Surgeon at Arms (10 page)

‘No.’

‘You’ve turned over a new leaf? I don’t believe it.’

‘Let’s say I haven’t time. I’m worked off my feet, you know. I’ve a hell of a lot of worry. Particularly over one of your compatriots—Bluey Jardine.’

Val frowned. ‘I wondered what had happened to him. He just dropped out of the news. Badly smashed up?’

‘With patience on both sides and a couple of years I’ll get him looking human.’

‘Poor bastard.’ Val rubbed his chin. ‘How about our doing a story on your little show? I’d like to remind people about Bluey.’

Graham looked doubtful. ‘Would anyone be interested? Plenty of men have suffered worse. And my boys aren’t particularly pretty objects to come across in your morning paper.’

‘Yes, people
would
be interested,’ said Val decisively. ‘We could send down Martha Raymond. Do you know Martha?’

‘She wrote a bitterly unkind story about me and Stella Garrod in your gossip column before the war.’

Val shrugged his shoulders. ‘These things happen. She’s a game kid.’

Martha Raymond’s physical courage matching the flintiness of her mind, she was then scaling cliffs with the newly raised Commandos, defusing unexploded parachute mines with the Royal Engineers, flying in the empty bomb-bay of Wellingtons with the R.A.F., or diving into the waters of Weymouth harbour with the Navy, all for the enlightenment and entertainment of Val Arlott’s readers. But Graham wondered if even she would be game enough to drag a story from his patients.

‘Geoff, what’s Martha doing?’ Val asked, as the editor reappeared.

‘On an Army cookery course, Val.’

‘Fix her to meet Graham when she’s free.’

‘Certainly, Val.’

‘I hope my boys won’t resent her,’ said Graham doubtfully. ‘They can be prickly with strangers.’

‘Martha’s a real professional, Graham. She can get round anyone. Like you.’

‘Then I only hope the zips arrive first,’ Graham added. ‘Otherwise Bluey might feel inclined to provide the girl with rather too colourful copy.’

CHAPTER TEN

‘ISEE GRAHAM’S getting up to his old tricks again,’ remarked Denise Bickley, putting down her coffee cup.

‘Eh? What’s that? Old tricks? What old tricks?’ Her host, Mr Claude Cramphorn, F.R.CS., paused in lighting his pipe. ‘He had plenty of them, as far as my memory serves.’

‘Didn’t you see this morning’s
Press,
Crampers?’

Mr Cramphorn shook his head.

‘There was an enormous article by some woman about the annex. Pictures and all. As a matter of fact,’ she added casually, ‘I happened to cut it out.’

Denise felt in her handbag and produced a strip of grey wartime newsprint, which she handed to her husband beside her on the sofa. ‘It’s wildly inaccurate, of course,’ smiled John Bickley, passing the cutting on. ‘The newspapers never seem to get anything right.’

Mr Cramphorn took it with a grunt. He was a fiery little surgeon given to pepper-and-salt suits, brown boots, half-moon glasses, briskly puffed pipes, and clipped sentences, a bachelor who had retired from the consultant staff of Blackfriars before the war to a farm which by chance lay within sight of the minarets of Smithers Botham. Nobody seemed to know how old he was, but no ageing general dug out to sit behind a ministry desk accepted his invitation to reactivity as eagerly as Mr Cramphorn—if he had ever been invited at all. When overlooked by the authorities at the beginning of the war, unlike Graham, who was inclined to take a neurotic view of everything, Mr Cramphorn had simply ignored the slight. He had appeared on the Smithers Botham portico puffing his pipe, rubbing his hands, and declaring, ‘Work to do? I’m willing and ready. Boys to teach? I’ll teach ’em!’ He marched in, discovered his old ward sister, herself recalled from helping a cousin run a boarding house at Bexhill, appropriated a dozen of the empty beds, and set up shop.

Mr Cramphorn did teach very well, the surgery of the First World War. He had lived through all the fashions. From the twenties, with short skirts and the surgical vogue of removing as many internal organs as possible compatible with the continuance of life, through the thirties with their padded shoulders and the enthusiastic tacking of floating kidneys, spleens, colons, and the like the more firmly into place, to the forties with their slacks and headscarves and ‘septic foci’. Nobody knew exactly what these malevolent foci did, nor even what they were, but Mr Cramphorn removed them just the same.

