looked at him, Eve still saw that young musician with the dark, magnetic eyes who had fixed together the broken pieces of her soul, and been the father of her children, and throughout the years that followed there had been both good times and bad, such heartbreaking sadness and such utter joy, but there Max was throughout it all, a hand holding hers in the dark.
He was there now, by the side of the bed, both hands wrapped around Eve’s fingers and the tentacles. His head was bowed and his shoulders hunched as a single tear ran down his cheek. “I cannot bear to say goodbye,” he said.
Eve tried to squeeze his hand, but there was no strength left in her fingers. “You’ll see me again soon.”
The key to Room 7 lay ready on the dressing table, along with the octopus from the grandfather clock. Max raised Eve’s hand to his face and took in a deep, shuddering breath. “You are the great love and joy of my life,” he said. “I’ll find you again, I promise.”
He held her hand as she died, and soon after that his children were gathered about him and he was grateful for Harry, and Tristan, and Anna, glad of their young, strong arms, and the fierceness of their love, and the strength this gave him to get through the days and weeks that followed until, at last, he could face the final trip.
“Don’t cry, children,” he said as the four of them gathered outside Room 7 in the White Octopus Hotel.
He felt a sense of excitement as he placed his favourite fedora on his head.
At last, he was going to see Eve again, one final time.
“And don’t waste a second of grief on your mother and me.
Sometimes, the end is also the beginning. ”