Chapter 42
When she looked out the window, Eve saw that the mountains were the same, and the lake was the same, but a new flag fluttered outside. The green hospital flag for health and healing. A note was propped up on the vanity table:
Dear Miss Shaw,
Welcome to the White Octopus Hotel. I trust you will enjoy your stay and please feel free to go wherever you like, but note that the sixth floor is off-limits both to yourself and to the servicemen.
Kind regards,
Nikolas Roth
The card was dated 12th June 1918.
I did it. I went back again….
There was a rap at the door, sharp and impatient. Eve opened it. This time there was no bellhop, no cocktail or sugar octopus. Instead, a hassled-looking woman of about fifty stood on the threshold, dressed in a pristine matron’s uniform.
“Here you are at last,” the woman exclaimed. “I expected you hours ago. Good grief, what on earth are you wearing? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m Mrs. Jones. You may call me Matron.”
“I’m Eve Shaw.”
“Well, Eve, you’d best get into your uniform quickly. Our men will be arriving at the station in an hour, and we ought to be there to greet them.”
Eve realised she must mean the POWs.
“Hurry up, for goodness’ sake,” Matron went on. “I’ll expect you in the lobby in five minutes.”
Then she was gone. When Eve looked out into the corridor a moment later, the lights were powered by gas rather than electricity, and there was the antiseptic smell of a sanitorium.
She closed the door and turned back into the room.
She wanted to go hunting for the last octopus and missing clocks at once but supposed she would have to play the part of a nurse in order to fit in here.
She didn’t intend to do anything to risk being thrown out of the hotel.
She went to the wardrobe and found a nurse’s uniform hung up inside it. Within a few minutes she’d changed into the long, blue belted dress and slipped the white apron over the top, a Red Cross emblem emblazoned across the chest. It took a few attempts to pin the white cap to her head.
Then she went down to the lobby. The hotel in its new formation was both familiar and unfamiliar to her.
Some parts remained the same, but there was no sense of celebration here anymore.
No champagne or jazz. No elegant guests walking over the tiled floor and no one manning the reception desk.
But the fountain still splashed and the grandfather clock continued to tick.
Mrs. Jones was waiting by the front door, tapping her foot impatiently.
“At last,” she said. “Come along. The boat is waiting.”
Eve hurried after her out the door and onto the boat floating on the perfectly still lake. It seemed odd somehow, for the lake and mountains to be exactly as they’d been before. And the seasons were different here too, she realised. It was now summer, the air warm on her skin.
“You should know that I don’t have any nursing experience,” Eve began as the boatman pushed them off from the shore.
Matron gave a short laugh. “You’re a VAD. Of course you don’t. Pay close attention and do as I say and perhaps you might be some use to me in the end.”
The cable car had not yet been built, so they travelled by carriage, arriving at the station just as the train was pulling in.
The Swiss townspeople were cheering and clapping and had even organised a children’s choir.
When the train stopped and the servicemen began to step down onto the platform, Eve felt that same sense of disorientation that she’d experienced on first encountering people from the 1930s in their glamorous evening wear.
It was hard to believe that these bewildered-looking men in their tattered uniforms were real, that they had actually fought in the First World War.
And then she saw him. Max Everly stood a few feet away and Eve was shocked by his appearance.
She’d seen an old photo of him in his lieutenant’s uniform, but that had been right at the start of the war, when he’d first enlisted.
Two years later, he looked older than nineteen and painfully thin, with dark hollows beneath his eyes, and cheekbones that pressed through his skin.
He folded up suddenly, like he was made from paper, and then he was on his knees on the platform, crying.
Eve could feel the despair radiating from him—a feeling she could still remember experiencing herself, with perfect clarity, although it had taken place in a different world, and for different reasons.
She went to kneel beside him, reached wordlessly for his hand.
Max flinched at her touch at first, but when he saw her nurse’s uniform, he wrapped his fingers around hers and held on to her tightly.
He was covered in dirt and grime, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d been able to wash.
Eventually, after the other men had been taken to the waiting carriages, Mrs. Jones returned and helped Eve to get Max loaded on too.
He did as they told him but didn’t speak during the entire journey back to the hotel.
There were twelve servicemen in total, and they took them straight to the steam baths to wash.
Those who could manage unattended—including Max—went through to the showers alone.
But a few of the men, including one with an amputated leg, required help.
Eve found herself assisting Matron to strip off their filthy clothes and then wash all the dirt and grime and lice from their gaunt bodies.
There wasn’t room for embarrassment or awkwardness from anyone present.
It was simply a job that needed to be done.
Afterwards, they escorted the men to the suite where they’d be staying.
All the furniture had been removed to make space for single beds and there were a couple of nurse’s cots in the corner behind a curtain.
Mrs. Jones informed Eve that she’d be on a rota of night duties along with the Swiss nurses also staying at the hotel.
Once the men were settled in, Mrs. Jones sent Eve around with a brown paper bag full of pretzels.
When she held one out to Max, he stared at it like he’d never seen anything so extraordinary.
She expected him to take it eagerly, as the other men had done, snatching it straight from her hand, but instead he frowned and shook his head.
He suddenly looked so angry that Eve didn’t know what to do.
She thought of the things his future self had told her in 1935.
The terrible sights he’d witnessed in the trenches.
The fact that he’d had to shoot his friend to spare him the agony of a drawn-out death.
No wonder he was angry. She would have been too.
“Perhaps later,” she said quietly, putting the pretzel down on the table.
