Surgeon at Arms

Smithers Botham he made for his office. He had to find some work, anything to occupy himself, to stop his self-inflicted mental wounds. He paused in the doorway, surprised to find Sister Mills at his desk. Then he remembered he’d asked her to collect case reports of something—what was it? Maxillary fractures. He was about to ask her to go when she noticed his face and jumped up, exclaiming, ‘What’s the matter? Was it something in the blitz?’
    He shut the door behind him.
    ‘I killed a man,’ he said wearily. ‘Unwittingly and indirectly, but I killed him. Tom Raleigh—did I ever mention him? He was my partner. We had a row. He should have been working with me out here on the unit. I wouldn’t take him. So instead, he was killed in Greece.’ He sat in a chair by the desk.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sister Mills quietly. ‘It must have been terrible news.’
    ‘Particularly as I got it from his widow. Who knew exactly what the facts were.’ He stretched out his legs. ‘She told me what she thought of me. She was perfectly right. To her, I couldn’t be anything but the vilest and wickedest creature in the world.’
    ‘She’d be feeling emotional. She let her tongue run away with her.’
    ‘I’d like to think so. But my whole life before the war doesn’t stand much examination.’
    ‘Doesn’t it? You brought a lot of happiness to people.’
    ‘At a price.’
    ‘Well, why not?’ she asked simply. ‘What is the price of happiness?’
    ‘Anyway, I didn’t give a damn about the happiness. Only the guineas.’
    ‘That’s quite impossible to believe. Not after all I’ve seen here.’
    He sat staring in front of him. Then he noticed she was crying.
    ‘I must apologize.’ He got up abruptly. ‘All these troubles I’ve brought back are upsetting you. I shouldn’t have mentioned them. I’ve no right asking you to share them.’
    ‘I’m crying for you,’ she told him. ‘You’re so much the nicest person in the world, and you fight so terribly hard against it.’
    Then he had her in his arms, and she was kissing him with a passion even he found exciting.
    Meanwhile, Mrs Sedgewick-Smith was holding another of her regular Monday afternoon tea-parties. She had told Stephanie severely that she mustn’t keep crossing her legs like that. After all, she was really getting quite a big girl.
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    ON SUNDAY MORNINGS Graham would lie in bed, reading the papers, Picture Post, the Strand Magazine, a novel, anything unconnected with the annex. It was only the bad doctor, he reflected, who killed himself to cure his patients.
    By that November Sunday of 1942 the posters in the Smithers Botham entrance hall had changed from the ringing warning YOUR FREEDOM IS IN PERIL to the more sophisticated COUGHS AND SNEEZES SPREAD DISEASES and is YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? The place was by then more than simply a hospital. It was another of the countless closed communities stretching across the globe from Spitzbergen to the Falklands, all more interested in themselves than in the war which had fathered them. There was always something going on there. The fashion of the times provided the staff with bountiful opportunity for self-expression, self-examination, and self-instruction, with dramatics and debating, brains trusts of varying trustworthiness, lectures on everything from Britain’s War Aims to Milk Production, plus E.N.S.A., A.B.C.A., and I.T.MA. Conversation in the long corridors never lacked an interesting case or an interesting scandal. The housemen continued to entertain the nurses. The matron continued to entertain doubts.
    The war had swept a remarkable assortment of illnesses and injuries into the vast wards. It was an Alladin’s cave of clinical medicine, if only the students had bothered to rub the lamp of learning. There were special units for surgery of the head, the chest, the limbs, and the arteries, created not through the benevolence of some millionaire but through the malevolence of Adolf Hitler. Its beds contained Free French, Free Poles, Free Norwegians, Free Dutch, Free Czechs, and unfree Germans (who made model patients, there being nothing like several years’ Nazi indoctrination for fitting in with the ideas of an old-fashioned British ward sister). Captain Pile was still there, and still a captain. Corporal Honeyman was still there, and still a corporal. Dr Pomfrey, after a baffled half-hour with his car at full throttle, unaware that his rear bumper was