Surgeon at Arms (9 page)

‘My youngest daughter Stephanie,’ said Mrs Sedgewick-Smith, on a note of enthusiasm.

‘Spiffing to meet you,’ said Stephanie, hand still outstretched.

Stephanie was at an age which should have changed her from a grub in boarding-school uniform to flutter gaily amid the dances and parties of the ‘season’. As it was, she was trying to decide whether to start as a probationer nurse at Smithers Botham or to make Sten guns in the shadow factory at Maiden Cross. But Graham had prescribed girls, and girls being like everything else in short supply, Mrs Sedgewick-Smith had patriotically concluded that Stephanie must do.

‘You should have warned us, Missus, you’d a houseful of beautiful women,’ said Bluey sarcastically.

‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ smiled her mother. ‘You’ll turn her head.’

Stephanie went pink. ‘Oh,
Mummy
! ’

‘You must forgive my daughter for being a little shy,’ Mrs Sedgewick-Smith apologized uneasily. ‘You see, she doesn’t have much chance to meet young men these days. The war has quite ruined our social life.’

‘It’s ruined a lot of things,’ said Bluey.

They went into the timbered drawing-room. There was a small fire, an eggless cake, and meat-paste sandwiches spread with margarine—Mrs Sedgewick-Smith considered raiding the butter-ration as carrying compassion too far. She fiddled anxiously amid the teacups, aware that her guests were going to be terribly difficult to entertain. Of course, one couldn’t—or at least mustn’t —blame the poor things for being rather peculiar. She hoped it wouldn’t have any lasting effect on Stephanie, who was sitting on a low chair with the arresting habit of repeatedly crossing her legs then nervously tugging her hem over the knee of her lisle stockings. Her mother had instructed her sternly to treat the guests as perfectly normal. Her boarding-school had instructed her even more sternly how to carry such things through. As she chatted haltingly it amused Bluey to see her struggling to pretend they were ordinary-looking individuals. She’d be a virgin for sure, he decided, though might make a satisfactory bang if touched up enough first.

‘Why don’t you come back to Australia with me after the war, Stephanie?’

‘I’d love to, really! Honestly, I would. I’ve heard it’s a super place.’

‘It’s hot bad. All the good things are free—surfing, lying on the beach, Sunday picnics, riding round the station. Australia’s got space. You can get lost in it. There’s no one to bother you. No one to stare at you.’ He stopped, realizing he had unthinkingly let show the raw edge of his feelings. The sergeant, whom Bluey always irritated, took advantage of the silence to compliment Mrs Sedgewick-Smith on the sandwiches.

‘I’m so glad you like them. I made the paste myself, you know, from leftovers. I got the recipe from a magazine—the food facts are so helpful these days, aren’t they? I would have done you a carrot flan as well, but of course that needs a lemon jelly for the glazing, and there just isn’t
one
in the shops.’

Food at the time was starting to replace sex as the basis of most adult conversation.

‘You’re quite right about your daughter,’ the sergeant continued. ‘It’s hard to miss the enjoyments of youth. You can’t store them away like your pretty frocks for use after the war. They won’t fit any more.’

Mrs Sedgewick-Smith gave a faintly puzzled smile. Behind the bandages was he young or old? Serious or mocking? Just a sergeant, or a gentleman?

‘There’s an exact moment in life for your first taste of wine and of love,’ the sergeant went on. ‘You’ll always remember it, and never succeed in recapturing the flavour of either.’

‘You know, I think I read something like that in a book,’ exclaimed Mrs Sedgewick-Smith.

‘Probably one of mine,’ said the sergeant, who had been desperate to make some such remark. Before the war he had written a couple of novels, which though noticed kindly by James Agate had not been noticed by his present companions at all. Mrs. Sedgewick-Smith, a three-volume-a-week woman with Boot’s, became agreeably flustered to find herself in the company of a man of letters. It also kept Bluey out of the conversation, which continued at a genteel literary level until they had finished the last pale dry crumbs of the tasteless cake. Then Bluey, resentful at his ousting from the centre of attention, demanded abruptly, ‘Where is it?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mrs Sedgewick-Smith.

