Surgeon at Arms

where , nobody was inclined to wander had been galling. But it was more gratifying still to find the article reviving Val Arlott’s twenty-years-old interest in plastic surgery. He telephoned asking if Graham lacked equipment, promising to jolt action out of the authorities. The longed-for extra huts seemed at last likely to appear. Val even suggested a fund to provide the annex with ‘comforts’—an excellent idea, Graham thought, it would keep the place in the public eye for months. But the best news of all was Peter Thomas becoming engaged to marry one of the nurses. He still looked a mess, but there he was, to marry in the merry month of May. It put up morale in the annex wonderfully. If a girl could sleep with Peter Thomas looking like that, Bluey declared, then he was off to pick up a bloody harem.
    The wedding was to be at Chelsea registry office on May the twelfth, a Monday. On the Saturday night London had its last bad raid of the war, and an unexpected guest, Rudolph Hess, floated by parachute into Scotland. While the Deputy Führer’s fractured ankle was being attended by a British military doctor, a younger German flier, steadfastly doing his duty above the Thames, made a mistake in his bomb-aiming and blew most of Blackfriars Hospital to pieces. Luckily, the casualties were light, the patients being at Smithers Botham and the wooden props in the basement being stronger than everyone gloomily believed. But the firemen were still working thirty-six hours later, when Graham stood with a carnation in his buttonhole soulfully inspecting the wreckage before making across battered London to the registry office. The Arlott Wing, where he had worked before the war, had simply disappeared. The rest of the building, which he could remember standing in apparently unshakeable dignity when his father had shown it off as a childhood treat, was a hardly recognizable ruin. But the pavements were still busy. The bowler hat was still worn. The tramlines still ran down the Embankment. London had shrugged off fire and plague before. The smashed eighteenth-century masonry was a shame, but what was the loss of the most splendid building, he asked himself, compared with that of the most miserable of lives?
    ‘Graham—’
    He turned. He didn’t recognize her for a moment. She was small and gingery, with a scarf round her head, staring at him.
    ‘Sheila Raleigh—’ he held out his hand, smiling. ‘How’s Tom?’
    ‘Didn’t you hear? He was killed.’ He looked blank, hand out-stretched and untaken. She bit her lip. ‘In Greece. He was one of the last.’
    ‘Sheila, what can I say—’
    ‘Don’t say anything, Graham. Please don’t.’
    ‘But Sheila, I’m so dreadfully sorry. It’s a terrible shock. I mean, Tom was my houseman, my registrar, my partner. We worked together for ten years. He was such a wonderful chap.’
    ‘Then why didn’t you keep him?’ she demanded savagely. ‘If you’d wanted, he’d be safe with you now in the country. But you didn’t. You rejected him. Because you really hated him. Because you were jealous of him. Because he wasn’t of use to you any more. That’s the truth, isn’t it? Now you know exactly what you’ve done.’
    For a moment Graham could say nothing. ‘How can you accuse me of that?’ he managed to ask weakly. ‘It isn’t right, you know. It just isn’t true at all. Honestly, I’m heartbroken at the news. Surely there’s something I can do to help? For the children? Isn’t there anything? If there’s some sort of assistance I can give, financial assistance—’
    ‘I wouldn’t take a penny from a murderer.’
    She shrugged her shoulders, turned, and abruptly walked off. Graham watched her disappear, picking her way among the firehoses.
    The wedding was to Graham as joyless as a funeral. He found it impossible to be even faintly amiable afterwards. He pleaded work, and drove straight back to Smithers Botham. He knew that everything Sheila said was perfectly correct. To come face to face with his old self was harrowing. Things had so changed. Or had they? His egotism and jealousy, which had cost poor Tom his partnership and then his life, he supposed must still be in his system somewhere. Perhaps he was merely redirecting them to temporarily more acceptable ends, like some thug given a rifle and praised for killing Germans? Was it too much to hope he really was becoming a better sort of man? How could he tell? There was no one near enough to ask.
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