Surgeon at Arms (6 page)

‘No one’s yet signed for the extra beds shifted here, sir,’ interrupted Captain Pile, who was feeling out of it.

‘Oh, do be quiet, Captain!’ snapped Haileybury. ‘Listen, Trevose, I knew you’re an enthusiast. Often enough, I’ll admit, in a perfectly good cause. But you can’t expect the Services to make fundamental changes according to your whim of the moment. Please get that into your mind for a start.’

‘Do you imagine I haven’t thought about these problems just as carefully as you or anyone else? You must issue instructions banning tannic acid.’

‘Are you giving
me
orders?’

‘Yes.’

Haileybury drew a breath. ‘You might have the courtesy to recognize my position, even if you don’t respect it.’

‘Why should I? It’s I who have to handle the patients. Anyway, I know far more about burns than you do.’

‘You would seem to have lost nothing of your high opinion of yourself.’

‘It’s a justifiable opinion,’ Graham told him offhandedly.

‘As far as I could make out before the war,’ Haileybury exclaimed, ‘your best skill was concentrated in your cock.’ He stopped, looking confused. He could not remember using the expression before. Trevose always seemed to bring out vulgarity in him.

‘Then do as you please,’ Graham said casually. ‘I’ll

get the tannic acid banned by the R.A.F., at least. You know a Member of Parliament called Fergusson?’

‘I've heard of him,’ Haileybury admitted surlily.

‘He’s just collared a job in the Air Ministry. Have you met his wife Sally? Wonderful pair of tits. Guaranteed to stop the conversation at a party. Well, I made them. The couple are pathetically grateful.’

‘You mean, you intend to go behind my back?’

‘I’ve no inhibitions about going behind anyone’s back if I think it’s in a good cause.’ Haileybury said nothing. It was all most frustrating. ‘You know, I’ve made so many bad decisions in my life,’ Graham told him with returning cheerfulness, ‘it’s good to find once in a while I’ve hit on the right one. I mean staying out of uniform.’

‘I would offer no view on the rightness or wrongness of that.’ Haileybury looked at him sourly. It seemed he ‘ had lost the argument, as usual. He vaguely wondered why. ‘As I am here, perhaps you would invite me to look round your wards?’ he added as sarcastically as possible.

‘Of course.’ Graham smiled. ‘You know that I am always ready to oblige an old acquaintance in any professional matter whatever.’

Graham opened the door of the ward. It was a terrible thought, he told himself, but he was really quite enjoying the war.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘BUT WHY DON’T YOU divorce her, Graham?’ asked Denise Bickley. ‘I can’t understand why you don’t divorce her.’

It was a subject which Graham chose to skip away from as quickly as possible. ‘I hate having truck with lawyers, I suppose,’ he told her. ‘They give me the creeps. With their undertakers’ clothes and their undertakers’ faces, burying all your hopes under a mound of stony possibilities.’

‘But unfortunately not at undertakers’ rates,’ smiled John Bickley, the anaesthetist, across the log fire.

It was a Sunday afternoon in the first week of 1941, when the
Luftwaffe
was bombing the country nightly, the onion had become a fragrant memory, whisky and bananas had vanished with the other flavours of peace, and the war was starting to change from a perilous adventure to a wearisome way of life.

‘But you
can
divorce her, you know.’ John’s wife Denise was chillingly well informed about everything to do with the married state. ‘You can these days. The law’s been changed.’

Why does the woman continually go paddling in the muddy waters of my soul? Graham asked himself. ‘So I understand,’ he agreed. ‘A. P. Herbert’s Act altered everything. Maria’s been mad for over five years, so I’m legally at liberty to rid myself of the encumbrance whenever I feel like it. Of course, it was different when I first had her locked up.’

Graham had hoped that putting the situation so starkly might shame Denise into changing the subject, but she persisted, ‘I’d have thought it worth taking the trouble, if only to get things straight.’

‘But how could it make the slightest difference to my life?’

‘Supposing you wanted to get married again?’ Denise exclaimed.

Graham laughed.

‘Well, you never know.’

‘I’m forty-six. Hardly the romantic age. Anyway, who’s to be the bride?’

