Surgeon at Arms (7 page)

‘Penny what?’

‘Oh, it’s some stuff they invented at Mary’s. Their Prof. Fleming found a mould which kept killing off the bugs he was trying to grow in his lab. It must have been very irritating, until he put two and two together. Our medical unit are working on it. It’s supposed to be secret, though God knows why. The stuff’s as rare as hens’ teeth’.

‘What’s it look like?’ asked Peter, with interest.

‘Very yellow and sticky, and personally I don’t think it’s going to be the slightest use.’

Graham took the man’s hands. Not much movement yet. Annoying.

‘Is that physiotherapy girl bullying you to use your hands, Peter?’

‘Quite delightfully so.’

‘I think we can risk doing without your company for a couple of months,’ Graham decided. He turned to the folder of notes on his desk. ‘Then I’m afraid it’s back for the next stage.’

‘How long, O Wizz, how long?’

‘Altogether? The next step shouldn’t be too bad. I’ll make you some eyebrows from the hair on the nape of your neck. But I’ve never made a secret that we’ll be very old friends by the time we finally part. You’re a major construction job.’

‘That’s an interesting way of putting it.’

‘I’m sorry. It must make me sound dreadfully heartless.’

‘But that’s the secret of your success, Wizz! You’ve got a ward full of monsters, and you look on us as so many construction jobs. Exactly the right attitude. Surely you know how sickening it is to be pitied?’

Graham nodded. ‘Yes, of course I do. But I’m not putting on an act, you know. I’ve always looked on my patients as construction jobs. I could never have run the sort of practice I had before the war otherwise.’

‘You must find us lot rather a come-down after remodelling film stars.’

‘Quite the opposite,’ said Graham warmly. ‘When I came out here I knew I’d have to remodel my operative technique—after all, a land mine makes rather more mess that even the worst car smash. What I didn’t know was the extent to which I’d have to remodel myself. What did I do before the war? I lifted a face or reshaped a nose, took out the stitches, collected the fee, and that was that. But I live with you fellows, day and night. You’ve always got some interesting problem for me to solve, psychological if it isn’t surgical.’

Peter laughed. ‘You make us sound like a bunch of damn nuisances.’

‘On the contrary, you’ve presented me with an object in life. You didn’t seek out my service, like my patients in peacetime. You’d no choice, the war washed you up on my doorstep. I feel I owe you something.’ He laughed, too. ‘It’s terribly stimulating. And terribly gratifying. This “Wizz” stuff, it’s stupid really, I’m only doing my job. But it means more to me than the most gushing praise I ever got for hanging a new pair of tits on an actress. You boys are highly selective in your appreciation of anything.’

‘We’re exposed to an awful lot of well-meaning hypocrites. We soon learn to pick out the genuine ones.’

‘Or perhaps it’s just a form of selfishness on my part?’ Graham philosophized. ‘I like to think of you as worthwhile memorials to my surgery. I’ve reached a depressing age. I’m beginning to realize I’m at the whim of any passing disease. “Death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits”—a sobering reminder from Webster. But what am I complaining for?” he apologized. ‘You’ve been near enough to getting yourself killed.’

‘Yes, and I was terrified. I’ve vomited in the cockpit. Once, though I kept pretty quiet about it, I accomplished what you would refer to as “defaecation”.’

‘You’d no hopes of the life hereafter?’

‘I preferred to wait and see.’

‘I expect you’re right. I had a brother once, a medical missionary. He at least departed this life in a spirit of glowing optimism. Do you want some cigarettes?’ Graham felt suddenly the conversation was becoming too self-revealing. But now he never had a chance to revèal anything of himself to anybody. ‘They’re called Sweet Caporals—Canadian, it seems.’ He had given up smoking, mainly through the tediousness of queueing, but scrounged what he could for his patients. ‘Do you want another book?’ He tossed a paperback on his desk, alongside the unfamiliar white packet. In peacetime, he hardly got through a book a year. Now he spent most evenings in his room at The Oak reading. There was nothing like a world war to simplify your life. ‘It’s
Decline and Fall,
by Evelyn Waugh. Very funny. How’s Bluey getting on?’ he added.

‘Somewhat restless.’

Graham ht the cigarette in Peter’s holder. That was bad news. Bluey had to stand at least another dozen operations, and needed all the patience he could muster.

