Surgeon at Arms

by Gordon, Richard

  Their domestic bliss at Cosy Cot continued. Clare didn’t go back to her work at the annex, but stayed at home to look after the house, grow radishes and lettuces in the garden, and cook the rations. They were frequently indebted to Mr Cramphorn, who seemed to have taken to them after Graham’s brush with authority, and would appear at the door with a rabbit he had shot, or a pigeon, or a rook, or even a squirrel, which he proclaimed excellent eating if roasted with a strip of bacon, as inclined to be rather dry. The food situation was trying. Graham himself sometimes guiltily brought liquid paraffin from the hospital to eke out the cooking fat, until the Ministry tumbled to this regrettably widespread practice and added the chemical phenolphthalein, which turned the fried fish bright pink.

  ‘What’s Maria’s prognosis, Graham?’ Clare asked.

  They were sitting on the handkerchief of a lawn in the garden that evening, waiting for Desmond. Graham had managed to buy a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1, which he prepared with great enthusiasm, adding bits of apple, cucumber rind, mint, and even carrot. ‘It’s difficult to say. She may recover, more or less completely. She may end up with a hemiplegia, half-paralyzed—and dumb, of course, if her speech centre’s gone. She may go on having small strokes for months, even years. On the other hand she may develop broncho-pneumonia and die in a week. These patients get bedsores, sepsis, you know. Sometimes they just fade out.’

  Clare said nothing. If Maria died, the last obstacle to their marriage would die with her. Well, the last excuse, anyway. Sensing her thoughts, Graham added, ‘I should have gone ahead with that divorce.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘I know how you feel, and it must be awful. Stepping into a dead woman’s shoes.’

  ‘No, I don’t feel that at all, darling. Maria’s never been more than an abstract quality to me.’

  ‘You should have made me do something about those lawyers.’

  ‘You’d have said I was nagging.’ She laughed. ‘You might have left me.’

  He squeezed her hand and said, ‘Don’t be silly. You know perfectly well—’

  He broke off. A noise. A motor bike in the sky, coming nearer.

  ‘Is that one?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes, I rather think it is.’

  ‘Crampers told me the one which fell in Maiden Cross yesterday killed about twenty people.’

  The engine stopped.

  ‘It’s a long way off,’ he said, still sounding uncomfortable.

  They stared at each other. The silence seemed to last for an age. Finally there was an explosion far in the distance.

  ‘Some of them glide on for miles,’ Graham observed. The flying-bombs had taken on an ill-natured personality of their own. They were malevolent, winged, fire-spitting beasts, impossible to relate to the busy grey-uniformed squads dispatching them. ‘I hope Desmond’s all right,’ he added in a worried voice.

  But Desmond arrived unaware of his peril. He spent the night in the bungalow, setting off early the next morning with Graham in the Morris. The nursing-home where Maria lay ill catered for a more genteel mental sufferer than once found themselves in Smithers Botham. It was a manor house providing seclusion, fresh vegetables from the garden, and nursing which was unfailingly kindly if not particularly skilful. They were received by the matron, a stout, blue-uniformed north-countrywoman, radiating cheerfulness. ‘The poor soul’s poorly, of that there’s no doubt,’ she greeted Graham. ‘If she went, we’d quite miss her, you know. She’s been with us longer than anyone.’

  Graham was familiar enough with Maria’s room. She had occupied the same one since he had her shut up in the place ten years ago. It was small, bright in the sunshine, with a vase of pink roses beside the bed. Maria was unconscious, breathing noisily. It was too soon after the haemorrhage, which had sprung from a brittle artery amid the microscopic telephone-cables of her brain, to tell the extent of her coming paralysis. Graham noticed she suffered the indignity of a large fly crawling unmolested across her cheek. Her grey hair lay neatly on the pillow in two plaits, each tied with a pink bow, like a schoolgirl’s.

