Surgeon at Arms (29 page)

‘I hope you’ve managed to get some holiday in Italy at the same time, Lady Trevose?’ the reporter asked Clare.

‘Yes, we had an absolutely wonderful fortnight in Positano.’

‘Despite the continuing currency restrictions?’ grinned the reporter.

‘We are extremely modest abroad,’ Graham told the man, quite sharply.

It was nine o’clock before they emerged from the Customs into the bright and confusing concourse. ‘It’s strange how this place always looks entirely different depending on whether you’re going or coming,’ Graham observed. ‘It’s the difference between hope and anticlimax, I suppose. A common enough sequence, in my own experience.’

‘You’ve nothing to complain about this trip, darling.’

‘Perhaps a little. They didn’t take my speech seriously at the Congress, you know. Not entirely.’

‘But they were absolutely charming,’ Clare protested. ‘Particularly the Russians.’

‘Yes, but they think I’m old hat. Perhaps they’re right. I’m a realist. Anyway, I livened them up. We’ll see how the Americans take to me in Baltimore next spring.’ Graham looked round hopefully for the chauffeur booked to drive them into London. He felt that at his age the shunning of airport buses was a luxury worth indulging in. He was spry, and as thin as ever. He let his wispy hair grow overlong, and strands of it poked under his hat. He wore glasses all the time, large and round, making his eyes look more owlish than ever. He had grown rather untidy in his clothes, presenting an amiably donnish look to the world. Clare thought fondly he resembled an elderly elf.

The car had hardly reached the M4 before Graham fell asleep. Clare picked up the tartan rug provided by the hire firm and carefully laid it over him. This was less to prevent any malevolent chill taking advantage of his unguardedness—her nursing training enabled her to take a strictly scientific view of Graham’s management— but an indulgence on her part, an expression of the steadfast tenderness she had shown towards him in their twenty-one years of marriage. She settled back in her corner, looking at the street lights, trying to correlate them with the necklaces she had admired from the air. She had grown fatter, but kept her pale good looks, and, with assistance, her fair hair. Graham tended to drop off to sleep rather often these days, she reflected. Perhaps he shouldn’t gad about the world so much. But seventy-three, though a respectable age, was hardly over the threshold of senility. If she remembered, Churchill was rather older when he became Prime Minister through the persuasion of the ballot-box rather than the approaching muzzles of the German guns.

They had a small flat in Chelsea, and an unimposing house in the country on the way to Oxford, past the National Accident Hospital. Graham had worked there almost a dozen years, until his retirement in 1959. They had been the happiest of his life, happier even, than at the annex. It was mainly because nothing had happened to him. He sometimes wondered if it were the security of a settled job, or the fires of his personality dimming to a comfortable glow, or simply Clare keeping a firm hand on him. He had busied himself with his work, developed a relish for committees, lectured enthusiastically, and drew veneration from the world as effortlessly as a well-established oak draws moisture from the soil. He enjoyed the respect, though it amused him. It was not so much the poacher turning gamekeeper, as the swashbuckling pirate becoming Admiral of the Fleet. Perhaps he possessed the same luck as his seafaring Cornish ancestors, he wondered, who had never turned from a chance of smuggling and generally ended clothed with gold lace and dignity.

There was a pile of letters inside the door.

‘I can’t face that lot at this hour of the night,’ Graham said, as Clare started gathering them. ‘I’ll have a go at them in the morning. Anything from Dick?’

Their nineteen-year-old son was on holiday in Spain, with, Graham suspected, the girl he had met at the university. Well, it would be a bit of fun, he wished he’d had the chance to do the same as Dick’s age, but then trips to Spain were only for the rich and venturesome. And the sunshine would do the girl good, he thought. She had struck him as a dismally anaemic young woman.

‘There’s a letter he seems to have sent from Malaga.’

‘Read it to me, darling, will you?’ Graham sat in the armchair. ‘I’m rather tired, and his handwriting’s dreadful.’

‘And there’s something from Blackfriars.’ She tore open a large envelope. ‘They’ve made it at last,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’re actually going to open the new Arlott Wing by Christmas. Of course, they want you to perform the ceremony.’