It never crossed his mind to explain his methods to his patients, whom he treated as a well-mannered squire his tenants. To Mr Cramphorn a hospital was a charitable institution, and a man begging bread at your door had no business enquiring the ability of your baker. For a disgruntled sufferer to threaten litigation was to him as unthinkable as for his gardener to threaten joining his dinner-table. He was an individualist, and like the British generals facing up to the aeroplane, distrustful of such comparatively new-fangled devices as asepsis coming between himself and the pure exercise of his art. His gloved fingers often strayed absently during operations to the pocket of his pepper-and-salt trousers under his gown, to produce a large yellow handkerchief on which he would blow his nose. He frequently puffed his pipe over the scrubbing-up basin, laying it aside with his freshly sterilized hand. But whatever operation he performed, whatever its chances of doing good or ill (they stood about fifty-fifty), it was a superb piece of surgical handicraft. Mr. Cramphorn was a real professional.

‘H’m,’ said Mr Cramphorn, finishing reading the cutting. He liked the company of good-looking women, and had asked the Bickleys across that April evening for dinner. He had bagged a couple of precious rabbits, though he often complained the war had quite ruined the shooting. ‘What d’you think of that, Pomfrey?’

He passed the cutting to the fourth sharer of the feast, a Blackfriars physician at Smithers Botham, Dr Paul Pomfrey, who observed mildly, ‘I do hope it’s nothing disgraceful.’

Dr Pomfrey was a distinguished elderly neurologist, a collector of butterflies, a player of the ’cello, an addict of crossword puzzles, his mind too fine a key to unlock such current mysteries as ration books, identity cards, and stirrup-pumps. He was under Mr Cramphorn’s thumb through living with him. When the war started, Mr Cramphorn instructed his housekeeper to open his doors to the expectant mothers who arrived from London, much fortified by vicars and vitamins, but his brisk behaviour so induced fears of premature labour, the women were replaced by evacuee children—according to himself the nastiest available, through the billeting officer’s personal spite. These guests, too, Mr. Cramp-horn was shortly relieved of, after insisting on treating their nits in the sheep-dip. Dr Pomfrey was conscripted to fill the spare room, and so put an end to such rude intrusions into a professional man’s privacy.

‘Oh dear,’ added Dr Pomfrey, reading. ‘We did have so much trouble with young Trevose at Blackfriars before the war. He always seemed to be getting into the papers. People must have gained the impression that plastic surgery was the only work our hospital was capable of.’

‘It doesn’t actually mention Graham by name,’ said John, coming to his surgeon’s defence.

‘He’d be much too fly for that,’ laughed Mr. Cramphorn, puffing briskly.

‘ “This wonderful work”,’ Dr Pomfrey read out hollowly, “is being performed by the brilliant plastic surgery expert who gave hope and beauty to stage and society in London before the war”. I suppose that would sink in with a good many people—eh, Crampers?’

‘Of course, Graham
is
doing wonderful work,’ admitted Denise. ‘But I don’t see why he should take all the credit. John comes home utterly exhausted most nights. Don’t you, darling? And Tudor Beverley’s rushed off his feet. Besides, there’re plenty of others in the hospital who deserve being taken notice of. Quite as much as Graham. They haven’t his flair for publicity, that’s all. I met Babs Twelvetrees while I was buying the rations this morning, and she was dreadfully upset.’ She was the wife of Mr Alan Twelvetrees, a young Blackfriars consultant surgeon who had been invalided out of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had expected to be treated at Smithers Bothams as a returning hero, but was disconcerted to find himself resented as an intruder who hadn’t suffered the earlier disorganization and inconveniences, to be given the worst wards, the surliest sisters, and the most awkward hours for operating.

‘Graham didn’t instigate the article,’ John pointed out. ‘The paper suggested it. They’re always looking for odd corners of the war to write up. It’s good for morale, I suppose, the more people read of what’s being done.’

‘You know perfectly well Graham would go to any lengths to get himself known,’ his wife told him briskly.

‘Mustn’t give a dog a bad name, my dear,’ Mr. Cramphorn told her. ‘Otherwise you can’t blame him if he bites you.’

