Alec had never administered an anaesthetic in his life, but luckily John Bickley was an indulgent master. He was used to getting the duds. John had been working for Mr. Cramphorn and Mr. Twelvetrees in the general theatres of Smithers Botham itself since his row with Graham, who often enough had wished him back. But he was not a man to relent on his own rashness. Alec was scared of Mr. Cramphorn, but discovered that he treated his anaesthetist exactly as he treated his prewar chauffeur, an underling expected to do his job and keep out of the conversation. Otherwise his new occupation seemed, like the war, ninety per cent boredom and ten per cent panic. He started bringing books into the theatre, reading them hidden in the sterile towels screening the unconscious patient’s head. Having a quick mind he could demolish even a Victorian novel in two or three operating sessions. Alec was never sure of the effects of his anaesthetics on his patients, but he felt they were improving his own mind considerably. He was becoming more intellectual and cultured than ever. Desmond meanwhile performed the duties of a house-surgeon, with much correctitude and distinction.
Alec’s second problem was his political allegiance. The general election of July 1945 was a nervous experience for the medical profession. Like Henry the Eighth’s monks, the doctors quivered, half in indignation and half in fright, as schemes for their official disposal reached their ears. The hospitals were apparently to be grabbed, not only inefficient little institutions maintained by ladies selling paper flags, but those as proud as Blackfriars itself, even though it most regrettably existed at the time only as a pile of rubble with pretty wild flowers growing on it. It would wreck all the ‘doctor-patient relationship’, everyone declared at Smithers Botham, and though nobody knew exactly what this meant, it was a telling phrase with a ringing note to it, and anyway a substitute for whistling to keep your spirits up.
How should he cast the first vote of his life? Alec wondered. The newspapers seemed poor instruments of political education. The cartoons at least made the issue simple, between bad bald men in top hats and good clean-cut ones in overalls. ‘The People’ came into it a good deal. Alec rather distrusted The People, who were sadly unintellectual, indeed somewhat dim. Sensitive to the doctors’ vote, the local candidates presented themselves on successive nights in the Smithers Botham assembly hall. The Conservative was plump and confident, and based his persuasion on the fact that the Cabinet were a very decent set of chaps (he had been to school with many of them). The Labour man was hollow-chested and nervously respectful, and based his persuasion on the fact that someone was rude to him in a Labour Exchange during the thirties. Mr. Cramphorn clapped the first oration to the echo, and walked out of the second.
Alec decided to support Labour, because he learned Desmond was voting Tory. In the end he was too busy in the operating theatre to reach the polls, and the hollow-chested man won handsomely. Mr. Cramphorn stayed at home for a week’s sulk. But worse was in store. He appeared in the theatre at the beginning of August white and trembling. ‘They sang the Red Flag,’ he muttered. ‘Actually in the House of Commons! Good God! Some woman danced in the benches. It’s the end!’ But it wasn’t. The next day a patient addressed him as ‘Mate’. Mate! To Mr. Cramphorn, who had given a lifetime to the curing of the poor, who felt the deepest concern for their ills and pains, just like the old Tsars of Russia for their serfs. Social order and sanity were sliding everywhere. They would be swinging from the lamp-posts next. He stayed at home for a month, and his housekeeper sent a message to say he was very poorly.
Alec’s next concern was finding his mother about to become a G.I. bride.
Edith Trevose had spent the war in a small Devon seaside town, in a guest-house whose rooms were furnished for a fortnight’s summer endurance at the most, but had been occupied since 1939 by elderly middle-class guests from London who complained increasingly about the food, the cooking, the war in general, and each other. Edith had been a typist with a Gray’s Inn solicitor, but decided to help a friend run the place as her ‘war work’. She was still pretty, and the sun of her affections, which had dawned upon Graham and shone through the noon-day of her: life on his brother, now glowed upon her son Alec, and was crossed by the first long restful shadows of the menopause. Edith had a split social position in the town. However much she tried to disguise it from herself, in the boarding-house she was taken as a servant. When twice a week she lent a hand in the small local hospital, she was respected by everyone as the widow of a medical missionary and the sister-in-law of Graham Trevose himself. Edith bore the discrepancy cheerfully. She had put up with more disagreeable places in life than the guest-house, and always reflected that the irritation of others, like their illnesses, though painful to witness could hardly kill her.
