Surgeon at Arms (19 page)

Edith met Hal White at the hospital. He was a doctor, a captain, about her own age, thin, with a large Adam’s apple, glasses like Glenn Miller’s, and given to long periods of deliberation before opening his mouth about anything. He offered her a packet of Life Savers and asked her to a dance. Edith hesitated. Jennifer, the girl who helped in the kitchen, might be there. Hal explained it was an officers only affair, and she accepted. She loved dancing. It would be really quite fun to be taken out by a man again. And of course he was a doctor, and therefore a gentleman.

The dance was exactly like a thousand others in the kingdom that Saturday night. The local recreation hall was crowded, dirty and ill-kept, with French chalk sprinkled hopefully over a rough floor with painted lines for badminton courts. The decorations were posters urging the merrymakers to dig or save for victory, and that careless talk cost lives. At one end was a trestle table where for half an hour or so they sold gin and lime, and afterwards beer, which everyone hoped would last the evening. Half a dozen G.I.s on the stage were playing with startling professionalism. Hal and Edith danced to
Paper Doll
and
Sentimental Journey,
and she thought him amazingly light on his feet. He said he lived in Yonkers and was a widower. They tried to hokey-cokey, which Edith thought silly, really, but quite fun. Hal explained he had knocked around the world a good deal, mostly doing medical jobs with construction companies, for a long stretch in Singapore. Edith exclaimed she knew Singapore well. They cheerfully explored the graveyards of their memories, exhuming a body or two to see if it were a mutual friend.

For the last year of the war they saw each other regularly. Hal brought her a good deal of Spam,
Life
magazine, and some nylons—her eyes shone as she smoothed the wonderfully sheer material with her fingers. When he asked her to marry him she was amazed. Marriage simply hadn’t entered into her scheme of things. Illness and death, yes, but widowhood had become a settled way of life, to be borne as patiently as residence in the Malayan jungle or in the Devon guest-house. Yet she realized that she belonged to the dread class of ‘distressed gentlefolk’. What would she do after the war? She was frightfully poor, she would have to go typing for solicitors until her fingers became too infirm for the keyboard. Hal was really very kind. And he was a doctor. The emotions of her fife had been entwined round doctors, as pliantly as the serpents round Aesculapius’ staff. She would have to live in America, but America was the place for self-betterment, everyone said so. The idea of self-betterment had driven her as a girl from her father’s butcher’s shop in Ramsgate—to where? After a quarter of a century, to running a boarding-house. It was a chance. Only one thing could she be certain of. It would be her last.

That summer, the inhabitants of two Japanese cities were ofï-handedly incinerated, and the war was over. A week later Lease Lend was cut off, equally off-handedly. It occurred only to Lord Keynes that the country was broke, and the millennium which so agitated Mr. Cramphorn would have to be financed by a loan of American money. So the country, like Edith, escaped from the possibility of German mastership to the certainty of American, with as much excitement and less thought.

Edith, Hal, and Alec met for the first time in the basement restaurant of the Criterion in Piccadilly. It was a disturbing gathering. Alec seemed to find Edith’s lover only funny. She had been worried for months at the peculiar excited flippancy in her son, quite unlike the stolid outlook of his father. She gave him a cheque for a hundred pounds, explaining it was all she could afford, and he must save it to visit her in America, once she was married and transported by the United States Government with eighty thousand other British women. Alec decided to spend it on a car. The medical profession lived at the time in a weird intimacy with the motor trade. Though the petrol ration was small, increased by the new Government so meanly as to arouse the irritation of even the
New Statesman,
doctors, who went on errands of mercy, were allowed more or less as much as they could use, with a bit of fiddling. He’d raise the fare to see his mother when the time came, he decided. He was never able to give a serious thought to the future of anything, particularly when there was fun to be found in the present.