‘The doings. I want to go. Tea runs through me like a dose of salts.’

‘You mean the smallest room?’ his hostess interpreted coyly. She rose helpfully. ‘I’ll show you the way.’

‘I’ll need some assistance with the buttons.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Sedgewick-Smith.

Bluey fixed Stephanie with his eye. ‘Perhaps the young lady will oblige?’

‘The young lady will certainly not oblige,’ snapped her mother.

‘Didn’t she say she was thinking of being a nurse?’ asked Bluey innocently. ‘The nurses do it for us in the annex.’

Mrs Sedgewick-Smith looked round desperately. None of the others gave any indication of volunteering. They found the situation only something to grin about. The literary sergeant might have saved her embarrassment, but he was damned if he were going to handle Bluey’s private parts. Mrs Sedgewick-Smith drew herself up. It was too bad. Even the lunatics hadn’t offered such problems. ‘If you will come with me, I shall do all that is necessary.’

‘Good on you,’ said Bluey amiably. He hadn’t really expected to get away with Stephanie. Well, it might be funny watching the old bag fumbling with him. She didn’t look as if anyone had put a prick in her hand for a good many years. It was only the embarrassment he could provoke in others which made bearable his humiliation at needing such attention at all.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s a social disability I rather overlooked,’ Graham laughed when Mrs Sedgewick-Smith explained the predicament the next morning. ‘Those buttons are a terrible obstacle for the boys’ hands. But I really can’t think what to do, apart from sending them out in kilts.’

Mrs Sedgewick-Smith hesitated. She wanted to edge away from the subject as soon as possible, but persevered bravely, ‘I don’t know if you would welcome a suggestion, Mr Trevose. But when my husband came home from America before the war, he was wearing a suit... equipped with a zip-fastener.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Graham snapped his fingers. ‘I remember seeing them there myself. It’s a sound idea. If only, of course, I can get a supply of zips.’

It struck him that a beleaguered country could hardly be expected to continue manufacturing such metallic frivolities. There were certainly none in the shops at Maiden Cross. You probably needed as much influence to lay your hands on some zip-fasteners as to lay them on a case of Scotch or a few gallons of petrol. But he had still one friend who might be expected to perform miracles, and the provision of patients’ flies was a minor miracle indeed. Graham telephoned the
Daily Press
office in Fleet Street, and found himself asked up to lunch.

Graham had a standing invitation to visit Lord Arlott, but hadn’t taken advantage of it partly because he was too busy at the annex, and partly because of a vague desire to keep his pre-war life disconnected from his new one. At seventy, Valentine Arlott continued to conduct his newspaper with undiminished energy and interference. He was a small, lively man in rimless glasses, the fiery red hair which Graham well remembered long ago turned grey, but his Australian accent was as fierce as ever, to be dimmed or intensified according to how it suited to illuminate a particular argument. The
Press
was continuing in the Second War its policy of the First, bringing the exploits of Lord Arlott’s countrymen repeatedly and enthusiastically to the attention of the British public. Its office was by then more or less roofless, weatherproofed by tarpaulins, standing amid buildings apparently gnawed by giant rats, or simply replaced by holes in the ground, or revealing themselves on a second glance as blackened shells like burnt-out fireworks. Graham found Lord Arlott had installed himself in a shored-up room in the basement, which he had fitted out like a military headquarters with telephones of various colours, charts, and large maps, all of great complexity. Val Arlott liked to spread the notion that the
Press
could manipulate any national movement of importance, from which he saw no reason to exclude the war.

‘Zip-fasteners?’ Val exclaimed, Graham coming to the point of his visit at once. His thick grey eyebrows shot up. ‘What the hell would you want those for?’

Graham explained.

‘Sounds like a good cause,’ said Val. ‘Fix it up, Geoff, will you?’

‘Certainly, Val.’

There was a third person in the basement room, who from the humility with which he conducted himself Graham passed off as some sort of secretary. He was startled to discover a little later that the man was the paper’s editor.

