Chapter 44
For a little while, Max wrote a letter to his parents every day.
And then, abruptly, the letters stopped.
The next time Eve saw him scribbling on the balcony, she realised he wasn’t writing a letter at all.
He was writing music. The notes sprawled out across the paper and even onto the envelopes.
He saw her looking and said, “Can you read music, Eve?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He looked back down at his work. “It’s so quiet in the mountains, I can hear it again, inside my head.”
Eve wondered which piece he was working on and how many times she might have listened to it and been comforted by it.
“I was going to be a musician, you know,” he added. “Before the war.”
Eve was tidying some blankets into a pile. “The war will be over one day.”
“Will it? It feels like it will continue until everyone’s dead.”
Max was scratching something on his paper and when she glanced down, she saw that he’d just given his song a title: “Afternight.” She stopped what she was doing with the blankets.
She knew that song. Oh, she knew it well.
It was soft and mournful, haunting, but somehow hopeful too.
She must have listened to it thousands of times.
It was one of the hands—the ones that came to hold on to her when she was lost in the dark.
Max glanced up then and frowned at the expression on her face. “Something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No. I was just thinking it must be wonderful. To hear music inside your head like that.”
“It’s everything. When I’m composing, I’m myself again. The real me, I mean. Not that other chap.”
“I draw,” Eve found herself saying. “To make sense of my thoughts. The ones I can’t put into words. The darkness.”
She fell silent, embarrassed at revealing a little bit more than she’d intended.
“Yes,” Max said quietly. “That’s it. Some things just…can’t be said out loud. Put all the devils into music instead, that’s the best place for them.” He looked back at her. “What do you like to draw?”
“Octopuses.”
“Why octopuses?”
She paused. “I’m not sure. I think they’re strange and beautiful.
But also…” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think grief is a bit like an octopus. That sprawl of tentacles that reaches into every corner of your life and you can’t beat it or banish it, so you have to…
find a way to make it your own somehow. A part of you that you can live with. A friend. And I like octopuses.”
Max nodded and flashed her a sudden smile—the first time he’d done so since he’d arrived at the hotel.
It was there and gone in a moment, but it made him appear younger and boyish.
Sometimes looking at Max felt to Eve like staring at an optical illusion.
She could see the young man, but she could also see the thirty-six-year-old Max she’d known in 1935, as well as the elderly man from 2016.
She left him to it. In the weeks and months that followed, she concentrated her scavenger hunt search on the exterior of the hotel—the balconies and verandas—checking them at different times of the day and night.
The weather turned frozen and the hotel was bitterly cold.
Hardly any of the rooms were heated thanks to fuel restrictions.
The ward itself was one of the few rooms in the hotel that was warm, but sleep there wasn’t restful.
Max often woke from night terrors, screaming and sweating.
He hadn’t grabbed Eve since that first occasion, but it would take time for him to realise where he was and even longer for the shaking to stop.
The other nurses were all scared of him when he was like that, so Eve was always the one who sat at his bedside and held his hand for hours until he finally fell asleep.
And then, one night after the armistice was announced, she was off duty, and it was late, and she was checking the roof.
It was the last place left to look. When the door opened and a man walked out, she thought it must be Nikolas Roth to begin with, but then she saw it was Max, wearing only his pyjamas and the dazed expression of a sleepwalker.
He didn’t notice she was there until she climbed up onto the wall beside him.
Eve had hoped that Max had exaggerated when he’d told her about this night in 1935.
That maybe it didn’t really matter whether she was there on the roof or not.
But when she saw the look in his eyes and heard the way he talked and the things he said, she knew.
She knew that he would do it. And part of her wondered why she was allowing herself to care anyway, because she was still committed—fully and completely—to finding that writing paper and rewriting the past. What would be the point of saving someone now only for them to die later?
And yet.
Maybe she wouldn’t win the scavenger hunt.
Maybe there was no writing paper. Maybe her plan wouldn’t work, even if there was.
Maybe there was no hunt or prize at all; perhaps this was only a game that Nikolas and Anna Roth were playing.
There were many, many unknowns, but there was nothing unknown about Max or the current situation, so she did what anyone would have done and she climbed up onto the wall to try to stop him.
When he slipped on the wall and tried to let go of her hand, there was a little snap inside Eve’s head.
Or was it a click? Perhaps it was a tick. Or a tock. Time stopped.
And then she saw him, the man stood below in the grounds, dressed in a long, dark coat.
The POWs were not permitted to leave the hotel after dark.
A reminder that they were, in fact, still very much prisoners.