In the summer of 1943 something happened to change the town’s face more alarmingly than the war itself. Strange uniforms, strange vehicles and strange habits became evident everywhere. The Americans poured from a near-by camp to amuse themselves, having to draw less on their supplies of cash (which were said to be limitless) than on those of their native enthusiasm and optimism. Strange soft-packaged cigarettes, chocolate bars, chewing-gum, and tinned beer circulated everywhere, and the girls’ hair-styles improved sensationally. The Americans had glamour, in a land which was short of it outside the overpacked cinemas. All were assumed to come from spacious and labour-saving apartments in Manhattan, though most lived in towns even sleepier than a Devon village, and knew of their hosts only from their official guide-book, which told them not to say ‘bloody’, that the British could take any amount of aerial bombardment, and were deeply grateful for all the dried egg.
Edith met Hal White at the hospital. He was a doctor, a captain, about her own age, thin, with a large Adam’s apple, glasses like Glenn Miller’s, and given to long periods of deliberation before opening his mouth about anything. He offered her a packet of Life Savers and asked her to a dance. Edith hesitated. Jennifer, the girl who helped in the kitchen, might be there. Hal explained it was an officers only affair, and she accepted. She loved dancing. It would be really quite fun to be taken out by a man again. And of course he was a doctor, and therefore a gentleman.
The dance was exactly like a thousand others in the kingdom that Saturday night. The local recreation hall was crowded, dirty and ill-kept, with French chalk sprinkled hopefully over a rough floor with painted lines for badminton courts. The decorations were posters urging the merrymakers to dig or save for victory, and that careless talk cost lives. At one end was a trestle table where for half an hour or so they sold gin and lime, and afterwards beer, which everyone hoped would last the evening. Half a dozen G.I.s on the stage were playing with startling professionalism. Hal and Edith danced to Paper Doll and Sentimental Journey, and she thought him amazingly light on his feet. He said he lived in Yonkers and was a widower. They tried to hokey-cokey, which Edith thought silly, really, but quite fun. Hal explained he had knocked around the world a good deal, mostly doing medical jobs with construction companies, for a long stretch in Singapore. Edith exclaimed she knew Singapore well. They cheerfully explored the graveyards of their memories, exhuming a body or two to see if it were a mutual friend.
For the last year of the war they saw each other regularly. Hal brought her a good deal of Spam, Life magazine, and some nylons—her eyes shone as she smoothed the wonderfully sheer material with her fingers. When he asked her to marry him she was amazed. Marriage simply hadn’t entered into her scheme of things. Illness and death, yes, but widowhood had become a settled way of life, to be borne as patiently as residence in the Malayan jungle or in the Devon guest-house. Yet she realized that she belonged to the dread class of ‘distressed gentlefolk’. What would she do after the war? She was frightfully poor, she would have to go typing for solicitors until her fingers became too infirm for the keyboard. Hal was really very kind. And he was a doctor. The emotions of her fife had been entwined round doctors, as pliantly as the serpents round Aesculapius’ staff. She would have to live in America, but America wa
s the place for self-betterment, everyone said so. The idea of self-betterment had driven her as a girl from her father’s butcher’s shop in Ramsgate—to where? After a quarter of a century, to running a boarding-house. It was a chance. Only one thing could she be certain of. It would be her last.
That summer, the inhabitants of two Japanese cities were ofï-handedly incinerated, and the war was over. A week later Lease Lend was cut off, equally off-handedly. It occurred only to Lord Keynes that the country was broke, and the millennium which so agitated Mr. Cramphorn would have to be financed by a loan of American money. So the country, like Edith, escaped from the possibility of German mastership to the certainty of American, with as much excitement and less thought.