During the rest of the hot summer of 1945 the war began to run down at Smithers Botham as gaily as everywhere else. There still wasn’t much to drink, but there was A.F.N. Munich on the radio, the jam ration was said to be going up (incorrectly), and the place was enlivened by the first demobilized medical officers, sent on a six-month course to refit them for gentler practice. Captain Pile was finally demobilized. He Went to Olympia for his new suit, and at once returned to Smithers Botham. He had grown to like the country hospital, and the future medical world was filled with half-glimpsed hazards. He had taken the post of medical officer to Smithers Botham as a mental institution, and was charged with preparing its return to normal function whenever Blackfriars could be evicted. As he walked up the long drive from the bus, once again mere Dr Pile, he saw the portico had for a second time been decorated. A Union Jack was spread across the columns, and a painted banner announced, ‘Welcome Home Our Heroic Cuthbert‘.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER of the Annex Club at the beginning of 1947 was predictably a noisy affair. It was held at a restaurant frustrated like all others from doing its best for its diners, by the Government order that only three courses might be served, including the soup. The law took itself seriously, an establishment serving asparagus on a separate plate instead of accompanying the sliver of meat having already incurred prosecution. But the millennium had arrived. The coal mines had been nationalized, the railways and the doctors were next. The rations were reduced, coupons were needed for bread, and cigarettes were as hard to come by as ever.

The club was Peter Thomas’s idea. Military units seemed hardly able to await their dispersal before arranging their reunions, so why not the patients who had passed through the annex? Besides, some sort of society was needed to help those who suffered from disability, official meanness, or bad luck. And it would be tragic for the buoyant comradeship of Smithers Botham to be lost without trace in the rough waters of the postwar world. The annex itself still existed, almost as busily as ever, with Tudor Beverley in charge. Graham had left, as he had promised himself, with the end of the war. His status as a Blackfriars consultant entitled him to half a dozen beds in the main wards at Smithers Botham for civilian cases, the arrangement to which Haileybury had tried to condemn him in 1942. But the time for self-sacrifice was past, Graham thought, personal and financial. One day the annex would have to close and Smithers Botham evacuated, he’d be back in the bright new wards of Blackfriars again beside the Thames— though from the permanent look of the hospital’s rubble, that day seemed as unlikely to dawn as the one of settled amity across the split face of Europe.

Graham was naturally the club’s president. It still gave him a feeling of smugness to see himself described on the printed menu as ‘Sir Graham Trevose, K.B.E., D.Sc., F.R.C.S.’. The goodies had been delivered as Val Arlott had promised, and the doctorate of science had been conferred on him at the same time by a provincial university keen on entering into the spirit of the times. He had found himself more proud of the knighthood than he had expected. It was an emblem of something

he sought all his life—a recognition that his work was far from trivial, but on a par with that of general surgeons majestically toiling among their sausage-chains of guts. Besides, everyone was terribly nice about it. Haileybury had called specially to congratulate him, almost with tears in his eyes. It was a well-deserved honour, he explained, not only for the surgeon and for the annex, but for the speciality of plastic surgery, to which he was himself about to return. Graham knew that Haileybury, of all his wellwishers, meant every word. He also knew the intense self-discipline which had brought the man to face him, for the first time since their meeting beside the River Itchen. He would know Graham well enough to sense the risk of a cutting rebuff. But Graham told himself the time for wounding was over, and reconciliation was in fashion.

‘Thank you,’ Graham said solemnly, shaking hands. ‘Thank you... Eric.’

Haileybury swallowed. ‘It is a real pleasure to congratulate you... Graham.’

It was the first time they had used each other’s Christian names. In a world which could address old Cramphorn as ‘Mate’, reflected Graham, such relaxations were plainly overdue.

At the dinner, Peter Thomas proposed a toast to ‘The Wizz’. Graham replied. Shortly afterwards the patients started singing, something innocuous at first,
Macnamara’s Band,
moving on to
Cats on the Rooftops,
an enduring favourite, then the
Ball of Kirriemuir.
Graham knew this always ended in argument, and sometimes in fisticuffs, over such points as the Minister’s Wife Who Felt Unweel coming before The Swishing of the Pricks in the Haystacks, or the other way round. When Peter Thomas put a glass of beer on his head to play The Muffin Man, Graham thought it time to withdraw. He leant over to touch John Bickley, two places away. ‘I fancy we’re a little old for this, old man,’ he smiled. ‘Shall we see if there’s the chance of a taxi?’

