Surgeon at Arms

diplomatic relations with me through the disgraceful behaviour of my patients,’ he told Peter with a grin, ‘I am obliged to find most of my own staff. This one’s been recommended by a surgeon I know in a children’s hospital. Just about the right background for handling you lot, I’d imagine. Send her in, will you?’
    The prospective sister struck Graham as resembling a Botticelli virgin with disastrous dress-sense. She was slight, fair, and transparent-looking, wearing lisle stockings, stout laced black shoes, and a suit of green and very hairy tweed. She had no hat, her hair was in the usual page-boy bob. Big eyes, Graham noticed, a pretty mouth, if rather over-large. No trace of make-up, but a good skin. He decided she didn’t look nearly tough enough.
    ‘It’s Miss Mills, isn’t it?’ he asked, as she sat with hands crossed demurely in her lap. ‘I’m afraid all I know about you is confined to a telephone conversation with Mr Cavill, and the line was terrible.’
    ‘Yes. Clare Mills. I’m Mr Cavill’s staff nurse.’
    She had a soft voice, speaking with great deliberation. Graham noticed she had a trick of emphasizing her last syllables. Probably nervous, he suspected.
    ‘How old are you?’
    ‘Twenty-three.’
    How the nursing profession thrusts responsibility on its daughters! Graham reflected. Before the war, they had to be twenty-one and of unspotted character before being allowed to handle the Blackfriars sick at all. But perhaps women were built for it. After all, there was no responsibility like motherhood, and that was liable to catch a girl unawares anytime.
    ‘I’d better make plain from the start that the work here isn’t very hard, Miss Mills. It’s exhausting. I’m an impossible taskmaster. I’m demanding, boorish, and usually most ungrateful. I don’t expect loyalty. I expect devotion. I tolerate incompetence badly, and fools not at all. It’s a mystery how I manage to keep my assistants in the place. And the patients are much worse than I am. Life can be hell for nursing staff in the annex. Though, to be fair, most of them seem to find it an enjoyable hell.’ Graham smiled at her. ‘Would you like to end our interview here and now?’
    ‘I should very much like the post, Mr Trevose.’
    ‘Why?’
    She hesitated. ‘I’ve always wanted to work on a plastic surgery unit.’
    ‘A strange ambition.’
    She paused again, and went on shyly, ‘You once operated on a friend of mine, Mr Trevose. She was a girl—seventeen at the time. She had a deformed lip. Her name was Susan Wright.’
    Graham tried to remember. It was impossible. He had operated on so many girls. ‘I can only hope the operation was a success?’
    ‘Oh, yes!’ She suddenly became animated. ‘It made an enormous difference to her. Not only physically, I mean, but mentally. She told me all about you, Mr Trevose—how understanding you were, how skilful. Perhaps it gave me the ambition of one day working for you.’
    Graham folded his arms. She was terribly young, but old Cavill had praised her warmly enough. She’d be pretty to have about the annex. Perhaps the boys would take pity on her delicate looks, though he doubted it. And she had a neat hand with flattery. A sensible girl. It was a talent which had taken him a long way at the beginning of his career.
    ‘Can you start on Wednesday?’ he asked her.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    BLUEY JARDINE bared the upper half of his left arm with an air of resignation. He knew exactly what was coming to him. It was a Friday morning, following the Sunday when Graham had sent Peter Thomas on leave, which gave Bluey the dubious honour of being the ward’s oldest inhabitant. He had then been in the annex four months, and into the theatre eight times. Like everyone else, he had developed a keen interest in the science which was bedevilling him.
    The routine of an operation had become as familiar to him as the routine of flying. The injection about to enter his arm was his ‘premedication’, and he even knew the names of the drugs. There was one hundred-and-fiftieth of a grain of scopolamine, which dried up your mouth and lungs and stopped you bubbling and drowning yourself once you were under. There was a third of a grain of omnopon, which was just another name for morphia, and gave you guts. He twitched as the staff nurse punctured his skin with the syringe. The more needles they stuck into you, the more you came to hate them.
    He lay back in bed, wearing long