Chapter 18 #2
Eve turned around and noticed for the first time that Max Everly sat on a bar stool.
One elbow rested on the bar beside his fedora and he was looking at Eve with a glint of amusement in his dark eyes.
But as she met his gaze, the look vanished, to be replaced with one of absolute shock, before he gave a slight shake of his head, and his expression became neutral once again.
“Well, how about it, miss?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “I can recommend the Aviation.”
Eve nodded, even though she would have preferred a neat whiskey. “Why not? I haven’t tried one before.”
“I won’t stay,” the older man announced. “Not under these circumstances. Not for anyone.”
He heaved himself up from his chair and the other men at his table did the same.
One by one, all the male guests got up and walked out the door.
Nobody tried to stop them. Max Everly reached forwards to pull out a bar stool for Eve.
She could hardly believe it as she sat down beside him.
He really was right there, the man whose music had meant so much to her over the years.
He glanced at her as she took her seat. “So,” he said conversationally. “Are you real?”
“Excuse me?”
He shook his head. “Never mind. I apologise. It’s only that I get faces muddled up sometimes. Have done ever since the war. You remind me of someone I used to know. Have we met?”
Yes, Eve wanted to say. I have known you for years….
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I was hoping to meet you properly, Mr. Everly.”
“Ah.” He looked suddenly dubious. “Now, don’t tell me. I insulted a friend of yours at a party, or I owe money to your brother, or I made an improper suggestion to your—”
“No, nothing like that,” she said. “I only wanted to say that I love your music.”
The words were inadequate, feeble, and she felt a wave of frustration at herself for wasting this opportunity, for being so vanilla and ordinary and dull, when she was really none of those things.
All of a sudden, she hoped that her octopus would take this moment to appear, to move its tentacles over her skin in a lazy caress—something she had never wished for before in her life.
Normally, she was at pains to blend in, but she desperately wanted to stand out to Max Everly.
In front of him, she wanted to be nothing more or less than who she truly was.
He reached into his inner jacket pocket and brought out a box of Player’s cigarettes. “You’re too kind.”
“I owe you a thanks as well,” she pushed on, trying again. “Your music got me through a…difficult time.”
Max gestured with the cigarettes. “Do you object?”
She shook her head. He took one from the box, lit the end, and took a drag.
“Music will do that,” he said, breathing out smoke.
He reached into the box to slip out the cigarette card.
Eve saw that it was Zorah from the Gilbert and Sullivan collection.
Max regarded it for a moment before slipping it into his shirt pocket.
She longed for a smoke herself and realised she should have packed more cigarettes.
She couldn’t prevent her eyes from straying to his fedora, right there on the bar beside her. Her fingers burned to snatch it up and turn it over to inspect the label inside. Would it have those monogrammed initials with the musical note? Could it be possible?
“Your Aviation, madam.”
The bartender—a tall, muscular man in his late thirties, whose name badge read Harry—set a lilac-coloured drink in front of her in a martini glass frosted with ice.
It was garnished with a brandied cherry so dark it was almost black.
A scent of sharp lemon and Parma violets floated up from the glass.
As Eve reached for the drink, she deliberately wobbled slightly on her stool so that her elbow knocked Max’s hat to the floor.
“Sorry,” she said, quickly hopping down to retrieve the hat before Max could do so.
She scooped it up and flipped it over and there it was, the label she knew well—a monogrammed M and E, along with a single musical note.
Her whole body tingled as she stared down at it.
It was the same hat that she currently had in her wardrobe in her flat at home—the very same one.
She recalled the moment when the elderly man had shuffled in, the flash of recognition in his eyes when he looked at her, the way his hand had tightened around hers.
He’d recognised her because they had already met many decades before, in the White Octopus Hotel.
Sometimes the end is also the beginning….
Wordlessly, Eve handed him the hat. Max set it back on the bar and gave her a close look, the neglected cigarette dangling between his fingers. “Tell me,” he said. “Did you have relatives here at the hotel? During the war, I mean? An aunt, perhaps?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t believe so.” She quickly reached for her drink, eager to give her hands something to do and her eyes something to focus on other than Max Everly. He was still staring at her in a strangely intense fashion.
“This seems an odd place for them to put the bar,” she said, keen to say something.
“How so?”
“It’s one of the only rooms with no windows at all. I would have thought they’d have chosen a room with a view of the lake.”
Max shrugged. “Sometimes in life you want champagne and sunshine, and at other times you want darkness and books. Or darkness and martinis, as the case may be.”