The two stood in dinner jackets and overcoats, surveying the ill-lit street from the door of the restaurant without much hope. It was bitterly cold, and snow had paralyzed the country more effectively than the
Luftwaffe.
There was a scarcity of coal, new shoes were on the ration, a warming tot of whisky was a luxury, and the Government had banned even greyhound racing to save electricity on the hares.

‘What a bloody night,’ muttered Graham. ‘I should have brought the car.’

‘What are you driving now?’ They had spoken little since the incident of Bluey, and since Graham had left the annex hardly met at all.

‘I’ve got a prewar Bentley. A peculiar beast with a fabric body, but it goes like a clock. I bought it from some spiv in the street, who wanted spot cash. God knows where the thing came from, probably stolen for all I know.’

They found a taxi and Graham asked John back for a nightcap. He had a large flat in the Marylebone Road, convenient for his new consulting room in Wimpole Street. John found it furnished stylishly with Graham’s stored belongings. There was brandy on the sideboard, a bowl of fruit, even a box of chocolates. Graham seemed to have climbed back on to the lap of luxury.

‘I suppose I’m allowed to switch on the electric fire?’ Graham removed his overcoat. ‘I can never remember what the permitted hours are.’

‘Don’t they just cut your current off?’

Graham grinned. ‘I’m on the same cable as the Welbeck Hospital, so I’m spared.’

‘You always did have all the luck.’ As Graham poured him a drink, John added, ‘It was quite a party tonight.’

‘It’s good to find the boys enjoying themselves. Though I could see that Tudor Beverley’s got a deal of work to do on some of them. But at least it’s a club where we can feel glad the membership won’t be increasing.’

‘It was good of you to ask me along.’

Graham looked surprised. ‘But of course you had to be there. We couldn’t do without “The Gasman”, surely?’

‘ “The Gasman”, if you’ll recall, Graham, was requested not to call.’

Graham gave a short laugh. ‘The famous Trevose temperament. Do you still hold it against me? I was upset at the time, all sorts of things were pressing on me. After all, they were trying to get rid of
me,
and damn near succeeded.’ They took the comfortable armchairs on each side of the fire. The three bars gave a welcome glow. The central heating was off, and the block of flats as inhospitable as an iceberg. ‘I know I’ve been a bastard often enough in my life,’ Graham continued. ‘As you get older you begin to see yourself properly. It was my temperament which wrecked our partnership. It wrecked my partnership with Tom Raleigh. It wrecked a lot of other relationships in my life. But I couldn’t help it. If I’d managed psychologically to emasculate myself, I’d have had no drive to achieve anything at all.’

Graham sipped his drink in silence. The reference to tempestuous partnerships set John wondering about his host’s present arrangements for sexual relaxation. He generally had some of a sort, though John had picked up no gossip round the nursing-homes of the West End. He wondered if the fellow were getting past it. By way of a probe, he asked, ‘Do you live in this palace all alone?’ Graham nodded. ‘It’s too big, but I had to take what I could. The squatters were in downstairs, you know.’

‘You were lucky to get your hands on it.’

‘London’s a peculiar place just now. Everyone knows someone who can obtain the unobtainable. This austerity’s a bore, isn’t it? I certainly didn’t expect it after the war. I thought everything would more or less click back into place again. I must have been mad.’

‘You weren’t the only one. The Tory party suffered the same insanity.’

‘I suppose I’m amusing myself. Though the people you meet are peculiar. Not at all like before the war. I wonder what happened to them all.’

‘Haven’t they gone to Kenya and Rhodesia and such places?’

‘I’d rather put up with things here. I’m not doing badly, you know,’ Graham told him defiantly. ‘The plastic game’s as tough as ever, if not tougher. But I’m well and truly inside the magic circle now.’ He smiled. ‘The new handle helps, I suppose, “Sir Graham” and all that. The outsiders have a thin time of it, trying to break in. I’m certainly not going to help them. I suffered enough myself, and nobody was inclined to give
me
a leg-up.’