Graham laughed. The rebuilding of Blackfriars beside the Thames had long ago become a harmless joke. When the war had ended, the staff imagined they would quit Smithers Botham in a year or two, but the volume of hospital work so increased with the National Health Service, and the volume of hospital building so diminished with the national bankruptcy, the country was several times on the brink of another war before they finally parted company. ‘I think we’ve beaten St Thomas’s to it, haven’t we?’ he asked. ‘Or is it more or less a dead heat?’ He opened and closed his hands. ‘Perhaps they might ask me to perform an inaugural operation on some unlucky fellow? It’s an amusing thought. I wouldn’t mind having a knife in my hands again. After all, John Bickley’s still giving anaesthetics for private cases all over London. Though perhaps he only does it to get away from Denise.’

John had worked for Graham again. Graham’s private practice had in fact continued almost as busily as ever, through an interesting fraction written into the Health Service known as ‘nine-elevenths’. The consultants were paid for the nine-elevenths of their time spent in the Service, the other two-elevenths being free to extract money from those members of the public feeling disinclined to accept its benefits. And two-elevenths of a consultant’s time, with evenings, early mornings, and week-ends, was a handsome period for profits. Without this concession, the consultants would have dug in their toes and there would have been no Health Service at all. But Nye Bevan was an even more penetrating realist than Graham.

Clare read their son’s letter, which said a lot about the sunshine, wine, beaches, and bullfights, but nothing about girls. The omission confirmed Graham’s suspicion.

He got up to pour himself a drink, and said, ‘I suppose he’ll get married pretty soon?’

‘I don’t know. He’s no one in mind.’

‘But they all seem to get married these days as soon as they’re legally entitled to. Perhaps they look upon it in the same light as learning to drive a car. Once the obstacle to any enjoyment’s removed, you indulge yourself automatically.’

‘He’ll wait until he’s qualified, surely?’

‘In my day, even in Desmond’s day, that seemed to be the rule. But of course we lived on our parents or our wits. Now they live on everyone else’s parents. Doubtless it’s all a good idea.’

‘He’ll wait till he finds the right girl. He’s terribly sensible.’

Graham smiled. ‘I had to wait a very long time till I found the right girl. Even then I didn’t realize it, did I?’ She said nothing. He seldom brought up their times as Cosy Cot. She felt he liked to imagine the episode had never happened, that he had met her for the first time when he had entered, extremely dramatically, her children’s ward one wet March morning in 1947. It was a forbidden topic, just like Maria’s divorce.

Graham sipped his whisky. ‘Do you know, Clare, I’m beginning to think that life resembles something I haven’t experienced for donkey’s years—it’s like Saturday night in an old-fashioned public house.’ As she looked puzzled, he gave a grin and said, ‘It gets better towards closing-time.’

When they went to bed he lay reading for half-an-hour. He snapped the book shut and said, ‘ “Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:” Strange how those lines of Eliot’s keep coming back to me. I must have read them years ago, when I first started at the annex. But it’s right, isn’t it? Everything else is the trimmings. It’s the most useful thing you can learn from medicine. How to sort the two out. What’s the time?”

‘Half-past midnight.’

Graham turned over. ‘For God’s sake remind me in the morning I’m due to see a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons. He wants to touch me for some charity, I imagine.’

He turned out the light. At twenty to four he woke, switched on the light, gasped at the pain exploding from his throat into his left arm, and died.

CHAPTER THIRTY

CLARE HAD RATHER HOPED for something at the Abbey, but whoever invisibly decides such delicate questions demurred. Official memories are long and not subject to the mellowing of human ones. A knighthood for Graham Trevose had been acceptable, in times when a man’s merit mattered more than the man himself. But a memorial service at the Abbey... the doctor, though distinguished, was far from impeccable. Someone in some small quiet office remembered there was really a bad scandal—he had lived openly with a mistress during the war.

