Surgeon at Arms (11 page)

‘I hope they were nice things. Many of them weren’t. But you must have been only an impressionable schoolgirl at the time.’

It always put him in a better humour talking to Sister Mills. And he noticed she had become less solemn, less nervous of him. A sympathetic ear was a luxury when he was expected to bear the troubles of everyone in the annex.

‘My father was always interested in your activities,’ she told him.

‘Is he a doctor?’ He had never asked about her background before.

‘No, he’s a commercial artist. Not a particularly successful one, I’m afraid to say. Now he’s working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production.’

‘I used to paint at week-ends before the war. I don’t think I was much good at it. I used to delude myself it was based on the same principles as my surgery. But it isn’t. My job’s more like plumbing, really. Whatever the look of the result, everything’s got to join up the right way underneath.’

‘Your own father was at Blackfriars, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, the formidable old boy was the professor of anatomy,’ Graham said fondly. ‘He wrote an erudite volume about the synovial membranes, so erudite that

only about fifty people in the country understood it. We’ve always been doctors of a sort. My grandfather was a semi-educated bonesetter. My great-grandfather wasn’t educated at all, but an out-and-out quack. He left a fortune. He could diagnose everything known to medical science, and a good deal that wasn’t, by merely inspecting the patient’s urine in a flask. What’s called a piss-prophet.’

She smiled .‘Quite a weight of medical tradition to carry.’

‘The family business, I suppose. My son Desmond’s going in for it. You must meet him when he comes down from Cambridge. He stays with me at the pub, and I let him mess about here trying his hand at being anything from assistant anaesthetist to theatre porter. You’ll like him. He’s a charmer.’

‘I’m sure I shall. I’ll look forward to it.’

Graham fell silent. He had a vague uneasiness about mentioning Desmond. ‘The fuss about the newspaper will soon blow over,’ he went on.

We're
proud of you on the unit, anyway.’

‘ “The Wizz”.’ He laughed and got up. ‘If I’m making a reputation I’d better live up to it, by doing some work. I’ve got to see a pneumonia John Bickley’s inflicted. The fellow uses far too much ether.’

Despite his protestations, the realist in Graham admitted readily enough that he enjoyed recapturing the glory of print. He was an exhibitionist in a neurotically self-effacing profession, and finding himself so long in a surgical backwater where , nobody was inclined to wander had been galling. But it was more gratifying still to find the article reviving Val Arlott’s twenty-years-old interest in plastic surgery. He telephoned asking if Graham lacked equipment, promising to jolt action out of the authorities. The longed-for extra huts seemed at last likely to appear. Val even suggested a fund to provide the annex with ‘comforts’—an excellent idea, Graham thought, it would keep the place in the public eye for months. But the best news of all was Peter Thomas becoming engaged to marry one of the nurses. He still looked a mess, but there he was, to marry in the merry month of May. It put up morale in the annex wonderfully. If a girl could sleep with Peter Thomas looking like that, Bluey declared, then he was off to pick up a bloody harem.

The wedding was to be at Chelsea registry office on May the twelfth, a Monday. On the Saturday night London had its last bad raid of the war, and an unexpected guest, Rudolph Hess, floated by parachute into Scotland. While the Deputy Führer’s fractured ankle was being attended by a British military doctor, a younger German flier, steadfastly doing his duty above the Thames, made a mistake in his bomb-aiming and blew most of Blackfriars Hospital to pieces. Luckily, the casualties were light, the patients being at Smithers Botham and the wooden props in the basement being stronger than everyone gloomily believed. But the firemen were still working thirty-six hours later, when Graham stood with a carnation in his buttonhole soulfully inspecting the wreckage before making across battered London to the registry office. The Arlott Wing, where he had worked before the war, had simply disappeared. The rest of the building, which he could remember standing in apparently unshakeable dignity when his father had shown it off as a childhood treat, was a hardly recognizable ruin. But the pavements were still busy. The bowler hat was still worn. The tramlines still ran down the Embankment. London had shrugged off fire and plague before. The smashed eighteenth-century masonry was a shame, but what was the loss of the most splendid building, he asked himself, compared with that of the most miserable of lives?