  Desmond stood in the background, looking solemn. However much he had prepared himself, however often he had observed the same clinical state in others, however little he felt for his insane mother, it was a shock to see her like that. Graham went to the bed and felt her pulse. His fingers slipped down to take her flaccid hand. It reminded him of the night when her troubles had started, when she tried to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping-draught and had been saved by the skill of John Bickley. He suddenly felt himself touched. Now his wife lay under his eyes as a dying wreck, he felt a surge of love for her. It was stronger than any he could remember in his life, even before he had married her.

  ‘Isn’t her breathing rather obstructed?’ he complained mildly.

  ‘The doctor will be along by and by,’ the matron told him comfortably. ‘Doubtless he’ll deal with it.’

  Graham nodded. He supposed at that stage it didn’t make twopence worth of difference. ‘Perhaps you’ll ring me at Smithers Botham, Matron, if she takes a turn for the worse?’

  ‘I will that, Mr Trevose.’ In the corridor outside she went on cheerfully, ‘It’s sad, isn’t it, your poor wife should be smitten when there’re such good news on the wireless this morning.’ As Graham looked at her blankly she explained, ‘Haven’t you heard? They’ve tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb. The Germans themselves. It won’t be long now till it’s all over and done with, you mark my words.’

  As they drove away, Graham said to Desmond, ‘I suppose there’re people who ought to know. You’d better try and get hold of your uncle Charles. You can probably find his whereabouts if you telephone Val Arlott’s office at the Press. Say it’s on my behalf. God knows where her other brother’s got to.’

  ‘Do you want to speak to Uncle Charles yourself, Dad?’

  ‘I most certainly do not.’ Graham drove in silence for a mile. ‘So they tried to liquidate Der Führer, did they? Perhaps they’ll end up with a revolution in Berlin, like last time. It could all be over by Christmas.’

  Graham hardly said anything for the rest of the journey. The shadow of death that hung over both Hitler and Maria was bringing to the front of his mind difficult problems.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MARIA’S FUNERAL caused a frightful fuss. She lingered a week, regaining consciousness, her hand groping the air, her eyes askew, speechless. During the days she was passive enough, but at nights she grew restless, clawing at her sheets, trying to get out of bed. The nurses were perfectly used to such behaviour. They brought long boards to slot along the sides of her bed, as though she were in her coffin already. On the Thursday morning she had another cerebral haemorrhage, and left life as she had entered it, with a gasp.

  When they telephoned Graham at Smithers Botham he shrugged his shoulders. But he was surprised at his inner distress. It is a merciful quality of the human mind never completely to expect the inevitable. There were practical details again. He knew his wife wished to be buried at Biddenden, in more glorious days the Cazalay family’s country ‘place’. She had told him as much when her life was in danger once before, at the stormy birth of Desmond. But Biddenden was in Kent, and since the opening of the second front a military area. Graham seemed to remember that permits were needed to venture there. He approached Captain Pile, who confessed it outside his authority—though he had taken to Graham since the surgeon had become a national figure, often boasting to his cronies of association with this wonderful work. The undertakers finally sorted things out, and the following Wednesday morning Graham set off in the Morris again with Desmond. They started late, Graham having been called to a soldier brought into the annex from a bad road smash. In an age infested with priorities, he supposed that the dying could claim precedence over the already dead.

  Graham remembered the Cazalays’ old house well enough. It was a mile or two from Biddenden, near another village with a few houses, a pub, and the church. You first caught sight of it as the ro
ad turned on the hill, through a gap in the trees—but the trees had grown. Graham tried to remember the last time he’d been invited to spend a night in its spacious and chilly bedrooms. It was not really an old house, its twisted chimneys, leaded windows, and timbered gables going no farther back than the reign of King Edward the Seventh. It was rather vulgar, really, like the late Lord Cazalay himself. He wondered how the famous glasshouses were, the airfields in the area having been plastered by the Germans generously. As he drove past the lodge gates he saw a notice announcing HEADQUARTERS—FORCES AND WORKERS ENTERTAINMENT SERVICE. Well, he supposed, that was carrying on the first Lord Cazalay’s tradition.

  ‘Did you ever visit the place?’ Graham asked Desmond.

