Surgeon at Arms

by Gordon, Richard

  The annex was no longer a sideshow but one of the busiest surgical units in the country. The huts in the grounds had doubled and the staff had trebled. Graham was receiving more patients from the R.A.F. than he could handle. His work had attracted surgeons—and journalists with their photographers—from every Allied nation, even the Russians. Women in fish-queues could talk to each other about Graham Trevose. Every morning brought a letter or two, generally badly written and spelt, with a few shillings towards the comforts fund. Graham thought this the most rewarding recognition of all. And it had all started because he had gone to Val Arlott seeking some zips for trousers.

  An unaccustomed sound crept across the misty morning. Church bells in the distance. For more than two years these accompaniments of Christian joys and sorrows had been silenced, reserved by the Government to herald not the coming of the Lord but of the German armies.

  ‘Listen.’ Graham slipped his hands between his head and the pillow. ‘I remember in the last war they rang the bells after Cambrai. It was when we used tanks for the first time, and broke the German lines. In a week or two we were back where we started, of course. It always seemed the case in those days. Let’s hope this Alamein affair is more permanent.’

  Clare Mills slipped her hand into the jacket of his pyjamas, which were pure silk, prewar, made to measure in Jermyn Street. The poor lamb really was terribly thin. It was like being in bed with a skeleton beside you. ‘Happy?’

  ‘This is probably a terrible confession, but the war’s been the happiest time of my life.’

  ‘Is it so terrible?’ she asked gently. ‘Surely the misery needn’t go undiluted?’

  ‘I suppose happiness is a well-insulated state of mind. Most of the boys are perfectly happy, and God knows they haven’t got much to justify it. Even Bluey seems happy enough these days.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s found a new girl-friend.’ She ran her hand down Graham’s chest. It was so smooth, the ribs standing out like the black notes on a piano. No wonder he’d once suffered from tuberculosis.

  ‘Why do I attract you?’ he asked.

  She pouted thoughtfully. ‘You’re different. From any other surgeon.’

  ‘Different from old Cramphorn, you mean?’

  Clare laughed. ‘You’re gentle, you’re amusing, you’re kind, you understand women. And I love you. Besides, you had a tremendous build-up. I’d read so much about you. It’s like being with a star you’ve only seen on the flicks.’

  ‘Don’t tell me I’ve got to match up to Clark Gable?’ he asked, though feeling flattered.

  She touched his small hard nipple with the tip of her forefinger. ‘Tell me why I attract you.’

  ‘You’re a good housewife.’

  ‘I thought that was it.’

  ‘Do you realize, darling, this is the first time in my life I’ve had a home I could call my own? I mean a place where I could do as I pleased, without it being run by a lot of servants. Where I didn’t feel I had to put on a show, to impress the world with my importance.’ He looked round the room, which was hardly big enough to take the bed. The beige wallpaper had galleons sailing across it, a fumed-oak dressing table was squeezed into a corner, there were faded pink curtains, an angular hanging mirror, and a coloured print of Tower Bridge, pre-blitz. They lived in a bungalow, rented furnished in the country some ten miles from Smithers Botham, with four small rooms and a kitchen, a bath with an alarming geyser, and the name of ‘Cosy Cot’.

  Graham felt he would have been happy with Clare even living in a Nissen hut. She shared his new liking for books and for the concerts on the wireless. She cooked agreeably and mended his clothes with her painstaking nurses’ stitches. He had enjoyed himself teaching her to dress properly, pulling her out of those awful tweeds and putting her into frocks, though the fun had been officially dimmed by the coming of clothes’ rationing. She was the most adoring woman he had known, which he sometimes wryly reflected accounted for their harmony. They had always the annex to fall back on as a common interest, Graham insisting she continued with her job, declaring the ward would fall into anarchy otherwise. As for their other common interest, Graham decided she enjoyed a greater talent than any woman he had met for copulation, with all its ancillaries, which he was apt to describe as ‘novelties’.

  As the church bells died away he said, ‘You’ve given me something to live for, darling. A unique gift.’

  ‘You always had your work.’

