Chapter 43
The next day, Eve had a few hours’ sleep in her own room before she was summoned back to the ward.
Max was just the same as before and Matron had the transfer paperwork in front of her.
Eve thought of what Clara had said yesterday about china plates and Paris-Brest cakes, and Matron’s words from last night replayed inside her head.
They don’t know where they are…. They think they’re back in the trenches….
An idea occurred to her, and when she finally got a spare moment, she went downstairs.
The huge kitchen was deserted, but she poked into the many cupboards and storage areas until, finally, at the back of one of the larders, she found an old tin of bully beef and a packet of stale biscuits.
She put two slices of the beef and a couple of biscuits on a tin plate and carried it back to the ward.
Max was sitting up in bed, staring at the wall.
He had a chilling expression, as if he really were seeing things that none of the rest of them could detect at all.
She stood beside his bed and held the plate out to him. “Your rations, Lieutenant.”
He looked around at her and, in a dreamlike sort of way, took the plate. He stared down at it and Eve wondered whether he might throw it at the wall, but almost immediately, he began to urgently shovel the food into his mouth. Eve went back to the nurses’ station.
“He ate the food,” she said to Mrs. Jones. “Please let him stay. You said yourself that it’s better for him here.”
She could tell that Matron was unsure, but in the end she nodded. “We’ll see how we go,” she said, filing the paperwork away in a drawer.
One day slipped into two, which slipped into three, and soon a week had passed and then a fortnight.
During her breaks, Eve frantically searched the hotel, but there wasn’t so much as a tentacle.
The birdcage lift had not yet been installed and the Palm Bar had no mirrored panels or golden palm trees.
In fact, it didn’t even have the same name.
In this time period, it was called the Nook and featured mahogany walls and etched glass panels positioned around Victorian-style snugs.
The bar was made of polished wood and set with green leather bar stools.
Bottles of whiskey and cognac lined the shelves behind it.
The blue curtain on the wall remained and Eve had already seen the Eavesdropper’s shabby shoes poking out from beneath it a couple of times.
She always said hello to him, although he never said anything back.
The Gatsby Room was much as it had been in 1935.
Eve knew that the officers had a farewell dinner there, so she wasn’t surprised at first, but then she looked again at the plaque on the door and frowned.
Hadn’t The Great Gatsby been written in the twenties?
Which meant that it was not yet published.
She reflected that perhaps the room had been named for some other reason—maybe the architect or an investor of the hotel had been named Gatsby.
Then again, maybe some other time-travelling guest had brought a copy of the novel back in time with them and then left it behind when they checked out… .
The only person who might have been able to shed light on these things was Nikolas Roth and he remained hidden away in his suite on the sixth floor.
It was strange to think of the artist up there, so close and yet so unreachable.
There were dozens of questions Eve longed to ask him, but he never seemed to set foot on the lower floors.
Once a week, though, Eve found a delivery of fresh flowers on her bedside table in Room 17, along with a card from Nikolas Roth that always read simply: With my compliments, N. Roth.
Eve asked Mrs. Jones whether she might be permitted to meet Nikolas Roth, but the matron shook her head. “He won’t see anyone,” she said. “I only met him once, very briefly, when I first arrived. It’s a condition of our using the hotel that he’s not to be disturbed under any circumstances.”
“But he sends me flowers every week,” Eve said.
Matron seemed startled by this news. “Be that as it may,” she said disapprovingly, “he won’t see you. He won’t see anyone. He even sent his wife and children away before the servicemen started to arrive. You’re here to tend to the men. There is no reason why you should cross paths with Mr. Roth.”
Eve hadn’t yet been up to the sixth floor.
She’d been leaving it until last because she was worried that if she broke the one rule Nikolas Roth had specified, then there might be consequences and she might have to check out.
She didn’t want to jeopardise her stay, but nor did she want to leave any stones unturned. And she was running out of options.
Eventually, she waited for an evening off and then went up to the top floor of the hotel.
It looked much as it had in 1935, except for the fact that the door at the end of the corridor had a brass plaque that read The Roth Suite.
