Surgeon at Arms

the apparatus concerned, and he might as well put the information to fullest use. He often recalled with satisfaction Balzac’s exhortation for no man to marry before dissecting at least one female pelvis. But he could never bring himself to feel the business more than ‘a sneeze in the loins’. It was only a reflex, centred in the humblest lower segments of the spinal cord, transmitted across the pelvic basin by fibres hiding under their Latinized name ‘the nerve of shame’. Even a real sneeze was a more cerebral occurrence, conducted by fine-sounding artisocratic nerves springing out of the brain itself. Of course, women took a different view. However many men sneezed in their loins, they invested it with some mystical significance. He supposed it was mainly through their fear of appearing tarts.
    ‘You look sad,’ she said teasingly afterwards.
    ‘Do I? It’s physiological after an orgasm. Isn’t there a classical tag? Though the single one I can remember is calor, rubor, tumor, dolor, and that’s only inflammation.’ She ran the tip of her .finger round his umbilicus. ‘That’s a strange thing we have.’
    ‘It’s only a cicatrix, a scar.’
    ‘What’s inside it?’
    ‘Nothing.The remains of the blood-vessels which fed us before we were born.’
    ‘It’s quite pretty, really, like a flower. A budding rose.’
    ‘Most are like cabbages.’
    Her hand slipped down to his penis, off duty in the at-ease position. ‘It’s full of tissue like a sponge, isn’t it? I remember from our anatomy lectures. It was awfully funny, the sister-tutor was a terribly dried-up old thing. She told us all about an erection, with diagrams on the blackboard, as though she was talking about the moon. She could never have seen one in her life.’
    ‘It’s a really most interesting organ. The arteries dilate enormously, quite unlike any others in the body.’
    ‘It must be fascinating to have one.’
    “According to the psychiatrists, all women think so. Penis-envy. Though quite where that interesting discovery gets us, I don’t know.’
    ‘Did all your women want one?’ He felt this reference, under the circumstances, in rather bad taste, and said nothing. ‘Have you had an awful lot of women, Graham?’
    ‘You know I’m a married man.’ As she gave a small pout he went on, ‘My sex life with Maria pretty well ended with the honeymoon. You could hardly blame me for seeking out others, particularly when she went off her head. But none of them meant anything, not one.’
    ‘Not even Stella Garrod?’
    ‘Particularly Stella Garrod.’
    ‘How about Edith?’
    ‘That’s rather going into ancient history,’ he said quickly.
    ‘Graham, darling, perhaps I’d better give up the annex.’
    ‘Unthinkable! ’
    ‘Staff-nurse Jones could easily take over. She’s awfully good with the boys.’
    ‘But why this sudden change of heart? I thought you liked the work. You’d get bored all day here.’
    ‘I haven’t used the toothpaste once or twice. I didn’t think it would matter. I haven’t seen anything now for a fortnight. Of course, it may be perfectly all right. Just a delayed period.’
    His large eyes stared at her across the pillow.
    ‘If it isn’t all right, will you be pleased?’ she asked timidly. ‘No, don’t answer. Wait till we know.’ She kissed him and got out of bed abruptly. ‘It’s Sunday. That means fried eggs for lunch. Something lovely to look forward to, isn’t it?’
     

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    TO FIND HIMSELF confronted with fatherhood on a second occasion filled Graham with the same numb shock as on the first, almost exactly twenty-two years previously. With Maria, their sexual endeavours were so beset with difficulties he somehow felt her reproductive system too inefficient for conception. With Clare, he had put a touching faith in science. As usual, the human element had let him down. It was the same in the annex, when they got a run of infection after the nurses forgot to sterilize the needles properly in carbolic.
    Monday was Mr Tim O’Rory’s day at Smithers Botham. Graham caught the gynaecologist at lunch in the medical officers’ mess and invited him for a stroll on the lawn.
    ‘It’s Clare,’ he said, once out of earshot. ‘I think she’s pregnant.’
    ‘Well, now,’ said Mr O’Rory. A thick-set, dark-haired, red-faced, humorous Irishman, he looked kindly on feminine failings through his heavily rimmed glasses and seemed to find them an endless source of