Surgeon at Arms

by Gordon, Richard

  ‘Oh dear,’ added Dr Pomfrey, reading. ‘We did have so much trouble with young Trevose at Blackfriars before the war. He always seemed to be getting into the papers. People must have gained the impression that plastic surgery was the only work our hospital was capable of.’

  ‘It doesn’t actually mention Graham by name,’ said John, coming to his surgeon’s defence.

  ‘He’d be much too fly for that,’ laughed Mr. Cramphorn, puffing briskly.

  ‘ “This wonderful work”,’ Dr Pomfrey read out hollowly, “is being performed by the brilliant plastic surgery expert who gave hope and beauty to stage and society in London before the war”. I suppose that would sink in with a good many people—eh, Crampers?’

  ‘Of course, Graham is doing wonderful work,’ admitted Denise. ‘But I don’t see why he should take all the credit. John comes home utterly exhausted most nights. Don’t you, darling? And Tudor Beverley’s rushed off his feet. Besides, there’re plenty of others in the hospital who deserve being taken notice of. Quite as much as Graham. They haven’t his flair for publicity, that’s all. I met Babs Twelvetrees while I was buying the rations this morning, and she was dreadfully upset.’ She was the wife of Mr Alan Twelvetrees, a young Blackfriars consultant surgeon who had been invalided out of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had expected to be treated at Smithers Bothams as a returning hero, but was disconcerted to find himself resented as an intruder who hadn’t suffered the earlier disorganization and inconveniences, to be given the worst wards, the surliest sisters, and the most awkward hours for operating.

  ‘Graham didn’t instigate the article,’ John pointed out. ‘The paper suggested it. They’re always looking for odd corners of the war to write up. It’s good for morale, I suppose, the more people read of what’s being done.’

  ‘You know perfectly well Graham would go to any lengths to get himself known,’ his wife told him briskly.

  ‘Mustn’t give a dog a bad name, my dear,’ Mr. Cramphorn told her. ‘Otherwise you can’t blame him if he bites you.’

  ‘I don’t think Graham would bite anyone, Crampers,’ she said. ‘Of course he’s utterly charming and such fun, and John and I love him. But he is so dreadfully weak. Look at those awful women who had him round their little fingers.’

  ‘What do you think I should do, Crampers?’ asked Dr Pomfrey helplessly. He asked Mr Cramphorn’s opinion on everything. He was more under his thumb than ever at the time, through the surgeon teaching him to drive, which he performed as he operated, very fast and impatient of obstacles. After Dr Pomfrey’s chauffeur had been called up the motor-car presented him with severer difficulties than the most elusive neurological diagnosis, the physician driving across lawns and flowerbeds, on the wrong side of the road, and frequently within inches of Captain Pile. ‘Perhaps you’d care to take it up with Graham?’ he suggested hopefully.

  ‘Not me,’ said Mr Cramphorn. He disliked being drawn into the animosities of others. He had enough in the hospital of his own, complaining almost daily to Captain Pile about the quality of everything from the operating equipment to the food, and appearing regularly in his office with the shepherd’s pie. ‘Why don’t you have a friendly word in his ear, John? You’re nearest to him.’

  John Bickley tried to find an excuse, but Dr Pomfrey looked at his watch and hastily switched on the wireless. The nine o’clock news brought an end to the conversation, as it did to almost every other in the country.

  John had his friendly word with Graham in the annex the following morning. His wife had insisted on it. But Graham only laughed and said, ‘Well, I half expected something like this. Who’s kicking up the fuss?’

  ‘Pomfrey, in his own sort of way.And a few of the others.’

  ‘Twelvetrees, I’ll bet?’ John said nothing. ‘Will they never learn? Things are so different now. There’s no one to benefit except the boys. It cheered them up, someone taking an interest in them, particularly a pretty girl. Though God knows I deserve some sort of encouragement. I haven’t had much since the war started.’

