Surgeon at Arms

by Gordon, Richard

  ‘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.’

  ‘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 syr
inge. 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....’