‘I don’t think Graham would bite anyone, Crampers,’ she said. ‘Of course he’s utterly charming and such fun, and John and I love him. But he is so dreadfully weak. Look at those awful women who had him round their little fingers.’

‘What do you think I should do, Crampers?’ asked Dr Pomfrey helplessly. He asked Mr Cramphorn’s opinion on everything. He was more under his thumb than ever at the time, through the surgeon teaching him to drive, which he performed as he operated, very fast and impatient of obstacles. After Dr Pomfrey’s chauffeur had been called up the motor-car presented him with severer difficulties than the most elusive neurological diagnosis, the physician driving across lawns and flowerbeds, on the wrong side of the road, and frequently within inches of Captain Pile. ‘Perhaps you’d care to take it up with Graham?’ he suggested hopefully.

‘Not me,’ said Mr Cramphorn. He disliked being drawn into the animosities of others. He had enough in the hospital of his own, complaining almost daily to Captain Pile about the quality of everything from the operating equipment to the food, and appearing regularly in his office with the shepherd’s pie. ‘Why don’t you have a friendly word in his ear, John? You’re nearest to him.’

John Bickley tried to find an excuse, but Dr Pomfrey looked at his watch and hastily switched on the wireless. The nine o’clock news brought an end to the conversation, as it did to almost every other in the country.

John had his friendly word with Graham in the annex the following morning. His wife had insisted on it. But Graham only laughed and said, ‘Well, I half expected something like this. Who’s kicking up the fuss?’

‘Pomfrey, in his own sort of way.And a few of the others.’

‘Twelvetrees, I’ll bet?’ John said nothing. ‘Will they never learn? Things are so different now. There’s no one to benefit except the boys. It cheered them up, someone taking an interest in them, particularly a pretty girl. Though God knows I deserve some sort of encouragement. I haven’t had much since the war started.’

‘I know all that, of course, Graham. But you must be aware how sticky the others can be about publicity.’

‘I don’t give a damn.’ They were standing outside the wash-house, and Graham started towards the ward. ‘I cared little enough in peacetime what my professional brethren thought of me. Now I don’t care at all. Anyway, they’ve a nice surprise in store. As a result of the article, that American fellow’s coming down—what’s his name, always being photographed in a tin hat coming out of shelters? Hugo Kirkham. His stuff’s syndicated right across the States, and they aren’t coy over there about hushing up the doctors’ names. A nice little flutter that’ll cause when the cuttings get back here.’ Graham began to sound annoyed. ‘I’m not trying to attract attention to myself. I’m trying to attract attention to the annex, which is quite a different thing.’

Anxious to change the conversation, John asked, ‘Are you going to have a look at that fellow with the postoperative chest?
⁵

‘Later, old man, if that’s all right?’ Graham excused himself hastily. ‘I’ve got to have a word with sister.’ Sister Mills occupied a partitioned office the size of a largish cupboard beside the ward door. She had been on the unit for three months, and Graham was astounded at her success. She seemed to have the right touch with unruly patients. There was less drunkenness, less swearing, fewer nurses asking for transfers. Even Bluey seemed to be behaving himself. Graham felt smugly gratified at the perspicacity of his choice. On the mornings when he wasn’t operating, he exercised his prerogative as ‘The Chief’ by taking with her a cup of the tasteless khaki liquid passing at Smithers Botham for coffee. He was not usually one for fraternizing with his nursing staff. He generally treated them brusquely, partly through fussiness over the smallest details of treatment, and partly as a defence reaction. For the sake of his patients he tried to fill his wards with the prettiest girls going, and though some of them fired his imagination, particularly in his present monkish existence, he was careful to avoid any entanglements. He didn’t care to foul his own doorstep. Besides, he was something of a sexual snob. The man who before the war had got himself into bed with Stella Garrod might find the joys of common-or-garden girls something of a come-down. And anyway, he told himself sharply, he was getting far too old for them.

‘You look in a mood,’ Sister Mills smiled, as Graham squeezed himself into the spare chair.

‘It‘s a passing irritation. Some of the others are grousing about that article yesterday. They still can’t forgive me for getting my name in the papers before the war.’ She handed him a thick chipped cup and said, ‘Yes, I remember reading some of the things they said about you.’