  ‘Only a fool or a saint lives for his vocation. Do you know, before you came along I was the prey to horrible and gloomy thoughts. Doom, impending death, extinction. Most uncomfortable. Such things don’t even enter my mind now. You’ve exorcised the ghosts. Perhaps the magic charm is finding myself with a girl of your age. Or perhaps it’s just the flattery.’

  She gently kissed his unshaven cheek. ‘It isn’t flattery.’

  ‘Is the distinction important? At my age, flattery’s a workable substitute for love.’

  ‘Now you’re being silly.’

  ‘Yes, I hope I am.’ He looked up at the ceiling, which had a large crack running across it. ‘Do you think we should have another week at that place in Wales?’

  ‘They were awfully awkward about our identity cards.’

  ‘They might have grown more accustomed to such irregularities by now.’

  He had taken her to a village hotel, remembered from before the war, for what he liked to remember as their honeymoon. Their first sudden contact in the office, the day he had met Sheila Raleigh, he told himself was like the unexpected symptom of some smouldering disease. He had been attracted to Clare almost since setting eyes on her. But he was immediately disconcerted to discover there was another—a Royal Marine lieutenant, stationed in India, to whom she was unofficially pledged. Graham declared to himself hastily that any monkey business was out of the question. Her lieutenant was abroad in the service of his country, like the Crusades, exactly the same principle. A man of his own standing couldn’t possibly stoop to such things. But he wondered how strong the psychological chastity belt was. It might be fun to try the lock. In the end it sprang open with an ease which surprised both of them, the severest difficulty being the locale. His house in Mayfair was bomb-damaged beyond habitation, and he could hardly smuggle Clare upstairs in the pub like one of the students. It occurred to him he hadn’t taken a holiday since the war started. Afterwards, she declared she couldn’t possibly go back to the nurses’ home. In a place like Smithers Botham, everyone would know of their adventure. The other sisters were unkindly enough already, and anyway had a tendency to kiss each other good-night. They moved into Cosy Cot, and she wrote to her Royal Marine, a dreaded epistle known as a ‘Dear John’.

  The rest of the Smithers Botham staff thought sharing a bungalow with your ward sister rather rich, even for Graham. He didn’t care. It never occurred to him to ask if Clare did. Denise Bickley was particularly outraged, about which Graham cared even less. In peacetime, Graham’s goodwill represented a large slice of her husband’s income, and Graham reflected grimly the war couldn’t go on for ever. As for Clare’s parents, who lived in Bristol, they were gratified to learn from her letters that their daughter had moved from the hospital to comfortable and apparently altogether satisfactory lodgings.

  ‘Why don’t we have our own celebration of the victory in the Desert?’ Graham asked her from the pillow. ‘We’re alone in the house, no one’s likely to call and disturb us.’

  Clare laughed and got out of bed, throwing back her blonde hair and starting to take off her red-and-yellow spotted cotton pyjamas. She really had an admirable figure, Graham reflected. Her breasts were wonderful. He couldn’t have made anything better himself.

  ‘Must I keep using this toothpaste stuff?’ she asked, squatting to insert her diaphragm.

  ‘My God, yes,’ said Graham hastily. ‘It’s terribly risky without the spermicidal jelly. All that cap does is to hold it round the cervix.’

  ‘It’s awfully messy.’

 
‘You can’t have everything, my love,’ he told her, a shade primly.

  ‘And I shall have to keep it in half the day, won’t I? It’ll give me backache.’

  ‘I’ll sit rubbing it with Sloan’s liniment.’

  She laughed again, and came back to him.

  In the sexual line Graham was, as Haileybury would have put it, an enthusiast. After all, he told himself, he had a deep knowledge of the apparatus concerned, and he might as well put the information to fullest use. He often recalled with satisfaction Balzac’s exhortation for no man to marry before dissecting at least one female pelvis. But he could never bring himself to feel the business more than ‘a sneeze in the loins’. It was only a reflex, centred in the humblest lower segments of the spinal cord, transmitted across the pelvic basin by fibres hiding under their Latinized name ‘the nerve of shame’. Even a real sneeze was a more cerebral occurrence, conducted by fine-sounding artisocratic nerves springing out of the brain itself. Of course, women took a different view. However many men sneezed in their loins, they invested it with some mystical significance. He supposed it was mainly through their fear of appearing tarts.