‘Though his morale has improved considerably,’ Peter added, ‘since getting his hands on a supply of rum. God knows where from. He keeps it in his locker, which I presume is strictly against regulations.’

‘The annex houses enough trouble without regulations,’ Graham said briefly. He looked at his watch. ‘Very well, Peter, off you go on leave. Now there should be a female waiting for me. I don’t know what she’s like—young, old, fat, thin, as ugly as sin or a goddess. She wants to take over as ward sister, God help her.’ Peter looked surprised. ‘The Dragon’s going?’

‘Yes, Sister James has decided to join the Q.A.s and nurse the Army. You can hardly blame her. After the annex she’ll find even a pitched battle a rest cure. As the Blackfrairs matron has broken off diplomatic relations with me through the disgraceful behaviour of my patients,’ he told Peter with a grin, ‘I am obliged to find most of my own staff. This one’s been recommended by a surgeon I know in a children’s hospital. Just about the right background for handling you lot, I’d imagine. Send her in, will you?’

The prospective sister struck Graham as resembling a Botticelli virgin with disastrous dress-sense. She was slight, fair, and transparent-looking, wearing lisle stockings, stout laced black shoes, and a suit of green and very hairy tweed. She had no hat, her hair was in the usual page-boy bob. Big eyes, Graham noticed, a pretty mouth, if rather over-large. No trace of make-up, but a good skin. He decided she didn’t look nearly tough enough.

‘It’s Miss Mills, isn’t it?’ he asked, as she sat with hands crossed demurely in her lap. ‘I’m afraid all I know about you is confined to a telephone conversation with Mr Cavill, and the line was terrible.’

‘Yes. Clare Mills. I’m Mr Cavill’s staff nurse.’

She had a soft voice, speaking with great deliberation. Graham noticed she had a trick of emphasizing her last syllables. Probably nervous, he suspected.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three.’

How the nursing profession thrusts responsibility on its daughters! Graham reflected. Before the war, they had to be twenty-one and of unspotted character before being allowed to handle the Blackfriars sick at all. But perhaps women were built for it. After all, there was no responsibility like motherhood, and that was liable to catch a girl unawares anytime.

‘I’d better make plain from the start that the work here isn’t very hard, Miss Mills. It’s exhausting. I’m an impossible taskmaster. I’m demanding, boorish, and usually most ungrateful. I don’t expect loyalty. I expect devotion. I tolerate incompetence badly, and fools not at all. It’s a mystery how I manage to keep my assistants in the place. And the patients are much worse than I am. Life can be hell for nursing staff in the annex. Though, to be fair, most of them seem to find it an enjoyable hell.’ Graham smiled at her. ‘Would you like to end our interview here and now?’

‘I should very much like the post, Mr Trevose.’

‘Why?’

She hesitated. ‘I’ve always wanted to work on a plastic surgery unit.’

‘A strange ambition.’

She paused again, and went on shyly, ‘You once operated on a friend of mine, Mr Trevose. She was a girl—seventeen at the time. She had a deformed lip. Her name was Susan Wright.’

Graham tried to remember. It was impossible. He had operated on so many girls. ‘I can only hope the operation was a success?’

‘Oh, yes!’ She suddenly became animated. ‘It made an enormous difference to her. Not only physically, I mean, but mentally. She told me all about you, Mr Trevose—how understanding you were, how skilful. Perhaps it gave me the ambition of one day working for you.’

Graham folded his arms. She was terribly young, but old Cavill had praised her warmly enough. She’d be pretty to have about the annex. Perhaps the boys would take pity on her delicate looks, though he doubted it. And she had a neat hand with flattery. A sensible girl. It was a talent which had taken him a long way at the beginning of his career.

‘Can you start on Wednesday?’ he asked her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

BLUEY JARDINE bared the upper half of his left arm with an air of resignation. He knew exactly what was coming to him. It was a Friday morning, following the Sunday when Graham had sent Peter Thomas on leave, which gave Bluey the dubious honour of being the ward’s oldest inhabitant. He had then been in the annex four months, and into the theatre eight times. Like everyone else, he had developed a keen interest in the science which was bedevilling him.