She remained busy the rest of the afternoon, helping Mrs. Jones to change dressings and apply delousing tonics to the men’s hair. They were all crawling with fleas and lice.
“We’ll have to do several rounds of this,” Mrs. Jones told her. “And change the bedding and pyjamas daily for a while.”
“There’s no getting rid of ’em,” one of the men said. “You know, back at the camp, I once picked three hundred sixty-five lice off my shirt in a single night.”
“We shan’t have any lice here,” Mrs. Jones said firmly. “A couple of weeks at the most and they’ll all be gone, I promise you.”
The men all seemed pleased to be there—all except for Max, who still hadn’t spoken since he’d arrived and had refused to eat any of the food they’d offered. He simply sat, staring out the window in an unfocused way, like he wasn’t really seeing any of them at all.
“He’ll have to be sent away if he doesn’t eat,” Matron said to Eve later that afternoon.
“Sent where?” she asked.
Mrs. Jones shrugged. “To one of the military asylums, probably. We can deal with physical injuries here, but we’re not set up for broken minds.”
“He’s only just arrived,” Eve pointed out. “Perhaps he needs time to adjust.”
“He doesn’t have time,” Matron said. “He needs to start eating straightaway, even if he chooses not to speak to anyone. If he hasn’t had anything by the end of tomorrow, I’ll have to put in a referral to move him.
” She sighed. “They’re unpleasant places, the asylums. I’ve heard reports of force-feeding and electric-shock therapy.
It’s hard to know what’s true, because many men don’t ever come out.
He’d be much better off here, with the fresh air and the mountains. ”
Eve glanced at Max, feeling a new flicker of worry. But she already knew that he did stay here at the White Octopus, so surely that must mean that he would eat something soon?
Mrs. Jones told Eve to go and get some rest, since she and one of the Swiss nurses would be on the night shift later.
Eve left the ward, but she didn’t return to her room.
Instead, she began her search for the final scavenger hunt items. The hotel was like a ghost building, reminding her of the way she’d first seen it in 2016.
It had that same eerie sunken-ship atmosphere.
It seemed that there was hardly anything or anyone there except for the wounded men and the nursing staff.
The majority of the rooms were empty, and many of the public rooms were shut up, the furniture covered in dust sheets.
Eve peered beneath them all, but there was nothing.
No octopus, no clocks, no Sugar Room, no magical objects.
She returned to the ward that evening in a bad mood. Max was still refusing food, even though Clara, the Swiss nurse, told her that she’d offered him slices of the best Gruyère cheese, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a Paris-Brest cream cake from the local bakery.
“He threw the cake on the floor,” she whispered. “The plate broke. Matron wasn’t happy. The porcelain all belongs to Nikolas Roth. She says that he’s to have only tin mugs and plates from now on.”
Eve glanced at the broken pieces of the plate in one of the bins at the nurses’ station. She saw it had been one of the lavender-grey ones with the octopus print, just like the tea set she’d discovered in France. And the teacup she’d smashed when she was three.
It was a restless night. Some of the men were in pain, some needed help getting themselves to the bathroom. And at about 3 a.m., Max woke up screaming.
It was a sound that Eve would never forget.
Something about it made her think of the unseen Eavesdropper hiding behind the curtain in the Palm Bar and his dreadful, inhuman cough.
This scream was so filled with agony that it almost did not sound like a noise a person should be able to make.
Some of the other men were muttering and Clara had sat up on her bed, looking frightened.
“He’s gone mad,” she whispered.
Eve scrambled up and started forwards.
“Don’t!” Clara said, looking frightened. “Matron said not to if this happens. It might not be safe. We’re supposed to call her.”
Clara reached for the nearby telephone, but Eve had no intention of waiting.
A couple of lamps were kept burning low during the night, but the ward was filled with shadows she had to stumble through to reach Max’s bed.
He was sat up and the wild look in his eyes made her heart sink.
He looked feral, dangerous. As soon as he saw her, he lunged forwards and gripped her arm, squeezing it so hard that she could feel the bruises forming beneath the skin.
When he yanked her closer, she had the sudden image of him wrapping his hands around her throat and snapping her neck.
In her quiet, protected life, Eve had never been physically assaulted before and was unprepared for how frightening it was to be grabbed, or how powerless and helpless and small it made her feel. The sudden panic of it. The dread.
She dragged in a deep, shaky breath and let it out in a hiss. “Lieutenant! Let me go!”
To her relief, he released her at once. The fury faded from his eyes as suddenly as it had appeared, and now he just looked confused and lost.
“You’re safe,” Eve said firmly. “It’s time to sleep.”
He stared at her without seeing her for a moment, then lay back down in his bed. One of the other soldiers—a captain called Donald—struggled over to her side.
“You all right, miss?” he asked. “Can I help?”
“Thank you, everything’s fine,” she whispered. “Please go back to bed.”
By the time Matron arrived on the ward, all was quiet once again.
“You shouldn’t have approached him,” she said sternly to Eve. “When they’re like that, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. They think they’re back in the trenches. He might have mistaken you for a German and killed you. It’s no good. He’ll have to be transferred tomorrow.”
The possibility made Eve feel dreadful, which made no sense at all, because if she was successful in changing what had happened to Bella, then Max Everly would die in this hotel anyway.
It suddenly seemed to her like Max had been right in what he’d said—that sometimes life simply dealt you a hand that meant you were always going to fail, no matter what you did.