Surgeon at Arms

if that’s all right?’ Graham excused himself hastily. ‘I’ve got to have a word with sister.’ Sister Mills occupied a partitioned office the size of a largish cupboard beside the ward door. She had been on the unit for three months, and Graham was astounded at her success. She seemed to have the right touch with unruly patients. There was less drunkenness, less swearing, fewer nurses asking for transfers. Even Bluey seemed to be behaving himself. Graham felt smugly gratified at the perspicacity of his choice. On the mornings when he wasn’t operating, he exercised his prerogative as ‘The Chief’ by taking with her a cup of the tasteless khaki liquid passing at Smithers Botham for coffee. He was not usually one for fraternizing with his nursing staff. He generally treated them brusquely, partly through fussiness over the smallest details of treatment, and partly as a defence reaction. For the sake of his patients he tried to fill his wards with the prettiest girls going, and though some of them fired his imagination, particularly in his present monkish existence, he was careful to avoid any entanglements. He didn’t care to foul his own doorstep. Besides, he was something of a sexual snob. The man who before the war had got himself into bed with Stella Garrod might find the joys of common-or-garden girls something of a come-down. And anyway, he told himself sharply, he was getting far too old for them.
    ‘You look in a mood,’ Sister Mills smiled, as Graham squeezed himself into the spare chair.
    ‘It‘s a passing irritation. Some of the others are grousing about that article yesterday. They still can’t forgive me for getting my name in the papers before the war.’ She handed him a thick chipped cup and said, ‘Yes, I remember reading some of the things they said about you.’
    ‘I hope they were nice things. Many of them weren’t. But you must have been only an impressionable schoolgirl at the time.’
    It always put him in a better humour talking to Sister Mills. And he noticed she had become less solemn, less nervous of him. A sympathetic ear was a luxury when he was expected to bear the troubles of everyone in the annex.
    ‘My father was always interested in your activities,’ she told him.
    ‘Is he a doctor?’ He had never asked about her background before.
    ‘No, he’s a commercial artist. Not a particularly successful one, I’m afraid to say. Now he’s working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production.’
    ‘I used to paint at week-ends before the war. I don’t think I was much good at it. I used to delude myself it was based on the same principles as my surgery. But it isn’t. My job’s more like plumbing, really. Whatever the look of the result, everything’s got to join up the right way underneath.’
    ‘Your own father was at Blackfriars, wasn’t he?’
    ‘Yes, the formidable old boy was the professor of anatomy,’ Graham said fondly. ‘He wrote an erudite volume about the synovial membranes, so erudite that
    only about fifty people in the country understood it. We’ve always been doctors of a sort. My grandfather was a semi-educated bonesetter. My great-grandfather wasn’t educated at all, but an out-and-out quack. He left a fortune. He could diagnose everything known to medical science, and a good deal that wasn’t, by merely inspecting the patient’s urine in a flask. What’s called a piss-prophet.’
    She smiled .‘Quite a weight of medical tradition to carry.’
    ‘The family business, I suppose. My son Desmond’s going in for it. You must meet him when he comes down from Cambridge. He stays with me at the pub, and I let him mess about here trying his hand at being anything from assistant anaesthetist to theatre porter. You’ll like him. He’s a charmer.’
    ‘I’m sure I shall. I’ll look forward to it.’
    Graham fell silent. He had a vague uneasiness about mentioning Desmond. ‘The fuss about the newspaper will soon blow over,’ he went on.
    We're proud of you on the unit, anyway.’
    ‘ “The Wizz”.’ He laughed and got up. ‘If I’m making a reputation I’d better live up to it, by doing some work. I’ve got to see a pneumonia John Bickley’s inflicted. The fellow uses far too much ether.’
    Despite his protestations, the realist in Graham admitted readily enough that he enjoyed recapturing the glory of print. He was an exhibitionist in a neurotically self-effacing profession, and finding himself so long in a surgical backwater