  ‘I don’t know. I could hardly remember, could I? I was too young before the family disgrace.’

  Graham grunted. He disliked to think of the disgrace spilling on to his own family. He had brought nothing but honour to the Cazalay tree. ‘We’re late,’ he said, as the church came in sight. ‘Everyone’s gone in.’

  They hurried inside, making for the front pew. Graham found himself beside a fat man with the bar of a black moustache across his red face—Maria’s brother Charles, the second Lord Cazalay. They inclined their heads gravely. The elderly clergyman rose. A familiar noise intruded into the church, a phut-phut-phut coming steadily nearer. Graham shifted his feet uncomfortably. Now they had moved the anti-aircraft guns to the coast and left the Spitfires and Hurricanes to prowl inshore, most of the flying-bombs were being shot down. It occurred to him they were standing in the middle of the area proscribed by the Air Ministry for exactly this purpose. The noise grew closer. The clergyman stood with his mouth open. Graham noticed the church windows had already been blown out and boarded up. It would be a strange end, to be buried alive at his wife’s funeral. The engine cut out. Silence. Then an explosion which shook the earth under them. The clergyman started the burial service in a tone of deep relief.

  It was all mumbo-jumbo, Graham thought. The only difference between a human body alive and a human body dead was that between an engine running and switched off, though the stopped engine didn’t inconveniently rot to pieces. There were a surprising number of people in the church, twenty or thirty. Old friends of Maria’s, he supposed. Living ghosts, come to clank the rusty chains of their memories in his ears. He hoped the old clergyman would get it all over quickly. He probably would, there was always the chance of another flying-bomb.

  As they wheeled Maria out, Graham noticed the route to the graveside passed a row of elaborate memorials to others of the Cazalay family. Though not her father and mother, who had died in the arid air of Venezuela, a destination recommending itself for Lord Cazalay’s retirement through its lack of an extradition treaty with Great Britain. As Maria’s remains were lowered from sight another flying-bomb came out of the distance. As the engine stopped, heads turned heavenwards in anxiety rather than supplication. It exploded with a distant thump. Graham wondered idly who was unfortunate enough to be underneath it

  ‘Mr Trevose, you must remember me,’ said an old lady in a velvet hat, voice conscientiously hushed.

  ‘Of course I do,’ Graham lied.

  ‘I was on the committee of the Sunshine League and the Free Medicine Club with your dear wife, you know.’

  The Sunshine League! Well, the war had relieved the rich of the painful necessity of lightening the burdens of the poor. Graham found himself facing a thin old man with two sticks, whom he recognized after a moment as Sir John Blazey. He’d been chairman of the small hospital at Uxbridge which Graham had used as his first step to success in plastic surgery—rather unscrupulously, he supposed. He thought the fellow had died long ago.

  ‘Your wife was a great woman, Trevose.’ The old man shook his head reflectively. ‘She was quite unsparing in her sense of duty to others. We shall never know how many unfortunate people have had cause to be grateful to her.’

  Graham thanked him. He had almost forgotten the Maria of the busy committees, with her picture in the Illustrated London News and the Bystander. Now the glories of her past began to draw his eye from the shadows of her later poverty and insanity. Well, it’s good to know she died a credit to me, he thought. He found himself shaking hands with Val Arlott.

  ‘Why did you come?’ Graham asked, looking surprised. ‘I didn’t notice you in the church.’

  ‘Have you a moment for a stroll?’

  They walked together in the country lane outside the churchyard. ‘I can’t say why I came, exactly,’ Val told him. ‘I’ve been wondering. Perhaps it is to make up for missing the burial of her father. I was fond of old Cazalay. In some measure, I suppose I was responsible for his plight.’ Graham made an unbelieving gesture. ‘It’s difficult to know. There are things I might have said or done to check his recklessness. Perhaps I’m suffering unconscious feelings of guilt towards the family. This is my penance. You’d know about such matters, wouldn’t you? How are things going?’

