Surgeon at Arms (18 page)

‘Clare, you’re simply saying a lot of irresponsible things which are making you overwrought.’

‘I’m saying things which I should have said months ago, years ago. My God, I’ve been a fool. Do you imagine all this hasn’t been boiling in my mind since I came here? Of course you don’t want to marry me. You’ve always had some excuse, something to put it off. Even when you got me pregnant you didn’t want me as your wife. You were scared stiff at the thought. You didn’t want that child either. You were as pleased as Punch when I aborted. That’s the truth, isn’t it?’ He stood up. ‘Of course it wasn’t the truth,’ he told her crossly. ‘I did everything I could to save it, didn’t I? I was upset when we lost it, dreadfully upset. Do you think I don’t know my own mind?’

‘No, you don’t know it all, Graham. That’s your trouble. There’re plenty of wonderful things about you, and you don’t recognize them. There are plenty of horrible things about you too, and you don’t recognize those either. Or you won’t bring yourself to face them, which is the worse for you.’

‘So you’re suggesting I’m going to turn you out after the war, like some camp-follower?’

‘It won’t come to that. We can’t go on with this playacting any longer. We’ve got to split up.’

‘You can’t mean that?’ He was alarmed at this practical turn in the conversation.

‘It’ll only get worse if I stay. She looked down at the threadbare carpet and went on more calmly. ‘I haven’t made up my mind just this minute, Graham. I decided... oh, months ago, I don’t know when. Perhaps I didn’t decide at all. It just crept up on me.’

‘Clare—’ He approached her, but she pushed him away. ‘Supposing I said I’d marry you tomorrow?’

‘No, it wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t work. We’d be in a worse mess than ever. Once you got back to London you’d want to be rid of me. I’m not your type. You don’t love me. I don’t think you could love anyone. Your attitude to women is like your attitude to the boys in the annex. So many ‘construction jobs’, as you say. You overlook that I’ve got the right to any feelings at all.’

Graham stuck his hands in his pockets. It was all most distressing. He hated emotional scenes. Perhaps they were both upset with the business of Maria. Clare would be over it tomorrow. ‘Why did you take up with me in the first place?’ he asked, a shade resentfully. ‘You knew enough about me, about my past affairs?’

‘Every woman’s a heroine, I suppose. She expects to succeed where others have succumbed.’

‘Possibly.’ They stood looking at each other. ‘You cant’ meant it?’ he asked more quietly. ‘About going away?’

‘Yes, I do. I’ll get a job somewhere.’

‘Les’s discuss it again tomorrow, when we’re ourselves.’

‘No,’ she told him. ‘There’s nothing else to say.’

A week later Clare left the bungalow and Graham took a room in a London hotel, explaining to everyone at Smithers Botham that this temporary change in domestic arrangements was necessitated by his searching for a flat. The pair had parted politely even amicably. A continued emotional tempest would have worn out both of them, and they were old enough to take such things sensibly. In the end, Graham was rather pleased. He would miss Clare, of course, but she was right. She was a simple, kindly girl, but not at all the sort to stand beside the fashionable plastic surgeon, Graham Trevose, now returning like the exiled European governments to his rightful dominions. A marriage would have been a disaster. And supposing this ‘gong’ materialized? Lady Trevose? Decidedly not. To fill
that
rôle he wanted someone far more intelligent, more versed in the ways of the world, more socially adept, someone of better family than the seedy commercial artist’s.

Someone like Maria?he thought.

Yes, someone like Maria.

Maria in death, like Maria in life, always came out top in the end.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

BY CHRISTMAS, when the fighting should have been over, the German armies broke through at the Ardennes for the second time in the war. Luckily for the Allies, the weather cleared and they could bomb them to pieces on the twisting hilly roads—which they would have saved themselves a great deal of trouble by doing in 1940, if only they’d had any aeroplanes. In London the flying-bombs were replaced by rockets, which perplexed and affronted the Government, as Lord Cherwell had worked out most carefully they were too expensive for the Germans to use. The rockets particularly harassed Alec Trevose, who was doing his two months’ midwifery training at a sandbagged lying-in hospital in north London. Every time one fell the noise sent half a dozen local women into labour, and it was no fun finding your way through blacked-out back streets on a bicycle, loaded like a mule with bags of instruments and dressings, suspected by policemen of being some sort of saboteur, and wondering if the next unheralded missile had your number on it.

Alec didn’t like midwifery. He was beginning to see himself as an intellectual, a man of culture, and childbirth was an extremely uncultured pursuit for all concerned. Alec hated the babies. He hated the midwife in charge of him, a sparse-bosomed Scotswoman with a vinegary tongue. She in turn seemed to hate him and indeed men in general, which he felt was reasonable from her toilsome occupation. Only the jovial Mr. O’Rory brought levity to the solemn reproductive circus with his visits twice a week. He was a Catholic, and therefore unable to perform abortions—though he stretched a point when they were natural, like Clare’s miscarriage, and passed the others to his houseman, back-seat driving over his right shoulder. Female sterilization was for him, he confessed, quite out of the question. He would perform the operation to the crucial point, then demand genially of his assistant, ‘Just tie a knot in those two ligatures round the Fallopian tubes, my boy, there’s a good fellow. My religion doesn’t allow me to do that sort of thing at all.’

Alec rather took to Mr. O’Rory. He felt he had the cultured approach.

In the spring the Nazi magníficos suddenly appeared in the papers as haggard and anxious old men, shuffling about in baggy civilian suits. It induced feelings of freakishness rather than triumph. To anyone of Alec Trevose’s age, a world empty of Hitler and Mussolini was as strange as one without Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Himmler bit the cyanide capsule in his tooth, and vomited himself to death over the trousers of a British officer. If nobody really knew what had happened to Hitler, nobody really cared. There were rejoicings in British streets, of a seemly nature. The Government, in a burst of official relaxation, allowed the citizenry to use binoculars again. If the population were restrained by the scarcity of hard liquor from getting lit up when the lights went up in London, at least they had some sort of fling before the authorities switched them off again through shortage of fuel. On the June day when the world inaugurated the United Nations in San Francisco and so abolished war for ever—for the second occasion in a quarter of a century—both Alec and Desmond found they had qualified as doctors.

Alec quickly found that qualification, like marriage, brought more problems than it settled. His first difficulty was to win a resident post at Smithers Botham. Failing to get a ‘house job’ in your mother hospital was like being expelled from school, it stuck for life. Besides, he was going to specialize. All the students were going to specialize, their teachers (who were specialists) having freely laced their instruction with their opinion of family doctors as dangerous fumbling ignoramuses. But specialize in what? Psychiatry, Alec decided. It was intellectual, and you never got your hands messy. There was no psychiatric houseman, so as a first step he must land a house physician’s appointment. But unfortunately for Alec the jobs had come to be decided solely by Mr. Cramphorn, who dominated the selection committee. His methods were simple. He would look through the list of applicants, grunting, and strike out with his gold pencil all coloured students, Jews, those with un-English sounding names, any he had taken a dislike to, and any he had for some reason never heard of. And Mr. Cramphorn had taken a fierce dislike to the Trevose family. He thought Graham’s treatment of Clare outrageous, and after he had lavished his rabbits on her, too. Desmond, he admitted grudgingly, must be given a job, as the son of a Blackfriars consultant. If that unspoken rule lapsed the whole structure of the hospital might tumble, and there were changes enough in the wind already. But Alec could be sacrificed. In the end, Mr. Cramphorn compromised by making Alec the resident anaesthetist, this speciality, Mr. Cramphorn believed, being reserved for those unfitted for the practice of medicine at all.

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.