When Eve paused outside, she could hear the faint strains of ragtime music playing from within.
She recognised it, but it took her a moment to place it as the “Frog Legs Rag” that she’d heard from that painting inside the walls, what felt like a lifetime ago.
She raised her hand and knocked. The sound echoed down the empty corridor, but there was no response from inside. Light and shadow flickered through the small gap at the bottom, though, and Eve knew that someone was there, standing just on the other side of the door.
“I know you’re there,” she said, watching the shadow.
A man’s muffled voice came back to her. “You cannot be here, Miss Shaw. If you ever come near my door again, I will have you evicted from the hotel.”
She was this close to Nikolas Roth. He was right there on the other side of the door, the only person who might be able to answer her questions.
Why is there an octopus hidden in the walls?
Why were you so secretive about your paintings throughout your entire career?
How do I win the scavenger hunt? Why am I here in the first place?
She slammed her hand against the door, suddenly angry. “But there are things I need to ask—”
“One more word,” Roth said quietly. There was something low and dangerous in his voice, something that was impossible to ignore. “One more word out of you, madam, and I promise you will never set foot in this hotel again.”
Eve shivered. She believed him, so she turned away and stalked back to the lower floors.
And yet…in the days that followed, when she was outside, octopus-hunting around the grounds of the hotel, she had the strongest feeling that she was being watched.
She could feel unseen eyes staring at her, and on a couple of occasions when she glanced back, she saw a curtain twitch on the sixth floor, as if someone had just stepped quickly back from the glass.
—
Up in the ward, Max was eating, but he still wasn’t speaking.
Eve didn’t like how everyone else looked at him.
In fact, she couldn’t stand it. No one spoke the word “coward” aloud, but there were judgements in the way that people looked at Max, and in the way they didn’t look at him, and the things they said, and didn’t say.
There was a respectful tone in the nurses’ voices when they talked to the other POWs, but they spoke to Max like he was a child, and that made something furious stir in Eve.
Much of the time Max did nothing at all, just stared that dreadful stare, but after a couple of weeks, Eve noticed him sometimes watching her—looking at her and actually seeing her as she moved about the ward.
And she thought that had to be a good sign, that he was seeing what was in front of him now rather than looking at whatever horror he’d left back there, in France.
Reporting for duty on the ward had been a nuisance to begin with, but after a while Eve realised she enjoyed her time there and felt at home with the wounded servicemen, experienced a greater sense of belonging with them than she’d ever felt with any other group of people.
And before long, the men started to speak of seeing a war horse in the steam baths—a grey horse that returned lost items.
Almost three weeks after Eve had arrived in 1918, Max spoke to her for the first time. She was bringing around cups of coffee one morning when he held a letter up and said, “Would you post this for me, miss?”
It was strange hearing his voice after so many weeks, but Eve simply took the letter. “Of course. I’d be glad to.”
She was pleased that he’d spoken to her, but when she told Matron about it and showed her the envelope later, the other woman shook her head.
“That’s addressed to his mother,” she said.
“Well, yes. I suppose he wants to tell her where he is now and that—”
“She’s dead,” Matron cut her off. “Both his parents are. They caught Spanish flu, back in London.”
“Oh.” Eve looked at the envelope in her hand and the letter it contained that would never be read.
“He’s been informed,” Matron said. “His aunt wrote to him the first week he was here. I saw the letter when I was tidying away his things. I suppose he can’t take it in at the moment.”
“It’s been really bad in England,” Clara put in. “The flu pandemic. One of the other men told me that his sister wrote to say that they can’t build coffins fast enough for everyone. The dead bodies just have to lie there. In the houses.”
Eve looked over at Max, who was staring at the wall again.
“I could bring a gramophone up,” she said. “I saw one downstairs. The men have nothing to do all day and it might help if they could listen to some music—”
Matron was shaking her head. “We can’t move anything without Mr. Roth’s permission.”
“Well, let’s get his permission, then,” Eve said. “Why would he mind anyway? He’s shut away being mysterious on the sixth floor.”