  ‘You look sad,’ she said teasingly afterwards.

  ‘Do I? It’s physiological after an orgasm. Isn’t there a classical tag? Though the single one I can remember is calor, rubor, tumor, dolor, and that’s only inflammation.’ She ran the tip of her .finger round his umbilicus. ‘That’s a strange thing we have.’

  ‘It’s only a cicatrix, a scar.’

  ‘What’s inside it?’

  ‘Nothing.The remains of the blood-vessels which fed us before we were born.’

  ‘It’s quite pretty, really, like a flower. A budding rose.’

  ‘Most are like cabbages.’

  Her hand slipped down to his penis, off duty in the at-ease position. ‘It’s full of tissue like a sponge, isn’t it? I remember from our anatomy lectures. It was awfully funny, the sister-tutor was a terribly dried-up old thing. She told us all about an erection, with diagrams on the blackboard, as though she was talking about the moon. She could never have seen one in her life.’

  ‘It’s a really most interesting organ. The arteries dilate enormously, quite unlike any others in the body.’

  ‘It must be fascinating to have one.’

  “According to the psychiatrists, all women think so. Penis-envy. Though quite where that interesting discovery gets us, I don’t know.’

  ‘Did all your women want one?’ He felt this reference, under the circumstances, in rather bad taste, and said nothing. ‘Have you had an awful lot of women, Graham?’

  ‘You know I’m a married man.’ As she gave a small pout he went on, ‘My sex life with Maria pretty well ended with the honeymoon. You could hardly blame me for seeking out others, particularly when she went off her head. But none of them meant anything, not one.’

  ‘Not even Stella Garrod?’

  ‘Particularly Stella Garrod.’

  ‘How about Edith?’

  ‘That’s rather going into ancient history,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Graham, darling, perhaps I’d better give up the annex.’

  ‘Unthinkable! ’

  ‘Staff-nurse Jones could easily take over. She’s awfully good with the boys.’

  ‘But why this sudden change of heart? I thought you liked the work. You’d get bored all day here.’

  ‘I haven’t used the toothpaste once or twice. I didn’t think it would matter. I haven’t seen anything now for a fortnight. Of course, it may be perfectly all right. Just a delayed period.’

  His large eyes stared at her across the pillow.

  ‘If it isn’t all right, will you be pleased?’ she asked timidly. ‘No, don’t answer. Wait till we know.’ She kissed him and got out of bed abruptly. ‘It’s Sunday. That means fried eggs for lunch. Something lovely to look forward to, isn’t it?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TO FIND HIMSELF confronted with fatherhood on a second occasion filled Graham with the same numb shock as on the first, almost exactly twenty-two years previously. With Maria, their sexual endeavours were so beset with difficulties he somehow felt her reproductive system too inefficient for conception. With Clare, he had put a touching faith in science. As usual, the human element had let him down. It was the same in the annex, when they got a run of infection after the nurses forgot to sterilize the needles properly in carbolic.

  Monday was Mr Tim O’Rory’s day at Smithers Botham. Graham caught the gynaecologist at lunch in the medical officers’ mess and invited him for a stroll on the lawn.

  ‘It’s Clare,’ he said, once out of earshot. ‘I think she’s pregnant.’

  ‘Well, now,’ said Mr O’Rory. A thick-set, dark-haired, red-faced, humorous Irishman, he looked kindly on feminine failings through his heavily rimmed glasses and seemed to find them an endless source of innocent merriment. ‘And what gives rise to this little suspicion?’

  ‘She’s a fortnight overdue. She’s always been as regular as clockwork before. Of course, it might be a chill, something like that, mightn’t it?’

  ‘Sitting on a damp park bench, doctor?’ Mr O’Rory chuckled. ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘You don’t think that’s a possibility?’

  ‘You know my low mind, Graham. Any woman outside a nunnery, who misses a period between the ages of fifteen and fifty, must be assumed pregnant until proved otherwise. And I’m not so sure about the nunnery these days, either.’

  Graham was in no mood for professional pleasantries. ‘Can you do a test in the lab?’ he asked irritatedly.

  ‘I will certainly invoke the assistance of a small frog, Graham, if you want. I’ll be needing a specimen of the lady’s urine.’