  ‘I know all that, of course, Graham. But you must be aware how sticky the others can be about publicity.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn.’ They were standing outside the wash-house, and Graham started towards the ward. ‘I cared little enough in peacetime what my professional brethren thought of me. Now I don’t care at all. Anyway, they’ve a nice surprise in store. As a result of the article, that American fellow’s coming down—what’s his name, always being photographed in a tin hat coming out of shelters? Hugo Kirkham. His stuff’s syndicated right across the States, and they aren’t coy over there about hushing up the doctors’ names. A nice little flutter that’ll cause when the cuttings get back here.’ Graham began to sound annoyed. ‘I’m not trying to attract attention to myself. I’m trying to attract attention to the annex, which is quite a different thing.’

  Anxious to change the conversation, John asked, ‘Are you going to have a look at that fellow with the postoperative chest?5

  ‘Later, old man, if that’s all right?’ Graham excused himself hastily. ‘I’ve got to have a word with sister.’ Sister Mills occupied a partitioned office the size of a largish cupboard beside the ward door. She had been on the unit for three months, and Graham was astounded at her success. She seemed to have the right touch with unruly patients. There was less drunkenness, less swearing, fewer nurses asking for transfers. Even Bluey seemed to be behaving himself. Graham felt smugly gratified at the perspicacity of his choice. On the mornings when he wasn’t operating, he exercised his prerogative as ‘The Chief’ by taking with her a cup of the tasteless khaki liquid passing at Smithers Botham for coffee. He was not usually one for fraternizing with his nursing staff. He generally treated them brusquely, partly through fussiness over the smallest details of treatment, and partly as a defence reaction. For the sake of his patients he tried to fill his wards with the prettiest girls going, and though some of them fired his imagination, particularly in his present monkish existence, he was careful to avoid any entanglements. He didn’t care to foul his own doorstep. Besides, he was something of a sexual snob. The man who before the war had got himself into bed with Stella Garrod might find the joys of common-or-garden girls something of a come-down. And anyway, he told himself sharply, he was getting far too old for them.

  ‘You look in a mood,’ Sister Mills smiled, as Graham squeezed himself into the spare chair.

  ‘It‘s a passing irritation. Some of the others are grousing about that article yesterday. They still can’t forgive me for getting my name in the papers before the war.’ She handed him a thick chipped cup and said, ‘Yes, I remember reading some of the things they said about you.’

  ‘I hope they were nice things. Many of them weren’t. But you must have been only an impressionable schoolgirl at the time.’

  It always put him in a better humour talking to Sister Mills. And he noticed she had become less solemn, less nervous of him. A sympathetic ear was a luxury when he was expected to bear the troubles of everyone in the annex.

  ‘My father was always interested in your activities,’ she told him.

  ‘Is he a doctor?’ He had never asked about her background before.

  ‘No, he’s a commercial artist. Not a particularly successful one, I’m afraid to say. Now he’s working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production.’

  ‘I used to paint at week-ends before the war. I don’t think I was much good at it. I used to delude myself it was based on the same principles as my surgery. But it isn’t. My job’s more like plumbing, really. Whatever the look of the result, everything’s got to join up the right way underneath.’

  ‘Your own father was at Blackfriars, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, the formidable old boy was the professor of anatomy,’ Graham said fondly. ‘He wrote an erudite volume about the synovial membranes, so erudite that

  only about fifty people in the country understood it. We’ve always been doctors of a sort. My grandfather was a se
mi-educated bonesetter. My great-grandfather wasn’t educated at all, but an out-and-out quack. He left a fortune. He could diagnose everything known to medical science, and a good deal that wasn’t, by merely inspecting the patient’s urine in a flask. What’s called a piss-prophet.’

  She smiled .‘Quite a weight of medical tradition to carry.’

  ‘The family business, I suppose. My son Desmond’s going in for it. You must meet him when he comes down from Cambridge. He stays with me at the pub, and I let him mess about here trying his hand at being anything from assistant anaesthetist to theatre porter. You’ll like him. He’s a charmer.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall. I’ll look forward to it.’

  Graham fell silent. He had a vague uneasiness about mentioning Desmond. ‘The fuss about the newspaper will soon blow over,’ he went on.

  We're proud of you on the unit, anyway.’

  ‘ “The Wizz”.’ He laughed and got up. ‘If I’m making a reputation I’d better live up to it, by doing some work. I’ve got to see a pneumonia John Bickley’s inflicted. The fellow uses far too much ether.’