“Huh.”
They both looked up at this grunt from the barman.
“You disagree?” Max asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No, sir. It’s only that my father used to say the same thing. Sometimes darkness is more comforting than sunlight.”
“Sensible fellow,” Max replied. He nodded at Eve’s cocktail. “Verdict?”
“It’s delicious,” Eve replied. It might not have been whiskey, but she relished the cold bite of the alcohol and the unusual taste of flowers and citrus.
He gave a small half smile. “It was invented by a friend of mine.”
“Oh? Back in London?”
Slowly he shook his head. “Hugo tended the bar at a hotel in New York. German fellow, but we won’t hold that against him since he fought on our side. We met in the trenches, actually.”
“Are you still in touch?” Eve asked.
“No.” Max exhaled a cloud of smoke. “He shot himself. A few years back.”
“Oh. I’m very sorry.” Eve felt that sense of frustration again. Her words were too bland, she might as well have been reading a script, yet what else was there to say? What else was there to do? There were so many ways that a life could go wrong.
Max shrugged. “The good times don’t last. That’s what Hugo always said.
He was very proud of that cocktail, though—until prohibition came along, anyway, and he lost his job and then his wife died.
There’s only so much misfortune one fellow can take.
Perhaps if he’d never married, then he might have stood a chance. ”
“You don’t think it better to have loved and lost and all that?”
“Certainly not. It opens you up to too much misery. And I don’t believe in marriage anyway. It isn’t logical.”
Eve wasn’t surprised to hear him say so. She knew of his reputation as a womaniser, had seen a different woman on his arm in almost every one of the old photos. He clearly had a type; they were always platinum blondes.
“I mean, you marry some woman,” he went on, “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?”
“True enough,” Eve replied. “People do not remain the same.”
Personally, she agreed with his position.
The only thing worse than what Max was describing was the alternative.
Suppose two people did continue to love each other through the decades, that those feelings somehow survived over the years, only to creep ever closer to the moment when they must part ways forever?
How could anyone survive such a thing? Far better to remain forever alone.
“Still,” Max said, “it always makes me happy to see an Aviation on the menu somewhere. And I know Hugo would have been especially glad to see a beautiful woman enjoying it.”
Eve almost—almost—felt beautiful in this incredible dress, with this lipstick, in this extraordinary place. But she knew that she wasn’t. Beautiful women were softer. Beautiful women smiled. They did not have blood on their hands. And they did not have octopuses drifting around their skin.
“I’m not beautiful,” she said, stating the fact bluntly.
Max glanced at her. “Perhaps not,” he acknowledged. “But you’re interesting. And that’s infinitely preferable.”
Eve allowed herself the smallest of smiles, pleased that he hadn’t contradicted her. What use was a compliment about her looks? She’d far rather be thought of as interesting.
“Are you taking part in the scavenger hunt?” she asked.
Max’s expression clouded. “I am not. I didn’t come here for that.”
“What did you come for then?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
Eve was about to ask who when the expression on Max’s face suddenly changed, and he stubbed his cigarette out vigorously in a nearby ashtray.
“Well, well. Don’t look now,” he said, nodding towards the corner of the room, “but our eavesdropping friend has joined us.”
Disregarding his words, Eve twisted to look over her shoulder.
And for the first time she noticed the curtain, conspicuously covering one wall on the other side of the bar.
A place a curtain had no right to be because there was no window there or anywhere else in the room.
The material was a very dark blue, the colour of deep depths in a cold sea.
Recalling what people had been saying at the party in the Sunset Room, Eve’s eyes went down to the bottom of the curtain, which stopped just shy of the floor.
A pair of men’s shoes were indeed poking out from beneath it.
“This place hosted sick POWs from German camps during the war,” Max remarked suddenly, glancing at the barman before looking back at Eve. “Did you know that?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I think I did read that somewhere.”
“Most of the nurses were Swiss,” Max said, “but there was a British matron from the Red Cross, assisted by a VAD.”
“VAD?”
“Voluntary Aid Detachment.” Max looked over at the curtain again and the pair of shoes poking out from underneath.
Then he leaned across the bar, looking right at the barman.
“Tell me, Harry,” he said, speaking in a voice that was calm but somehow dangerous too.
“Do you know what happened to the VAD who worked here?”
Harry paused in the act of polishing a glass. His eyes flicked just once towards the curtain in the corner before they darted away again.
“No, sir,” he said quietly. “I do not.”
And there it was from behind the curtain—a small, but audible, cough.