Surgeon at Arms
moved against me through his usual high-mindedness or his hypocrisy—I’ve never really decided which it is. But I can’t understand why Cazalay started him off. Through spite, I suppose.’
‘Did you know he’s got himself some sort of job in the censorship? Through the title, doubtless. I can’t think of any other qualifications.’
‘I wouldn’t trust him even to deliver the morning post,’ Graham said sourly.
‘Yes, they’re twisters, the Cazalays, all of them,’ Val said amiably. ‘Though it was sad about the father. To be reviled and ruined after enjoying power is bad enough. To face death in exile is heartbreaking. Even the sick rabbit can crawl back to its own burrow. I suppose it can be forgotten now. Even the muddiest little eddies in our history have been submerged by the tidal wave. Not that I came out of the Cazalay crash badly,’ he continued more cheerfully. ‘I picked up his share of this paper dirt cheap. I suppose you’ve some pretty little girl tucked away there in the country?’ he added.
‘No.’
‘You’ve turned over a new leaf? I don’t believe it.’
‘Let’s say I haven’t time. I’m worked off my feet, you know. I’ve a hell of a lot of worry. Particularly over one of your compatriots—Bluey Jardine.’
Val frowned. ‘I wondered what had happened to him. He just dropped out of the news. Badly smashed up?’
‘With patience on both sides and a couple of years I’ll get him looking human.’
‘Poor bastard.’ Val rubbed his chin. ‘How about our doing a story on your little show? I’d like to remind people about Bluey.’
Graham looked doubtful. ‘Would anyone be interested? Plenty of men have suffered worse. And my boys aren’t particularly pretty objects to come across in your morning paper.’
‘Yes, people would be interested,’ said Val decisively. ‘We could send down Martha Raymond. Do you know Martha?’
‘She wrote a bitterly unkind story about me and Stella Garrod in your gossip column before the war.’
Val shrugged his shoulders. ‘These things happen. She’s a game kid.’
Martha Raymond’s physical courage matching the flintiness of her mind, she was then scaling cliffs with the newly raised Commandos, defusing unexploded parachute mines with the Royal Engineers, flying in the empty bomb-bay of Wellingtons with the R.A.F., or diving into the waters of Weymouth harbour with the Navy, all for the enlightenment and entertainment of Val Arlott’s readers. But Graham wondered if even she would be game enough to drag a story from his patients.
‘Geoff, what’s Martha doing?’ Val asked, as the editor reappeared.
‘On an Army cookery course, Val.’
‘Fix her to meet Graham when she’s free.’
‘Certainly, Val.’
‘I hope my boys won’t resent her,’ said Graham doubtfully. ‘They can be prickly with strangers.’
‘Martha’s a real professional, Graham. She can get round anyone. Like you.’
‘Then I only hope the zips arrive first,’ Graham added. ‘Otherwise Bluey might feel inclined to provide the girl with rather too colourful copy.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘ISEE GRAHAM’S getting up to his old tricks again,’ remarked Denise Bickley, putting down her coffee cup.
‘Eh? What’s that? Old tricks? What old tricks?’ Her host, Mr Claude Cramphorn, F.R.CS., paused in lighting his pipe. ‘He had plenty of them, as far as my memory serves.’
‘Didn’t you see this morning’s Press, Crampers?’
Mr Cramphorn shook his head.
‘There was an enormous article by some woman about the annex. Pictures and all. As a matter of fact,’ she added casually, ‘I happened to cut it out.’
Denise felt in her handbag and produced a strip of grey wartime newsprint, which she handed to her husband beside her on the sofa. ‘It’s wildly inaccurate, of course,’ smiled John Bickley, passing the cutting on. ‘The newspapers never seem to get anything right.’
Mr Cramphorn took it with a grunt. He was a fiery little surgeon given to pepper-and-salt suits, brown boots, half-moon glasses, briskly puffed pipes, and clipped sentences, a bachelor who had retired from the consultant staff of Blackfriars before the war to a farm which by chance lay within sight of the minarets of Smithers Botham. Nobody seemed to know how old he was, but no ageing general dug out to sit behind a ministry desk accepted his invitation to reactivity as eagerly as Mr Cramphorn—if he had ever been invited at all. When overlooked
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