Edith, Hal, and Alec met for the first time in the basement restaurant of the Criterion in Piccadilly. It was a disturbing gathering. Alec seemed to find Edith’s lover only funny. She had been worried for months at the peculiar excited flippancy in her son, quite unlike the stolid outlook of his father. She gave him a cheque for a hundred pounds, explaining it was all she could afford, and he must save it to visit her in America, once she was married and transported by the United States Government with eighty thousand other British women. Alec decided to spend it on a car. The medical profession lived at the time in a weird intimacy with the motor trade. Though the petrol ration was small, increased by the new Government so meanly as to arouse the irritation of even the New Statesman, doctors, who went on errands of mercy, were allowed more or less as much as they could use, with a bit of fiddling. He’d raise the fare to see his mother when the time came, he decided. He was never able to give a serious thought to the future of anything, particularly when there was fun to be found in the present.
During the rest of the hot summer of 1945 the war began to run down at Smithers Botham as gaily as everywhere else. There still wasn’t much to drink, but there was A.F.N. Munich on the radio, the jam ration was said to be going up (incorrectly), and the place was enlivened by the first demobilized medical officers, sent on a six-month course to refit them for gentler practice. Captain Pile was finally demobilized. He Went to Olympia for his new suit, and at once returned to Smithers Botham. He had grown to like the country hospital, and the future medical world was filled with half-glimpsed hazards. He had taken the post of medical officer to Smithers Botham as a mental institution, and was charged with preparing its return to normal function whenever Blackfriars could be evicted. As he walked up the long drive from the bus, once again mere Dr Pile, he saw the portico had for a second time been decorated. A Union Jack was spread across the columns, and a painted banner announced, ‘Welcome Home Our Heroic Cuthbert‘.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER of the Annex Club at the beginning of 1947 was predictably a noisy affair. It was held at a restaurant frustrated like all others from doing its best for its diners, by the Government order that only three courses might be served, including the soup. The law took itself seriously, an establishment serving asparagus on a separate plate instead of accompanying the sliver of meat having already incurred prosecution. But the millennium had arrived. The coal mines had been nationalized, the railways and the doctors were next. The rations were reduced, coupons were needed for bread, and cigarettes were as hard to come by as ever.
The club was Peter Thomas’s idea. Military units seemed hardly able to await their dispersal before arranging their reunions, so why not the patients who had passed through the annex? Besides, some sort of society was needed to help those who suffered from disability, official meanness, or bad luck. And it would be tragic for the buoyant comradeship of Smithers Botham to be lost without trace in the rough waters of the postwar world. The annex itself still existed, almost as busily as ever, with Tudor Beverley in charge. Graham had left, as he had promised himself, with the end of the war. His status as a Blackfriars consultant entitled him to half a dozen beds in the main wards at Smithers Botham for civilian cases, the arrangement to which Haileybury had tried to condemn him in 1942. But the time for self-sacrifice was past, Graham thought, personal and financial. One day the annex would have to close and Smithers Botham evacuated, he’d be back in the bright new wards of Blackfriars again beside the Thames— though from the permanent look of the hospital’s rubble, that day seemed as unlikely to dawn as the one of settled amity across the split face of Europe.
Graham was naturally the club’s president. It still gave him a feeling of smugness to see himself described on the printed menu as ‘Sir Graham Trevose, K.B.E., D.Sc., F.R.C.S.’. The goodies had been delivered as Val Arlott had promised, and the doctorate of science had been conferred on him at the same time by a provincial university keen on entering into the spirit of the times. He had found himself more proud of the knighthood than he had expected. It was an emblem of something
he sought all his life—a recognition that his work was far from trivial, but on a par with that of general surgeons majestically toiling among their sausage-chains of guts. Besides, everyone was terribly nice about it. Haileybury had called specially to congratulate him, almost with tears in his eyes. It was a well-deserved honour, he explained, not only for the surgeon and for the annex, but for the speciality of plastic surgery, to which he was himself about to return. Graham knew that Haileybury, of all his wellwishers, meant every word. He also knew the intense self-discipline which had brought the man to face him, for the first time since their meeting beside the River Itchen. He would know Graham well enough to sense the risk of a cutting rebuff. But Graham told himself the time for wounding was over, and reconciliation was in fashion.
