Surgeon at Arms (26 page)

He looked blank. ‘But Clare. Aren’t you coming back to me?’

‘Don’t be silly, Graham.’

‘But this time, I mean... we’d be married, it would be different.’

‘It wouldn’t be different in the slightest. As I told you once before, it wouldn’t work.’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’ He sounded quite cross. ‘Everything was abnormal in those days.’

‘Yes, there was a war on.’

‘I mean everything about
me.
I was selfish then, foolish, chasing all the wrong things. I’ve changed. I know I’ve changed. I’ve got my sense of values straight.

I don’t give a damn for the fripperies of life any more.’

‘You sound like Sir Stafford Cripps,’ she told him.

By the time he reached home Graham was furious. It was beyond him why Clare had refused to fall gratefully into his arms. All this effort to turn himself into a decent human being, he reflected petulantly, would be absolutely wasted if nobody was going to take it seriously. He poured himself a whisky and sat in the armchair. For the first time there stole upon him the black realization that he had lost Clare for good. A solitary fife stretched ahead, as bleakly as the concrete corridors at Smithers Botham. And at fifty-one you needed someone beside you, much more desperately than at twenty-one. But there was nobody who cared a damn about him. Only his son Desmond. At least, he presumed so. The young man had more or less given up speaking to him.

The next morning Graham had a letter from Haileybury, confirming the new appointment and inviting him to lunch with some political figures who were enthusiastic over the new hospital. Mr. Bevan himself, he added, might possibly be joining them for coffee. Graham wrote resigning his post as consultant surgeon to Blackfriars. He would devote himself wholly to his new interest. He would have the best part of fifteen years in the place before he retired, and he would leave it as a splendid monument to himself. He would meanwhile live alone and put up with it. After all, he was a widower, not some crabby never-loved bachelor like old Crampers. He wondered vaguely if Crampers were still alive. He doubted it. The Welfare State seemed to have been the death of him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE POLITICIANS’ LUNCH was held in the House of Commons, a fair proportion Of which, like a fair proportion of the place, though confessing as he was escorted Graham was interested to see for the first time the inside of the place, though confessing as he was escorted rapidly through the corridors and stairways a feeling of disappointment. The marble floors, the vulgar murals, the pillared corners and vaulted ceilings, the solemn dress-suited attendants, reminded him of somewhere— yes, it was the casino at Monte Carlo. He supposed that both structures had been raised about the same time, and had much in common in their function.

The party gathered in a smallish upstairs room with mullioned leaded windows and an over-abundance of carved pale oak, overlooking the river. Graham at once realized the importance of the affair. Of the thirty-odd men in the room, about half he recognized as top medical people, including Haileybury. Clearly, the Government had taken the new hospital to its heart.

Never a martyr to the self-inflicted tortures of modesty, Graham was flattered to notice the stir his arrival made among the politicos. They would have heard enough of him during the war, he supposed. Or perhaps, he reflected wryly, they were aware of his having married the daughter of the first Lord Cazalay, and his kinship to the rogue at the seat of their present troubles. Graham was coming to detach himself from the man in Brixton prison with more assurance every day. He decided his brother-in-law had enough on his hands without dragging him into the mess—though with a man like that you never could tell. But if anything about himself was exposed by the promised radical surgery of the tribunal, he fancied even the memory of the present feast would induce in his hosts an attack of acute dyspepsia.

Graham found himself sitting next to a young Member of Parliament with junior rank in the Government, though he was vague what, and felt it would be discourteous to reveal such ignorance. Graham was far too self-centred to have much interest in politics, a quality which, combined with his exhibitionism, might have made him a successful politician. He had troubled neither to vote in the recent election, nor even to hear Churchill’s broadcast speeches during the war. Like most medical people, he saw mankind less as noble sufferers in adversity than as sadly muddle-headed ignoramuses, to be saved from themselves by well-educated ladies and gentlemen as kindly as possible. With a lazy if reasonable over-simplification, Graham wrote off the Tories as appealing to the populace’s natural greed, and the Socialists to its natural envy. If the Government were now trying to organize everyone’s life from the cradle to the grave he felt it probably a sound idea, most inhabitants of a growingly complicated world being incapable of even crossing the road with impunity. Long ago in the days of the first Lord Cazalay, he had grasped that politicians ran to their own rules, as detached from those of everyday life as the rules of some game of cards. You had to let them get up to whatever they wished, running your life as best you could and allowing for their existence like the bacteria contaminating every article you touched.