  ‘I’ve got one in the car.’

  ‘But don’t get too alarmed,’ Mr O’Rory added amiably. ‘The lady may have made a mistake in her dates. It’s remarkable how unreliable the feminine gender is at its fundamental calculations.’

  The telephone at Cosy Cot rang the following evening ‘That was Tim,’ said Graham, putting down the receiver. ‘It’s on.’

  Clare turned her eyes back to her sewing. Graham stuck his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the small sitting-room, which was filled with books, medical journals, files of notes, photographs of his patients, and had a coloured picture of Bubbles over the fireplace.

  ‘It’s wonderful news, isn’t it?’ he declared.

  She looked up again. ‘Are you sure you want it?’

  ‘But of course I do! As long as you do?’

  ‘More than anything.’

  Graham perched on the edge of her chair and put his arm round her tightly. So, he thought, one of my wriggling little spermatozoa has threshed with its hair-like tail across the black mucoid depths of Clare’s pelvis, to sink itself joyfully into the speck of jelly comprising her ovum. The stark object of the most fashionable wedding, with all its elaborate trimmings of an ecclesiastical, legal, floral, and emotional nature, had been simply achieved. No trouble at all. The human race really did surround itself with a lot of fuss over its reproduction. Clare wondered what he was going to say. At least he’d declared he wanted the child, she thought. She didn’t dare to question whether he really meant it. Living with Graham, she rarely dared to question whether he really meant anything.

  ‘There’ll be a terrible lot of practical details to settle,’ Graham announced.

  He immediately threw himself vigorously into solving the varied problems set by the new pregnancy. He decided Clare must leave the annex at once. Staff-nurse Jones could enjoy unexpected promotion, he must find someone to succeed the girl as staff-nurse. Appointments must be made with Mr O’Rory. Specimens must be collected. A woman must be sought to help in the bungalow. They would go away for the holiday in Wales, it would do Clare good. Her ration-book must be exchanged at the Food Office for a pregnant woman’s green one. Extra milk and vitamins must be applied for, with a dozen Government forms. Pregnancy struck Graham as a highly compl
icated item of official business. It had been so much simpler last time. Which reminded him, he really must do something about Maria.

  Graham had been meaning to do something about Maria for over a year. But there had always seemed a last-minute snag. Whenever he steeled himself to start instructing his lawyers there was somehow a rush of work in the annex, keeping his mind occupied for weeks. The solicitors had anyway been bombed out of the City, and re-established themselves at some inaccessible address near Southend-on-Sea. There seemed then no urgency. Clare appeared perfectly content with their arrangement. Graham couldn’t see how ten minutes in a registry office would make the slightest difference to the pair of them. Or perhaps, he sometimes suspected, he still had his lingering reluctance about disowning Maria for good. Or perhaps... perhaps he was afraid of committing himself wholly to Clare? It was too difficult to think about, and the problems of the annex came first. Clare certainly raised the topic of a divorce. He felt it only to be expected, but she never harped on it for long. It never occurred to Graham that she saw how much it distressed him, nor that her silence was the expression of her terror of losing him.

  But now the solicitors were written to. A divorce was imperative, the wheels of the law must be geared to the rapid process of reproductive physiology. The solicitors wrote back with a promise of doing their best, explaining the Court would doubtless be sympathetic, but there were innumerable difficulties in wartime. He fixed a visit to Southend for the end of the month. He also agreed at last to see Clare’s parents in Bristol. It was a glum prospect, even his charm might not prove an antidote to all unpleasantness, particularly as Mr Mills was hardly older than himself. Besides, a journey in the crowded» slow, and foodless wartime trains would be terrible.

  First of all he must put matters to his son Desmond.

  Something seemed to have gone wrong with Desmond. At Cambridge he had taken a fair degree in Part I of his Tripos, stayed on a year to breathe the rarefied academic atmosphere of the Part II, and done rather badly. From a gay if self-centred schoolboy he was turning into a reticent and solemn young man, wearing a dignity as unfitting for his years as a middle-age spread. He was even something of a prig. When he had left Cambridge that summer to start his three years’ clinical course at Smithers Botham, Graham had assumed he would move in with them at Cosy Cot. But Desmond was reluctant.