  ‘At the annex? We’re still busy. Though the excitement’s gone. We’re an institution now. Like all institutions we’ve lost the fun for getting greater and grander, we’ve only the worry of seeing ourselves slipping.’

  ‘I wish I’d done more for you medical people. Particularly now I’m getting old and infirm. Look at Nuffield—given millions, set up professors, all manner of things.’

  ‘You know they tried to sack me?’

  ‘Yes, I got the P.M. to scotch it.’

  Graham looked faintly put out. He had imagined the intervention a tribute to his own personality. ‘After the war you’ll have plenty of room for your charity, I should imagine, Val. These ideas about State medicine and so on, nothing will come of them, surely?’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. When the fighting stops we’ll get a socialist government.’

  ‘Surely you’re not telling me the country’s going to reject Churchill?’

  ‘Why not? What stopped us giving in after Dunkirk? Our national streak of perversity.’

  Graham looked glum. ‘That’ll make it tough on me, trying to build up again.’

  ‘You’ve got a wonderful reputation.’

  ‘I can’t eat it.’

  ‘No, but it helps. There’ll be a lot of goodies and gongs going after the war, Graham. I don’t see why you should be passed by. I take it you’d be agreeable if I put you in for something?’

  Graham gave a faint smile. ‘Haven’t I been too gay a dog to be given an official collar?’

  ‘The war’s altered a lot of that. After all, if you’re brave enough to win the V.C. nobody gives a damn how many women you’ve screwed.’

  ‘It’s certainly an attractive proposition—’ He broke off, listening ‘No, it’s only a motor-bike somewhere. Those doodle-bugs are damn scaring. I thought that one in church was going to blow the lot of us up, corpse and all.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Duncan Sandys says we’ve got them licked. Only about one in five get through now.’

  ‘When’s the war going to be over?’

  ‘Against the Germans, by Christmas.Against the Japs, in a couple of years. Against the Russians, God knows.’

  With this deep and disquieting observation, Val Arlott shook hands, entered his chauffeur-driven car, and made off.

  Graham felt he needed a drink.

  The other mourners were cramming themselves with some agitation into three or four taxis parked off the lane. His son was standing alone, looking awkward by the lych gate. ‘I expect you could do with a stiff one, Desmond, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, it wouldn’t come amiss.’

  ‘We’ll try our luck in the pub.’

  They walked a quarter-mile down the lane in silence. The funeral had already been displaced from Graham’s mind by his talk with Val. Some sort of ‘gong’. What sort? They could hardly hand the O.B.E., like some zealous food official. A K.B.E. would make him Sir Graham, which would sound very pretty. But he doubted if even Val could push him into the pure light of official
favour. The bigwigs in.the medical profession would certainly have a say in it, and they had always mistrusted him. Someone would be resentful he won his fight over the sacking, and eager to express it practically. And Haileybury would be against him. No, not Haileybury, Graham decided, after a moment’s thought. Haileybury was far too stupidly righteous to take the chance of such easy revenge. Anyway, he didn’t care. He had never let official honours flicker among the varied ambitions which had burned inside him. He knew medical knights enough, and he thought most of them horribly dreary.

  They pushed open the door of the little saloon bar, to hear a loud voice declaring, ‘But of course you must have some whisky. Come along, be a good fellow, look out a bottle from under the counter. Don’t you understand? I’ve just been to a funeral?’

  Graham hesitated, but it was too late to withdraw. He had never liked Maria’s brother. The man had laughed at him as her suitor, paining young Graham with the discovery that in ‘society’ medical people were seen with the eye of fifty years previously, when the healer was admitted only via the tradesmen’s entrance—though Graham had acted afterwards on this brutal realization, most profitably. He was also rather afraid of Charles Cazalay. He had the unscrupulousness of his father, if not the intelligence which made the most of it. He had tried to damage Graham once, and wouldn’t hesitate to try again if it suited him.

  ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Lord Cazalay continued to the landlord, half-chaffing and half-hectoring. ‘You should, you know. I’m Lord Cazalay. I used to live in the house. Before your day. I remember the fellow who kept this place, man called Greensmith. Greensmith