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 weekend 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 timetable 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.'
'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 than 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".'