The routine of an operation had become as familiar to him as the routine of flying. The injection about to enter his arm was his ‘premedication’, and he even knew the names of the drugs. There was one hundred-and-fiftieth of a grain of scopolamine, which dried up your mouth and lungs and stopped you bubbling and drowning yourself once you were under. There was a third of a grain of omnopon, which was just another name for morphia, and gave you guts. He twitched as the staff nurse punctured his skin with the syringe. The more needles they stuck into you, the more you came to hate them.

He lay back in bed, wearing long white knitted socks and a short over-laundered cotton nightshirt which fastened with rubber buttons at the back. He didn’t seem to be growing as drowsy as usual. Perhaps the injection was losing effect. Only to be expected, he told himself. Once he could get drunk on a bottle of beer, now it needed a couple of crates. He wondered how many more operations the Wizz had in store for him. It never occurred to Bluey that he might ask Graham to stop, to leave him with a half-patched face and makeshift hands, but in peace. He accepted his treatment as something which went on until it reached its natural end, like the war.

As they wheeled him the few yards from the ward to the operating theatre on a trolley he searched the ceiling for a peculiar star-shaped crack, as he always touched the dried kangaroo paw in his tunic pocket before flying. Sometimes when they trundled you out you were dead scared, others you didn’t gave a damn. He supposed it depended how rough they were on your last visit. Anyway, the operation today was kid’s stuff. He’d soon get over it. With luck, he’d be out on the grog again on Saturday night, as usual.

The anaesthetic room, improvised out of flimsy partitions, was hardly big enough to hold the patient, the ward nurse accompanying him, the tall frame of John Bickley, and the anaesthetic trolly gleaming with dials, bottles, piping, and coloured cylinders. Bluey raised his head from the pillow. The Gasman, his long green gown pushed up to his elbows, was holding a large syringe.

‘Not another bloody needle?’

‘You’re a favoured customer, Bluey. No gas this time. I’m sending you off with an injection.’

‘Go on?’ This was an interesting departure, something to tell the ward afterwards. The anaesthetist rubbed a swab of cold antiseptic on the crook of Bluey’s left arm. ‘What’s the stuff called?’

‘Evipan.’ John drew back the plunger of his syringe, a swirl of blood telling him the needle lay safely inside the vein. If the injection went by error into the skin of Bluey’s elbow there would be an abscess, and a terrible row with Graham. ‘There, you didn’t even feel the needle, did you? Now count, out loud....’

Bluey reached fifteen, yawned deeply, and fell asleep. John plucked out the syringe, simultaneously freeing Bluey’s breathing by holding up his chin. ‘This stuff was invented by our friends the Germans,’ he told the nurse. ‘I ought to use it as a routine. The boys get pretty browned off, being suffocated every time with gas. That can’t be much fun when you have to face a dozen operations on the trot.’

Like all specialist anaesthetists, John Bickley brought to his work the artistic touch of an experienced chef. First he held a triangular padded mask tight to Bluey’s patchwork face, and concocted a delicately proportioned mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide gas. Then he moved a lever on a bottle of blue liquid to add a trace of trichlorethylene vapour—a more powerful anaesthetic to deepen Bluey’s unconsciousness. John edged across the lever on another bottle to admit the pungent vapour of ether, the main ingredient of the dish. Bluey coughed fiercely. He always did, John reflected. He should insist that Graham stop his patients smoking for a least a week before their operations. But Graham objected that would be bad for morale, and they’d smoke in the lavatories, anyway. Graham objected to almost everything he suggested, it struck John wearily, ever since he had started calling for Sunday lunch.

Two coloured bobbins already danced up thin vertical glass tubes on John’s anaesthetic trolley, indicating the volume of oxygen and nitrous oxide flowing to his patient. When he judged the anaesthesia deep enough, he sent a third bobbin spinning by adding carbon dioxide to the mixture. This stimulated Bluey’s breathing, until he was heaving away as though finishing some desperate race in his sleep. With economical movements, John laid aside the face-mask, reached for a narrow, stiff, greased, red-rubber tube, and inserted it into the remains of Bluey’s right nostril. He edged it inwards gently—an unsuspected nasal polyp would bring blood all over the shop and an even worse row with Graham—listening to the breath-sounds as it slipped behind Bluey’s flaccid tongue, then finally through his widely open larynx into his windpipe. It was a technique invented by Harold Gillies’ own anaesthetist, Ivan Magill, to deliver the anaesthetic directly into the patient’s lungs while leaving his face and mouth as a sterile unoccupied battlefield for the plastic surgeon.