In the end, the final pageant was held in St. Pancras Church, a frequent choice for such affairs in memory of medical men, possibly because of its nearness to the red-brick ramparts of the British Medical Association in Bloomsbury. It was a befittingly miserable day in late September, with cold wet winds from the north blowing down the railway lines to the termini which dominate that depressing part of London. Haileybury stumped along, a thick overcoat over his blue suit, wondering if it were going to trigger off his bronchitis again. It was becoming increasingly burdensome to run the laps of the years. It occurred to him to list mentally his own infirmities. Apart from the chest, there was presbyopia, ptosis, arthritis of the left hip, a bilateral hallux valgus, a small inguinal hernia he ought to have something done about, and of course the piles. But a man was as old as his arteries, as the physicians kept saying when everything else was falling to bits. He supposed if his number didn’t come up in the cancer lottery a good surgeon and antibiotics would keep him going a while. At least that morning he was alive, while Trevose was dead. To Haileybury’s mind, death restored the formality of surnames.

‘Excuse me, Sir Eric—’

Haileybury paused on the pavement outside the church, staring blankly at a young man in a raincoat.

‘I’m from the
Daily Press,’
said the young man.

Graham deceased had the news value of Graham alive. The London evening placards had announced FAMOUS SURGEON DEAD, and middle-aged men in crowded trains heard the echo of Churchill’s funeral drums. Sir Graham Trevose was part of the legend. And if young pilots in Spitfires and Hurricanes had shot out of the sky only half the enemy aeroplanes they thought they did, the legend could shine when required as brightly as ever. It seemed about the only thing the country had got out of the war.

‘Do you think,’ the young man continued, ‘that Sir Graham deserved his distinction as “The Wizard” of plastic surgery?’

‘I don’t know. How could I know?’ Haileybury started edging away. ‘Wasn’t the term invented by you people in Fleet Street?’

‘I understand you had certain differences with Sir Graham?’

‘I was never aware of any,’ Haileybury muttered.

‘Do you think it is morally wrong, using surgery to construct new noses and such things for people who can afford it?’

Haileybury sniffed. ‘I have never given the matter any thought.’

‘Perhaps, Sir Eric, you have a comment on Sir Graham’s great work in the war—’

But Haileybury had escaped into the sanctuary of a holy place, like a medieval criminal.

The church was crowded and warm and smelt of damp overcoats, reminding Haileybury of the outpatients’ clinic. He was shown to a pew at the front. He decided his arthritis put even a perfunctory kneel on the hassock out of the question. At least the service would be short and businesslike. Services for dead doctors generally were. Medical men live in far too close intimacy with death to regard its arrival as other than an unexpected stroke of treachery. And at his age, Haileybury reflected, such functions became occasions less of pain than foreboding. He adjusted his glasses and reached for the folded sheet of printed paper set before him. Experience told him they would have
O God, Our Help In Ages Past.
He found he was right. He felt pleased with his little guess, it brightened his morning considerably.

He folded his arms and stared along the pews. The widow, of course. Rum sort of business, really all over and done with now. Her son. The first son, now an academic, he believed. He’d forgotten what line. These days they made professors in all sorts of peculiar little subjects. Woman doubtless his wife. Been trouble there in the past, too, he seemed to remember. Trust the Trevose family to make fools of themselves when a female came into it. Other man the nephew, Alec. Always seeing him on the television. Looked damned prosperous. Needed a haircut. The other people around him were elderly men of washed-out military appearance, and of course the surgical big wigs. The biggest wig was giving the address. Wouldn’t say anything about Trevose, really, of course. At least, Haileybury reflected, he sincerely hoped not.

Odd chap, Trevose. Neurotic, of course, but he supposed all medical men were to some degree. You must be, to pick such a strange occupation. As slippery as a snake, unreliable, abominably self-centred. Fond of fame, money, and women. The first two failings didn’t matter much, but the last did. Women were human beings. Trevose always seemed to forget that little fact. Of course, it all changed in the last twenty years of his life. I always rather liked Trevose, Haileybury decided, even when I didn’t care to admit it to myself. He livened things up. Didn’t take life too solemnly. I rather wish I’d had the courage to be more like him myself.