And so, this could surely only be one person—Nikolas Roth.
Eve felt a flicker of relief. He would do something—call for help, or try to get up onto the roof, or, well, she didn’t know what, but he would try to help in whatever way he could.
Yet he didn’t. He only stood there, painted silver by the moonlight, watching in unnaturally still silence.
We always got the impression that he didn’t much care for the servicemen, Max had said, that he would have preferred it if we’d never come to his hotel at all….
No one was going to help. It was up to Eve alone. Her gaze locked with Max’s and she thought, No. You’re not leaving like this.
And she didn’t care, in that moment, about Bella, or the writing paper, or the scavenger hunt.
She didn’t care about anything at all except saving Max Everly’s life.
The tentacles ripped out into the night, and she yelled as they tore through her skin, wrapping around Max and helping her to pull them both back onto the roof.
When they stood up to go a few minutes later, she glanced over the edge of the wall, but Roth had vanished.
Eve led Max downstairs to the bathroom. She could feel a white-hot flame of anger burning inside her as she thought of Roth, standing there watching, doing nothing to help.
As soon as Max was back on the ward, she would return to the Roth Suite and demand an answer, whether it was forbidden or not.
But as she hurried down the stairs with a set of spare clothes for Max, she met Roth coming up.
They noticed each other at the same instant and froze—Eve on the landing and Roth near the bottom of the stairs.
For a moment, there was no sound at all but for the hissing of the gas lamps.
The light wasn’t enough to see Roth clearly, but Eve noticed he was still wearing his coat and that his dark hair was streaked with grey.
His face was angled away from her, but she could tell he was tall, and probably somewhere in his midfifties.
“Mr. Roth,” she said.
“Miss Shaw. I didn’t expect to see you here. Ought you not to be on the ward?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Her voice came out harsh with anger. “You saw what happened on the roof. Why didn’t you help?”
He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “What would you have had me do? Besides, it looked as if you had the situation well in hand.”
Eve wondered whether he had seen her tentacles, but if he had, then surely he would say something?
She realised they were on the same staircase from the black-and-white photograph of the servicemen lined up in their hospital blues.
The one with that dark figure in the corner that Max had said must have been Nikolas Roth.
He never spoke to any of us, but we were aware of him lurking in the shadows sometimes….
“The servicemen all think that you dislike them,” she told him. “That you don’t want them here.”
She wondered if he might deny it, but after a pause he simply said, “Of course I don’t want them here.”
“Then why offer your hotel at all?”
“Sometimes we are forced by circumstance.”
Eve considered asking why he’d been wandering the grounds in the middle of the night, but she doubted she’d get much of an answer and it was his property, after all, to wander about as he liked. Unlike the internees, he wasn’t a captive.
“The hotel will close, you know,” she said, relishing the spite of the words. “It will close in 1935, never to reopen.”
Roth tilted his head slightly. “You’re mistaken, Miss Shaw.
There’s an old legend that the White Octopus will close its doors for good on the day snow falls from the ceiling and other lives are glimpsed within the mirrors, but the truth is this hotel will go on forever.
” He nodded at the laundered hospital blues in her hands.
“Isn’t there some shivering fellow waiting somewhere for those? ”
Eve realised that, without her coat, she was freezing in the unheated stairwell too. Scowling, she began to walk down the stairs. Roth retreated into the shadows of the landing to make space for her to pass. She could barely make out the glimmer of his eyes through the dark.
“Might I say,” he spoke quietly, “that I admire your dedication to your duties very much. The internees are lucky to have you.”
Eve was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Whatever your private feelings, you ought to have had the courtesy to welcome the men to your hotel. They’ve experienced things you cannot imagine.”
“I daresay.”
“Don’t send any more flowers to my room,” Eve said. “I want nothing from you.”
“As you wish, madam.”
Eve left him behind and quickly walked down the corridor to the bathroom, feeling guilty for the time she’d been gone.
She passed the clothes through the bathroom door to Max and once he was settled back on the ward, she returned to Room 17, took the key from her pocket, and stared at it for the longest time. She simply did not know what to do.
She could almost feel Bella’s little ghost tugging insistently on her hand, but there was Max holding on to the other hand, until it began to feel as if they might rip her in half between them.
The octopus burned as it travelled up to her collarbone and trailed its tentacles gently over her neck and shoulders.
Eve didn’t know what she ought to do. So, for perhaps the first time in her life, she did what she wanted to do.
She put the key away and she stayed in 1918.
Not forever. But just for now. To be close to Max.
To enjoy whatever last moments they might be able to spend together.