Chapter 5
The next day, Eve set the tea service out on the small table in her kitchen.
She filled the sugar bowl and the milk jug and poured tea into one of the teacups.
And all the while, she kept wondering whether something would happen, whether some magic would reveal itself.
She added sugar and milk, although she didn’t normally take sugar, but it seemed important to use as much of the set as possible.
She raised the teacup in her hands. It was so timelessly elegant, so different from the old mug she normally used.
Steam twisted up from the surface and Eve scalded her lips slightly as she took her first sip.
Nothing happened. It was simply overly sweet tea in a pretty teacup.
She set it back down on the saucer, shaking her head.
This was foolish. She was a fool for believing in magic like this—the type that could lead to redemption.
There was no forgiveness—not for someone like Eve.
She gulped down the tea, almost relishing the burn, then set the empty cup back on its saucer.
And then there was a flash—a dazzlingly bright flash inside her head.
She yelped and jumped up from the chair, but she was no longer in her kitchen, and she was no longer herself.
She was on some kind of hospital ward, dressed in a nurse’s uniform, helping to bathe the stump of a young man’s amputated leg. A ragtime record played on a gramophone nearby. She could smell antiseptic and cigarette smoke and freshly baked pretzels.
Are you coming to the farewell dinner tonight? the young man asked, looking right at her.
We’ll have to ask Matron, too, someone else said. Otherwise, there’ll be thirteen guests at the table.
And then it was all gone, and Eve was back in her own kitchen, wearing her own clothes.
Her chair had fallen over, but everything else remained the same.
She was breathing hard as she realised that Victor was right.
The tea set did have a magical power. It allowed you to glimpse another person’s life from another time.
She brewed more tea immediately, but there were no further visions that day, or the day after. Perhaps one was all you got.
But it made her more determined than ever to find the writing paper.
The next morning, Eve phoned her dad. She described the White Octopus Hotel, but he sounded baffled on the other end of the line.
“We did go to Switzerland once, when you were tiny,” he said. “But we stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast. It was all we could afford back then. There were never any grand hotels, I’m afraid.”
“Is that Eve?” Her stepmother Suzy’s voice floated through from the background. “Ask her when she’s coming for lunch.”
“Did you hear that?” her dad asked.
“Yes,” Eve replied. “I promise I’ll visit soon.”
Eve had known Suzy since she was eight years old and had been pleased to call her stepmum just two years after that.
Suzy was easygoing, warm, and caring, and had always treated Eve like a daughter.
Her love was big and certain and reliable.
After finishing the call with her dad, Eve stared at the phone in her hand.
There was nothing for it; she’d have to phone her mum.
When had she last spoken to her? At Christmas, probably, when Eve had invited her over to her flat for mince pies.
She’d made them herself from scratch. She’d hoped…
what? Even now, she wasn’t sure exactly. For something normal. Something real.
Christmas was a difficult time because she didn’t have work to fill her days.
There had never been many friends because Eve avoided people.
They said you couldn’t miss what you’d never had, but Eve did wonder, sometimes, how she’d ended up quite so alone.
She felt the emptiness of the years stretching out ahead of her, the pointlessness of continuing to put one foot in front of the other.
“You’d like a better relationship with your mum, wouldn’t you?” her therapist at the time had said. “Well, that has to start somewhere.”
So Eve issued the invitation and she made the mince pies, but as soon as her mum walked into the flat, it felt wrong.
Like inviting a colleague whom you thought you might be able to form a friendship with and then realizing that your relationship was better off left in the workplace after all.
Eve’s mum must have felt the same way because she had stayed for only half an hour before she’d made her excuses and left.
Now Eve took a breath and her heart started beating faster as her thumb hovered over her mum’s number.
Chances were that she wasn’t even in the country.
She rarely was these days. Her work as a photographer took her all over the world.
One of the many reasons Eve hesitated to call was that she might wake her up if she was in a different time zone.
Finally, she rang the number and her mum answered on the second ring.
“Eve? Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. I, um, I’m sorry to call, but I wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?” her mum replied, sounding wary.
“When I was little, did we ever go to this place called the White Octopus Hotel?”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Why do you want to know about the White Octopus?” her mum finally asked.
“So we did go there then?” Eve replied.
“Well, in a manner of speaking.”
“What does that mean?”
Her mother paused, then said, “Come over, if you want.”
“You’re at home?” Eve asked.
“Briefly. I’m flying back to Marrakech this evening.”
Eve was startled by her mother’s invitation. It had been several years since she’d set foot in her old family home, despite the fact that it was only half an hour or so away.
“All right,” she said, trying to control her nerves. “I’ll see you soon.”
—
A short while later, Eve got off the bus and walked down the road to her childhood house.
She hadn’t lived there since she was six.
When her parents split up, it had been assumed by everyone involved that Eve would live with her dad.
She’d seen her mum, of course, for weekends and special occasions.
Sometimes they went out for burgers or to the cinema.
But the problem was that they never seemed to quite know what to say to each other.
It was almost like they weren’t really mother and daughter at all, only actors playing their parts.
As Eve approached the house now, she wondered how her mother could bear to remain living here.
To walk past the spot where it had happened every day.
She reached into her pocket for the fumsup, rubbing her thumb frantically over its smooth wooden head.
Even the fucking gate was the same—the gate that had changed everything.
Eve paused on the pavement, wishing she didn’t have to touch it.
It was a perfectly ordinary gate, with a few flakes of blue paint still clinging to it, but if Eve had been her mother, she would have had it ripped out and sent for scrap.
Even now, after twenty-four years, Eve hated that gate with a smouldering intensity that made it hard to breathe as she released the latch and swung it open… .