  Despite his protestations, the realist in Graham admitted readily enough that he enjoyed recapturing the glory of print. He was an exhibitionist in a neurotically self-effacing profession, and finding himself so long in a surgical backwater where , nobody was inclined to wander had been galling. But it was more gratifying still to find the article reviving Val Arlott’s twenty-years-old interest in plastic surgery. He telephoned asking if Graham lacked equipment, promising to jolt action out of the authorities. The longed-for extra huts seemed at last likely to appear. Val even suggested a fund to provide the annex with ‘comforts’—an excellent idea, Graham thought, it would keep the place in the public eye for months. But the best news of all was Peter Thomas becoming engaged to marry one of the nurses. He still looked a mess, but there he was, to marry in the merry month of May. It put up morale in the annex wonderfully. If a girl could sleep with Peter Thomas looking like that, Bluey declared, then he was off to pick up a bloody harem.

  The wedding was to be at Chelsea registry office on May the twelfth, a Monday. On the Saturday night London had its last bad raid of the war, and an unexpected guest, Rudolph Hess, floated by parachute into Scotland. While the Deputy Führer’s fractured ankle was being attended by a British military doctor, a younger German flier, steadfastly doing his duty above the Thames, made a mistake in his bomb-aiming and blew most of Blackfriars Hospital to pieces. Luckily, the casualties were light, the patients being at Smithers Botham and the wooden props in the basement being stronger than everyone gloomily believed. But the firemen were still working thirty-six hours later, when Graham stood with a carnation in his buttonhole soulfully inspecting the wreckage before making across battered London to the registry office. The Arlott Wing, where he had worked before the war, had simply disappeared. The rest of the building, which he could remember standing in apparently unshakeable dignity when his father had shown it off as a childhood treat, was a hardly recognizable ruin. But the pavements were still busy. The bowler hat was still worn. The tramlines still ran down the Embankment. London had shrugged off fire and plague before. The smashed eighteenth-century masonry was a shame, but what was the loss of the most splendid building, he asked himself, compared with that of the most miserable of lives?

  ‘Graham—’

  He turned. He didn’t recognize her for a moment. She was small and gingery, with a scarf round her head, staring at him.

  ‘Sheila Raleigh—’ he held out his hand, smiling. ‘How’s Tom?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear? He was killed.’ He looked blank, hand out-stretched and untaken. She bit her lip. ‘In Greece. He was one of the last.’

  ‘Sheila, what can I say—’

  ‘Don’t say anything, Graham. Please don’t.’

  ‘But Sheila, I’m so dreadfully sorry. It’s a terrible shock. I mean, Tom was my houseman, my registrar, my partner. We worked together for ten years. He was such a wonderful chap.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you keep him?’ she demanded savagely. ‘If you’d wanted, he’d be safe with you now in the country. But you didn’t. You rejected him. Because you really hated him. Because you were jealous of him. Because he wasn’t of use to you any more. That’s the truth, isn’t it? Now you know exactly what you’ve done.’

  For a moment Graham could say nothing. ‘How can you accuse me of that?’ he managed to ask weakly. ‘It isn’t right, you know. It just isn’t true at all. Honestly, I’m heartbroken at the news. Surely there’s something I can do to help? For the children? Isn’t there anything? If there’s some sort of assistance I can give, financial assistance—’

  ‘I wouldn’t take a penny from a murderer.’

  She shrugged her shoulders, turned, and abruptly walked off. Graham watched her disappear, picking her way among the firehoses.

  The wedding was to Graham as joyless as a funeral. He found it impossible to be even faintly amiable afterwards. He pleaded work, and drove straight back to Smithers Botham. He knew that everything Sheila said was perfectly correct. To come face to face with his old self was harrowing. Things had so changed. Or had they? His egotism and jealousy, which had cost poor Tom his partnership and then his life, he supposed must still be in his system somewhere. Perhaps he was merely redirecting them to temporarily more acceptable ends, like some thug given a rifle and praised for killing Germans? Was it too much to hope he really was becoming a better sort of man? How could he tell? There was no one near enough to ask.