The young M.P. revealed himself over the soup as a strong enthusiast for the coming National Health Service.

‘My father,’ he explained forcefully to Graham, ‘suffered from bad eyes. He couldn’t afford to attend a doctor, or an optician, or anyone qualified for the job. Do you know what he was obliged to do? Go to one of the cheap sixpenny stores, where they had a card affair, with those different-sized letters on it. Right on the counter, among all the tubes of toothpaste. He’d pick up lenses and try them till he found the right ones. Thousands of sufferers from bad eyesight had to do exactly the same. Those cheap stores were providing a valuable social service on behalf of their shareholders, if they but knew it. But it’s disgraceful, isn’t it, Sir Graham. In future, every citizen will be entitled to a properly fitted pair of spectacles as a right. Just as he’s entitled to clean water or the protection of the law.’

‘It’ll probably be equally expensive,’ Graham demurred mildly.

The politician’s gesture brushed this aside impatiently. ‘Naturally, there’ll be a pent-up demand, but the whole point of a proper health service is that it gets progressively cheaper. When people are given the proper treatment they’ve been denied through poverty—not to mention given better working conditions, better houses, and a higher standard of living from decent wages—the need for medicines and doctors will simply diminish. We’ll all live healthier and longer. Eh, Sir Graham?’ He grinned. ‘As a medical man, mustn’t you agree?’

‘But if we all live longer we’ll simply suffer more intractable ailments and need even more doctors.’

‘Sir Graham! You’re belittling your profession. What about the inevitable great advances in curative medicine?’

‘And the inevitable increases in expensive drugs? Penicillin’s a dreadful price as it is.’ Graham felt uneasy entering in an argument with a professional debater, but to his relief the waiter interrupted by serving the main course. ‘What on earth’s this?’ he exclaimed in surprise.

‘Whale steak,’ the M.P. told him proudly. ‘We’re importing tons of it to eke out the meat ration. I assure you it’s absolutely delicious.’

Then the young man began talking equally energetically about India, a subject which bored Graham even more than cricket.

It was clear that Haileybury was enjoying the occasion immensely. He rose to make a short if wholly un-memorable speech, and as they prepared to break up Graham noticed with amusement he was noticeably flushed with official port.

‘Graham, old fellow, if you’re going my way perhaps we can stroll together?’ Haileybury suggested with an unknown heartiness.

‘I’m not going anywhere in particular. Shall we take a turn round St. James’s Park? We’ve plenty to talk about.’

As they walked round the lake, the chilly spring air restored Haileybury to his usual oppressive sobriety. They talked animatedly for half an hour about the first steps for bringing the new unit into being, until Graham broke off unexpectedly, ‘You know, Eric, this new task you’ve saddled me with has saved my life. Literally, I mean. I’ve never thought of suicide—and I know a surprising number of one’s acquaintances have at least once, quite seriously. But I wouldn’t have been too sure of myself, not at this stage of my life, without some fresh interest.’

‘You’re being fanciful again,’ Haileybury told him with a thin smile.

‘I suppose you’re entitled to think so. You know me better than almost anybody. But I mean it. Without something big to tackle, some worthwhile achievement to make, I’d get depressed. Dreadfully depressed. It seems to get worse with age. And when a patient’s depressed, you know well enough, they’ve a different personality, there’s no knowing what they might do. It’s as dangerous as walking along the edge of a cliff.’ Haileybury nodded slowly as they walked. ‘What makes you imagine I haven’t suffered myself?’

