Surgeon at Arms

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

'It's a justifiable opinion,' Graham told him off-handedly.

'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 lightness 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.

7

'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 nighty, 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 resignedly.

'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.'

'I 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 an 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.'