‘Thank you,’ Graham said solemnly, shaking hands. ‘Thank you... Eric.’
Haileybury swallowed. ‘It is a real pleasure to congratulate you... Graham.’
It was the first time they had used each other’s Christian names. In a world which could address old Cramphorn as ‘Mate’, reflected Graham, such relaxations were plainly overdue.
At the dinner, Peter Thomas proposed a toast to ‘The Wizz’. Graham replied. Shortly afterwards the patients started singing, something innocuous at first, Macnamara’s Band, moving on to Cats on the Rooftops, an enduring favourite, then the Ball of Kirriemuir. Graham knew this always ended in argument, and sometimes in fisticuffs, over such points as the Minister’s Wife Who Felt Unweel coming before The Swishing of the Pricks in the Haystacks, or the other way round. When Peter Thomas put a glass of beer on his head to play The Muffin Man, Graham thought it time to withdraw. He leant over to touch John Bickley, two places away. ‘I fancy we’re a little old for this, old man,’ he smiled. ‘Shall we see if there’s the chance of a taxi?’
The two stood in dinner jackets and overcoats, surveying the ill-lit street from the door of the restaurant without much hope. It was bitterly cold, and snow had paralyzed the country more effectively than the Luftwaffe. There was a scarcity of coal, new shoes were on the ration, a warming tot of whisky was a luxury, and the Government had banned even greyhound racing to save electricity on the hares.
‘What a bloody night,’ muttered Graham. ‘I should have brought the car.’
‘What are you driving now?’ They had spoken little since the incident of Bluey, and since Graham had left the annex hardly met at all.
‘I’ve got a prewar Bentley. A peculiar beast with a fabric body, but it goes like a clock. I bought it from some spiv in the street, who wanted spot cash. God knows where the thing came from, probably stolen for all I know.’
They found a taxi and Graham asked John back for a nightcap. He had a large flat in the Marylebone Road, convenient for his new consulting room in Wimpole Street. John found it furnished stylishly with Graham’s stored belongings. There was brandy on the sideboard, a bowl of fruit, even a box of chocolates. Graham seemed to have climbed back on to the lap of luxury.
‘I suppose I’m allowed to switch on the electric fire?’ Graham removed his overcoat. ‘I can never remember what the permitted hours are.’
‘Don’t th
ey just cut your current off?’
Graham grinned. ‘I’m on the same cable as the Welbeck Hospital, so I’m spared.’
‘You always did have all the luck.’ As Graham poured him a drink, John added, ‘It was quite a party tonight.’
‘It’s good to find the boys enjoying themselves. Though I could see that Tudor Beverley’s got a deal of work to do on some of them. But at least it’s a club where we can feel glad the membership won’t be increasing.’
‘It was good of you to ask me along.’
Graham looked surprised. ‘But of course you had to be there. We couldn’t do without “The Gasman”, surely?’
‘ “The Gasman”, if you’ll recall, Graham, was requested not to call.’
Graham gave a short laugh. ‘The famous Trevose temperament. Do you still hold it against me? I was upset at the time, all sorts of things were pressing on me. After all, they were trying to get rid of me, and damn near succeeded.’ They took the comfortable armchairs on each side of the fire. The three bars gave a welcome glow. The central heating was off, and the block of flats as inhospitable as an iceberg. ‘I know I’ve been a bastard often enough in my life,’ Graham continued. ‘As you get older you begin to see yourself properly. It was my temperament which wrecked our partnership. It wrecked my partnership with Tom Raleigh. It wrecked a lot of other relationships in my life. But I couldn’t help it. If I’d managed psychologically to emasculate myself, I’d have had no drive to achieve anything at all.’
Surgeon at Arms Page 14