‘Well, Graham—how are you going along?’ Val Arlott leaned back in his swivel-chair, smiling but eyeing Graham with a shrewdness he turned impartially on prime ministers and messenger boys. ‘By God, you’re looking fit. And ten years younger.’

Graham laughed. ‘It’s the simple country life. Think what a fortune it would have cost to enjoy before the war.’

‘Don’t you get bored?’

‘Not much. I just work and sleep.’

‘You must notice the change—patching up our national heroes instead of our national beauties.’

‘I do. It’s much more gratifying.’

‘I suppose it should be gratifying to me, too. I’m the one who gave you your start, aren’t I?’

‘Of course—no Val Arlott, no Graham Trevose.’

In the nineteen-twenties Val had run a crusade in the
Press
to install not only London’s first plastic surgery unit in near-by Blackfriars Hospital, but its first plastic surgeon embodied in Graham Trevose. Graham’s father-in-law had owned half the paper, which stimulated the benevolence. But Val’s interest had quickly turned to some other campaign for lightening the burden of humanity—the opening of cinemas on Sundays, if Graham remembered aright.

‘Making much money?’ asked Val.

‘No, but there’s nothing to spend it on.’

‘That’s true. Not these days.’

‘You must have had a pretty bad time of it up here in London,’ observed Graham.

‘It certainly hasn’t been a picnic. Any bombing down your way?’

‘Our only casualty has been a cow. I think they mistook us for Biggin Hill.’

‘Now the bastards are turning their attention to the provinces. Swansea had a nasty time of it last night.’

‘Is the damage serious?’ It warmed Graham to talk again to someone important, a man who not only knew the inside story of the war but who, from the look of the room at least, might even affect the turn of the plot. ‘I mean, taking the country as a whole.’

‘It could be worse. They get the railways running again pretty smartly, and production all round has been hit much less than we feared. The U-boats are a stickier problem, between you and me. But civilian morale has stood up to it. It might have gone the other way, you know. Could have been panic, demands for peace. He confided in me he’s genuinely relieved about that.’

‘Who is?’ asked Graham.

Val Arlott seemed surprised at the question. ‘Churchill.’ His look turned to annoyance as Graham gave a laugh. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing, Val, nothing.’ The Captain Piles and Mrs Sedgewick-Smiths of Graham’s new world shrank into their true inconsequence. ‘I don’t move in such circles, I’m afraid.’

‘Geoff, fix up some drinks, will you?’ ordered Val Arlott.

‘Certainly, Val.’

When they were alone, Val asked Graham, ‘How’s your wife taking the war?’

‘Maria wouldn’t begin to understand. The clock of her mind stopped somewhere in the thirties.’

‘I ran into her brother the other day.’

‘The second Lord Cazalay?’

‘Yes, God help us. There was some unpleasantness between the pair of you, I gather?’

‘Yes. Cazalay and that fellow Haileybury were in it

together, trying to get me struck off.’

‘You mean about the actress? What’s her name— Stella Garrod?’

Graham nodded. ‘I’ll concede that Haileybury moved against me through his usual high-mindedness or his hypocrisy—I’ve never really decided which it is. But I can’t understand why Cazalay started him off. Through spite, I suppose.’

‘Did you know he’s got himself some sort of job in the censorship? Through the title, doubtless. I can’t think of any other qualifications.’

‘I wouldn’t trust him even to deliver the morning post,’ Graham said sourly.

‘Yes, they’re twisters, the Cazalays, all of them,’ Val said amiably. ‘Though it was sad about the father. To be reviled and ruined after enjoying power is bad enough. To face death in exile is heartbreaking. Even the sick rabbit can crawl back to its own burrow. I suppose it can be forgotten now. Even the muddiest little eddies in our history have been submerged by the tidal wave. Not that I came out of the Cazalay crash badly,’ he continued more cheerfully. ‘I picked up his share of this paper dirt cheap. I suppose you’ve some pretty little girl tucked away there in the country?’ he added.