Surgeon at Arms

expect too much.’
    ‘But that’s a tragedy, Graham! A life without love.’
    ‘Is it? Aren’t people over-obsessed with such attitudes? It’s all the fault of the pictures and the wireless. Anyway, I’ve enough satisfaction for one lifetime in my work.’
    ‘That tannic acid row was fun,’ laughed John. Graham’s face lit up. He developed an almost schoolboy eagerness when anyone started talking about the annex. ‘It was amusing, wasn’t it? I told you, if McIndoe and myself made enough fuss in the right places they’d ban it. Fergusson grasped the point at once, luckily. Haileybury was so delightfully furious. He suffers a terrible spasticity of ideas, that man, his mind’s as rigid as a plank. In peacetime I never had much use for the bigwigs who impose their authority on the profession, you know that, John. I never realized how gratifying it would be to extend my range in the war.’ He looked at his wrist-watch. ‘It was a wonderful lunch, Denise, but I must go.’
    She looked disappointed and asked, ‘Won’t you stay for another cup of coffee?’ She always did, every Sunday.
    ‘I promised to see Peter Thomas this afternoon. A vital consultation—he’s bursting to go on leave. Then I’ve someone to interview for a job. I’d like an early start in the theatre tomorrow, John,’ he added. ‘An awful list of oddments has piled up. Tim O’Rory’s sending us a newborn baby with a hare lip. It ought to be done as soon as possible, I think, to give the poor little thing a chance to have a go at mother’s milk.’
    ‘I’ll have the case on the table at eight.’
    ‘I’d be much obliged,’ said Graham.
    When he had gone, Denise started clearing the dishes and declared, ‘I really can’t understand about Graham and Maria.’
    Her husband, tall, bony, wearing an old jacket and chalk-striped flannels, stretched himself in front of the fire. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t think a divorce would be in Maria’s own interests.’
    ‘I couldn’t believe that for a moment,’ she said impatiently. ‘Graham’s one of the most selfish men I know. He’s totally self-centred about everything, even the war.’
    John started refilling his pipe. ‘I imagined our Graham had undergone something of a sea change this last year.’
    7 certainly hadn’t noticed it.’
    He stuck a spill of newspaper into the fire. Matches were becoming almost as precious as razor-blades. ‘Do you think he really is so selfish? The plastic surgery racket was pretty tough in London before the war, you know. If a man didn’t push himself, nobody else would take the trouble. Now that it doesn’t matter a damn to Graham if he operates on three cases a week or thirty, perhaps he can afford the luxury of indulging his better nature.’
    ‘He hasn’t been showing much of it to you lately, has he? In the annex, I mean.’
    John shrugged. Never as easy-going colleague, Graham was becoming worse-tempered in the theatre than ever. ‘With the amount of work we’re getting through, some tension between surgeon and anaesthetist is inevitable.’ Denise picked up the tray. ‘If he did divorce the woman, it would all be perfectly respectable. He wouldn’t have to take a girl for a week-end to Brighton, or anything like that.’
    ‘I rather think you need a permit these days to pass a week-end in Brighton,’ John observed mildly.
    ‘Oh, you never take anything seriously,’ she complained, disappearing into the kitchen.
    Graham usually walked from the Bickleys’ cottage back to Smithers Botham, on the double assumption that it did him good and he ought to save his official petrol. He started along the bare country lane wondering how he could get out of these Sunday lunches. Denise’s insensitivity was deadly.
    She had come into his life on the shoulders of John, a friend of twenty years’ standing. John Bickley had given the anaesthetics since Graham was a young house-surgeon making a false start on throat work, in the days when children were submitted to the rape of their tonsils under the oblivion of asphyxia more than anaesthesia. Perhaps Denise was jealous, Graham wondered. The relationship of surgeon and anaesthetist had something in common with marriage. He and John had half a lifetime of shared experience, together having faced the triumphs, failures, and excitements concentrated in the few square feet round an operating table. As Graham had become a fashionable plastic surgeon so John Bickley had become a fashionable