‘How old must Maria be now?’ asked Denise.

‘Let me see—she’s nine years older than me. Which makes her fifty-five.’

‘How’s she bearing up? Physically, I mean,’ asked John. It was an attempt to turn the conversation. He knew Graham’s sensitivities far better than his wife did.

‘Her body’s extremely well. I went down with Desmond to see her over Christmas. She’s put on a lot of weight—they generally do, I gather. But her vital organs are functioning perfectly, though admittedly her blood-pressure’s a bit up. Her mind’s quite unbalanced, of course. She doesn’t know me, sometimes she doesn’t know her own nurses. On good days she washes herself. On bad days she wets the bed.’

Denise lit a cigarette and said, ‘It must be dreadfully upsetting, seeing her like that.’

‘Not particularly. I can hardly be expected to correlate her with the person I married. She was what they called a “society beauty”, you know. The only daughter of our popular tub-thumping millionaire, Lord Cazalay.’ A lot of things have happened since then, Graham reflected sombrely. Lord Cazalay’s gone bust, for a start.

‘Graham, may I ask you one thing?’ Denise puffed earnestly. ‘I’m only trying to help, you do understand that, don’t you?’

‘Ask anything you like,’ said Graham designedly.

‘Do you still love her?’

‘I never did.’

‘But surely you must have done once?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love with anybody. I fancy I have some sort of inborn immunity to the condition, like some people have for tuberculosis. Or perhaps I just expect too much.’

‘But that’s a tragedy, Graham! A life without love.’

‘Is it? Aren’t people over-obsessed with such attitudes? It’s all the fault of the pictures and the wireless. Anyway, I’ve enough satisfaction for one lifetime in my work.’

‘That tannic acid row was fun,’ laughed John. Graham’s face lit up. He developed an almost schoolboy eagerness when anyone started talking about the annex. ‘It was amusing, wasn’t it? I told you, if McIndoe and myself made enough fuss in the right places they’d ban it. Fergusson grasped the point at once, luckily. Haileybury was so delightfully furious. He suffers a terrible spasticity of ideas, that man, his mind’s as rigid as a plank. In peacetime I never had much use for the bigwigs who impose their authority on the profession, you know that, John. I never realized how gratifying it would be to extend my range in the war.’ He looked at his wrist-watch. ‘It was a wonderful lunch, Denise, but I must go.’

She looked disappointed and asked, ‘Won’t you stay for another cup of coffee?’ She always did, every Sunday.

‘I promised to see Peter Thomas this afternoon. A vital consultation—he’s bursting to go on leave. Then I’ve someone to interview for a job. I’d like an early start in the theatre tomorrow, John,’ he added. ‘An awful list of oddments has piled up. Tim O’Rory’s sending us a newborn baby with a hare lip. It ought to be done as soon as possible, I think, to give the poor little thing a chance to have a go at mother’s milk.’

‘I’ll have the case on the table at eight.’

‘I’d be much obliged,’ said Graham.

When he had gone, Denise started clearing the dishes and declared, ‘I really can’t understand about Graham and Maria.’

Her husband, tall, bony, wearing an old jacket and chalk-striped flannels, stretched himself in front of the fire. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t think a divorce would be in Maria’s own interests.’

‘I couldn’t believe that for a moment,’ she said impatiently. ‘Graham’s one of the most selfish men I know. He’s totally self-centred about everything, even the war.’

John started refilling his pipe. ‘I imagined our Graham had undergone something of a sea change this last year.’

7 certainly hadn’t noticed it.’

He stuck a spill of newspaper into the fire. Matches were becoming almost as precious as razor-blades. ‘Do you think he really is so selfish? The plastic surgery racket was pretty tough in London before the war, you know. If a man didn’t push himself, nobody else would take the trouble. Now that it doesn’t matter a damn to Graham if he operates on three cases a week or thirty, perhaps he can afford the luxury of indulging his better nature.’

‘He hasn’t been showing much of it to you lately, has he? In the annex, I mean.’