  At Smithers Botham he made for his office. He had to find some work, anything to occupy himself, to stop his self-inflicted mental wounds. He paused in the doorway, surprised to find Sister Mills at his desk. Then he remembered he’d asked her to collect case reports of something—what was it? Maxillary fractures. He was about to ask her to go when she noticed his face and jumped up, exclaiming, ‘What’s the matter? Was it something in the blitz?’

  He shut the door behind him.

  ‘I killed a man,’ he said wearily. ‘Unwittingly and indirectly, but I killed him. Tom Raleigh—did I ever mention him? He was my partner. We had a row. He should have been working with me out here on the unit. I wouldn’t take him. So instead, he was killed in Greece.’ He sat in a chair by the desk.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sister Mills quietly. ‘It must have been terrible news.’

  ‘Particularly as I got it from his widow. Who knew exactly what the facts were.’ He stretched out his legs. ‘She told me what she thought of me. She was perfectly right. To her, I couldn’t be anything but the vilest and wickedest creature in the world.’

  ‘She’d be feeling emotional. She let her tongue run away with her.’

  ‘I’d like to think so. But my whole life before the war doesn’t stand much examination.’

  ‘Doesn’t it? You brought a lot of happiness to people.’

  ‘At a price.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ she asked simply. ‘What is the price of happiness?’

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t give a damn about the happiness. Only the guineas.’

  ‘That’s quite impossible to believe. Not after all I’ve seen here.’

  He sat staring in front of him. Then he noticed she was crying.

  ‘I must apologize.’ He got up abruptly. ‘All these troubles I’ve brought back are upsetting you. I shouldn’t have mentioned them. I’ve no right asking you to share them.’

  ‘I’m crying for you,’ she told him. ‘You’re so much the nicest person in the world, and you fight so terribly hard against it.’

  Then he had her in his arms, and she was kissing him with a passion even he found exciting.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Sedgewick-Smith was holding another of her regular Monday afternoon tea-parties. She had told Stephanie severely that she mustn’t keep crossing her legs like that. After all, she was really getting quite a big girl.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ON SUNDAY MORNINGS Graham would lie in bed, reading the
papers, Picture Post, the Strand Magazine, a novel, anything unconnected with the annex. It was only the bad doctor, he reflected, who killed himself to cure his patients.

  By that November Sunday of 1942 the posters in the Smithers Botham entrance hall had changed from the ringing warning YOUR FREEDOM IS IN PERIL to the more sophisticated COUGHS AND SNEEZES SPREAD DISEASES and is YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? The place was by then more than simply a hospital. It was another of the countless closed communities stretching across the globe from Spitzbergen to the Falklands, all more interested in themselves than in the war which had fathered them. There was always something going on there. The fashion of the times provided the staff with bountiful opportunity for self-expression, self-examination, and self-instruction, with dramatics and debating, brains trusts of varying trustworthiness, lectures on everything from Britain’s War Aims to Milk Production, plus E.N.S.A., A.B.C.A., and I.T.MA. Conversation in the long corridors never lacked an interesting case or an interesting scandal. The housemen continued to entertain the nurses. The matron continued to entertain doubts.

  The war had swept a remarkable assortment of illnesses and injuries into the vast wards. It was an Alladin’s cave of clinical medicine, if only the students had bothered to rub the lamp of learning. There were special units for surgery of the head, the chest, the limbs, and the arteries, created not through the benevolence of some millionaire but through the malevolence of Adolf Hitler. Its beds contained Free French, Free Poles, Free Norwegians, Free Dutch, Free Czechs, and unfree Germans (who made model patients, there being nothing like several years’ Nazi indoctrination for fitting in with the ideas of an old-fashioned British ward sister). Captain Pile was still there, and still a captain. Corporal Honeyman was still there, and still a corporal. Dr Pomfrey, after a baffled half-hour with his car at full throttle, unaware that his rear bumper was enmeshed in the stout railings of the coal store, had decided to settle for a second-hand bicycle. But to anyone who read the newspapers, Smithers Botham in 1942 was the place where a man called Graham Trevose performed his miracles.