Graham looked at him sharply. He had imagined Haileybury’s personality breasting the tides of life with the unexciting stability of a coal-barge on the Thames. It struck him that although Haileybury had grown to understand a good deal of his own inner workings, he knew absolutely nothing of Haileybury’s.

‘I hope the intolerable amount of work you are about to undertake will put such unpleasant notions from your mind,’ Haileybury added.

‘I’m safe as long as I’m occupied every minute of the day. I hate living alone.’ Graham hesitated, but decided to go on. Haileybury, of all people, had become his only confessor. ‘I’d hoped to cure that particular deficiency, btu I’m afraid it’s not to be.’

‘You’re thinking of taking a companion?’

‘I notice you avoid the word “wife”, and I can’t blame you for that either.’ Graham sounded a shade weary. ‘You know I lived with a girl during the war? She was my ward sister from the annex. We’ve met up again. I want to marry her. I can’t live without her. That’s a stupid expression, much overused, but as I explained a moment ago it might have been quite literally true. But she doesn’t want to take the same risk with me twice, and I can hardly object to her point of view.’

‘Who might this lady be? Would I have met her?’

‘I should imagine so. She’s the children’s ward sister at the Kenworth.’

Haileybury stopped dead. ‘Sister Mills? But what an amazing coincidence!’

‘It isn’t at all. John Bickley got her the job after I kicked her out in 1944.’

‘I see,’ said Haileybury. He put his fingers together and blew on them.

‘I do wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Graham burst out. ‘It’s irritated me for years.’

Haileybury hastily thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m sorry there’s a difficulty between you,’ he sympathised.

‘She can’t understand that I don’t
want
to go back to my old ways—because of the war, or old age,’ Graham ended gloomily, ‘or perhaps just disgust with myself in general.’

‘I suppose to some extent the seven ages of man are all strangers to each other,’ Haileybury observed.

‘Just look at those ducks,’ said Graham, pointing across the lake. ‘They must run up a tremendous oxygen debt, keeping their beaks under water as long as that.’

He didn’t care to reveal more of himself to Hailey?-bury. He had said too much as it was. He had written Clare a long and thoughtful letter, uncloyed with passion. There had been no reply. It seemed best to forget about her, as deliberately as he had once forgotten about Edith. As the two surgeons resumed their walk, Graham began with growing disquiet to hope that Haileybury would forget about her too. Haileybury had been his enemy once, and in this shifting and faithless world who knew when he might be again?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

BUT HAILEYBURY did not forget about Clare at all.

He had heard rumour during the war of Graham living ‘in sin’ at Smithers Botham, but had vaguely imagined his consort some painted and skittish female of the type portrayed on his rare visits to the cinema by Dorothy Lamour (Haileybury suffered a guilty affection for the comedies starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope). That she was the quiet and efficient Sister Mills, whom he had encountered almost weekly for a year, seemed inconceivable. But Haileybury decided he had never been able to comprehend the powerful mysteries of sexual attraction, no more than he could grasp those of the atomic physics you were beginning to read so much about in the newspapers. He had never felt drawn to one woman rather than another in his life. He felt annoyed that John Bickley had kept Sister Mills’ relationship from him—but he supposed it wasn’t a matter you wanted revealed in such a gossip-ridden place as a hospital. He anxiously tried to recall if he had made any particular uncharitable remarks about Graham in her presence.

Haileybury thought about it all the week-end. He kept shaking his head and chuckling faintly to himself, much alarming his sister. It certainly took him back. The only other of Graham’s women he had met was that girl Edith, secretary on his plastic surgery unit in 1918. He had taken a distinctly dim view of
that
connection, Haileybury remembered. But that was long ago; now they were growing into old dogs and learning not to bark and bite so much. He began to wonder if he might say something on Graham’s behalf to Sister Mills. An outrageous idea, of course. But Haileybury was a fair man and felt the lady was perhaps being unjust. As for the injustice he had himself done Graham in 1942, he felt it more keenly than Graham now did himself.