‘Graham—’

He turned. He didn’t recognize her for a moment. She was small and gingery, with a scarf round her head, staring at him.

‘Sheila Raleigh—’ he held out his hand, smiling. ‘How’s Tom?’

‘Didn’t you hear? He was killed.’ He looked blank, hand out-stretched and untaken. She bit her lip. ‘In Greece. He was one of the last.’

‘Sheila, what can I say—’

‘Don’t say anything, Graham. Please don’t.’

‘But Sheila, I’m so dreadfully sorry. It’s a terrible shock. I mean, Tom was my houseman, my registrar, my partner. We worked together for ten years. He was such a wonderful chap.’

‘Then why didn’t you keep him?’ she demanded savagely. ‘If you’d wanted, he’d be safe with you now in the country. But you didn’t. You rejected him. Because you really hated him. Because you were jealous of him. Because he wasn’t of use to you any more. That’s the truth, isn’t it? Now you know exactly what you’ve done.’

For a moment Graham could say nothing. ‘How can you accuse me of that?’ he managed to ask weakly. ‘It isn’t right, you know. It just isn’t true at all. Honestly, I’m heartbroken at the news. Surely there’s something I can do to help? For the children? Isn’t there anything? If there’s some sort of assistance I can give, financial assistance—’

‘I wouldn’t take a penny from a murderer.’

She shrugged her shoulders, turned, and abruptly walked off. Graham watched her disappear, picking her way among the firehoses.

The wedding was to Graham as joyless as a funeral. He found it impossible to be even faintly amiable afterwards. He pleaded work, and drove straight back to Smithers Botham. He knew that everything Sheila said was perfectly correct. To come face to face with his old self was harrowing. Things had so changed. Or had they? His egotism and jealousy, which had cost poor Tom his partnership and then his life, he supposed must still be in his system somewhere. Perhaps he was merely redirecting them to temporarily more acceptable ends, like some thug given a rifle and praised for killing Germans? Was it too much to hope he really was becoming a better sort of man? How could he tell? There was no one near enough to ask.

At Smithers Botham he made for his office. He had to find some work, anything to occupy himself, to stop his self-inflicted mental wounds. He paused in the doorway, surprised to find Sister Mills at his desk. Then he remembered he’d asked her to collect case reports of something—what was it? Maxillary fractures. He was about to ask her to go when she noticed his face and jumped up, exclaiming, ‘What’s the matter? Was it something in the blitz?’

He shut the door behind him.

‘I killed a man,’ he said wearily. ‘Unwittingly and indirectly, but I killed him. Tom Raleigh—did I ever mention him? He was my partner. We had a row. He should have been working with me out here on the unit. I wouldn’t take him. So instead, he was killed in Greece.’ He sat in a chair by the desk.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sister Mills quietly. ‘It must have been terrible news.’

‘Particularly as I got it from his widow. Who knew exactly what the facts were.’ He stretched out his legs. ‘She told me what she thought of me. She was perfectly right. To her, I couldn’t be anything but the vilest and wickedest creature in the world.’

‘She’d be feeling emotional. She let her tongue run away with her.’

‘I’d like to think so. But my whole life before the war doesn’t stand much examination.’

‘Doesn’t it? You brought a lot of happiness to people.’

‘At a price.’

‘Well, why not?’ she asked simply. ‘What is the price of happiness?’

‘Anyway, I didn’t give a damn about the happiness. Only the guineas.’

‘That’s quite impossible to believe. Not after all I’ve seen here.’

He sat staring in front of him. Then he noticed she was crying.

‘I must apologize.’ He got up abruptly. ‘All these troubles I’ve brought back are upsetting you. I shouldn’t have mentioned them. I’ve no right asking you to share them.’

‘I’m crying for you,’ she told him. ‘You’re so much the nicest person in the world, and you fight so terribly hard against it.’

Then he had her in his arms, and she was kissing him with a passion even he found exciting.