John shrugged. Never as easy-going colleague, Graham was becoming worse-tempered in the theatre than ever. ‘With the amount of work we’re getting through, some tension between surgeon and anaesthetist is inevitable.’ Denise picked up the tray. ‘If he
did
divorce the woman, it would all be perfectly respectable. He wouldn’t have to take a girl for a week-end to Brighton, or anything like that.’

‘I rather think you need a permit these days to pass a week-end in Brighton,’ John observed mildly.

‘Oh, you never take anything seriously,’ she complained, disappearing into the kitchen.

Graham usually walked from the Bickleys’ cottage back to Smithers Botham, on the double assumption that it did him good and he ought to save his official petrol. He started along the bare country lane wondering how he could get out of these Sunday lunches. Denise’s insensitivity was deadly.

She had come into his life on the shoulders of John, a friend of twenty years’ standing. John Bickley had given the anaesthetics since Graham was a young house-surgeon making a false start on throat work, in the days when children were submitted to the rape of their tonsils under the oblivion of asphyxia more than anaesthesia. Perhaps Denise was jealous, Graham wondered. The relationship of surgeon and anaesthetist had something in common with marriage. He and John had half a lifetime of shared experience, together having faced the triumphs, failures, and excitements concentrated in the few square feet round an operating table. As Graham had become a fashionable plastic surgeon so John Bickley had become a fashionable ‘doper’ or ‘stuffist’, hurrying with his rubber tubes and cylinders from nursing-home to nursing-home on a time-table more complicated than Bradshaw’s. The surgeons allowed him ten per cent of the operating fee, so he had to keep in with a good many to keep going. The year before the war he had married Denise, whom he had met at a suburban golf-club. She was tall, slim, blonde, and athletic, and had money. It struck Graham that ever afterwards John occupied himself by keeping in with her.

Graham hadn’t liked Denise from the start. She had taken him over, as she had taken over everything else connected with her husband, even his Saturday’s golf. It was becoming a complication to their work in the theatre, and Graham wouldn’t countenance any complication likely to affect his patients. The Bickleys had found a cottage near Smithers Botham—very luckily, the arrival of Blackfriars having shifted most of the white elephants squatting on local estate agents’ books. Having neither children nor evacuees, Denise had first invited Graham to live with them, confessing her astonishment at his tolerating the pub. But he was never a man to lack excuses. She insisted he at least called for Sunday lunch. She had a pressing sense of social duty, devoting much energy to organizing the wives of Blackfriars consultants scattered round the countryside into cosy if meatless dinner parties, into fours of bridge or sets of tennis, and into the knitting of large quantities of Balaclava helmets.

She loved quizzing him about Maria. It seemed to be her Sunday treat. Graham could anyway hardly explain his motives for not divorcing his wife when he didn’t know them himself. Perhaps he had no more than a vague reluctance to put down some decrepit animal which once strode vigorously in the sunshine of admiration. Or perhaps, he thought more darkly, his wife was a mother-substitute, his feelings towards her loaded with guilt—but one mustn’t take too much notice of the psychiatrists, they told a lot of fairy-tales. Somehow he must see less of Denise, particularly now it looked as though they’d be living in each other’s pockets at Smithers Botham for life. Only General Wavell in the Western Desert was providing any encouraging sweeping black arrows on the front-page maps of Lord Arlott’s
Daily Press.
Graham wondered glumly if the ebullient Australian newspaper proprietor, whom he had known well enough in peacetime, had foreseen that his task of chirpingly maintaining civilian morale every morning would have reached its present bleak severity.

Reaching his office in the hut outside the annex, Graham changed his shoes, pulled on a white coat, and sent a nurse for Peter Thomas.

‘I hope I’m a specimen worthy of display to the outer world,’ Peter began cheerfully.

The patient’s flesh sausage was by then detached from his wrist, and starting to turn into something like a nose. The rest of his face was a patchwork of skin, too yellow and too shiny, Graham thought, cut from various bits of his body, Graham removed a dressing and saw with satisfaction that some sepsis in the corner of his last graft had healed. ‘The sulphanilamide powder seems to have done the trick,’ he announced. ‘It’s saved me the necessity of having to use you as a guinea-pig for penicillin.’