Meanwhile, Mrs Sedgewick-Smith was holding another of her regular Monday afternoon tea-parties. She had told Stephanie severely that she mustn’t keep crossing her legs like that. After all, she was really getting quite a big girl.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ON SUNDAY MORNINGS Graham would lie in bed, reading the papers,
Picture Post,
the
Strand Magazine,
a novel, anything unconnected with the annex. It was only the bad doctor, he reflected, who killed himself to cure his patients.

By that November Sunday of 1942 the posters in the Smithers Botham entrance hall had changed from the ringing warning YOUR FREEDOM IS IN PERIL to the more sophisticated COUGHS AND SNEEZES SPREAD DISEASES and is YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? The place was by then more than simply a hospital. It was another of the countless closed communities stretching across the globe from Spitzbergen to the Falklands, all more interested in themselves than in the war which had fathered them. There was always something going on there. The fashion of the times provided the staff with bountiful opportunity for self-expression, self-examination, and self-instruction, with dramatics and debating, brains trusts of varying trustworthiness, lectures on everything from Britain’s War Aims to Milk Production, plus E.N.S.A., A.B.C.A., and I.T.MA. Conversation in the long corridors never lacked an interesting case or an interesting scandal. The housemen continued to entertain the nurses. The matron continued to entertain doubts.

The war had swept a remarkable assortment of illnesses and injuries into the vast wards. It was an Alladin’s cave of clinical medicine, if only the students had bothered to rub the lamp of learning. There were special units for surgery of the head, the chest, the limbs, and the arteries, created not through the benevolence of some millionaire but through the malevolence of Adolf Hitler. Its beds contained Free French, Free Poles, Free Norwegians, Free Dutch, Free Czechs, and unfree Germans (who made model patients, there being nothing like several years’ Nazi indoctrination for fitting in with the ideas of an old-fashioned British ward sister). Captain Pile was still there, and still a captain. Corporal Honeyman was still there, and still a corporal. Dr Pomfrey, after a baffled half-hour with his car at full throttle, unaware that his rear bumper was enmeshed in the stout railings of the coal store, had decided to settle for a second-hand bicycle. But to anyone who read the newspapers, Smithers Botham in 1942 was the place where a man called Graham Trevose performed his miracles.

The annex was no longer a sideshow but one of the busiest surgical units in the country. The huts in the grounds had doubled and the staff had trebled. Graham was receiving more patients from the R.A.F. than he could handle. His work had attracted surgeons—and journalists with their photographers—from every Allied nation, even the Russians. Women in fish-queues could talk to each other about Graham Trevose. Every morning brought a letter or two, generally badly written and spelt, with a few shillings towards the comforts fund. Graham thought this the most rewarding recognition of all. And it had all started because he had gone to Val Arlott seeking some zips for trousers.

An unaccustomed sound crept across the misty morning. Church bells in the distance. For more than two years these accompaniments of Christian joys and sorrows had been silenced, reserved by the Government to herald not the coming of the Lord but of the German armies.

‘Listen.’ Graham slipped his hands between his head and the pillow. ‘I remember in the last war they rang the bells after Cambrai. It was when we used tanks for the first time, and broke the German lines. In a week or two we were back where we started, of course. It always seemed the case in those days. Let’s hope this Alamein affair is more permanent.’

Clare Mills slipped her hand into the jacket of his pyjamas, which were pure silk, prewar, made to measure in Jermyn Street. The poor lamb really was terribly thin. It was like being in bed with a skeleton beside you. ‘Happy?’

‘This is probably a terrible confession, but the war’s been the happiest time of my life.’

‘Is it so terrible?’ she asked gently. ‘Surely the misery needn’t go undiluted?’

‘I suppose happiness is a well-insulated state of mind. Most of the boys are perfectly happy, and God knows they haven’t got much to justify it. Even Bluey seems happy enough these days.’

‘Perhaps he’s found a new girl-friend.’ She ran her hand down Graham’s chest. It was so smooth, the ribs standing out like the black notes on a piano. No wonder he’d once suffered from tuberculosis.