Surgeon at Arms

written to. A divorce was imperative, the wheels of the law must be geared to the rapid process of reproductive physiology. The solicitors wrote back with a promise of doing their best, explaining the Court would doubtless be sympathetic, but there were innumerable difficulties in wartime. He fixed a visit to Southend for the end of the month. He also agreed at last to see Clare’s parents in Bristol. It was a glum prospect, even his charm might not prove an antidote to all unpleasantness, particularly as Mr Mills was hardly older than himself. Besides, a journey in the crowded» slow, and foodless wartime trains would be terrible.
    First of all he must put matters to his son Desmond.
    Something seemed to have gone wrong with Desmond. At Cambridge he had taken a fair degree in Part I of his Tripos, stayed on a year to breathe the rarefied academic atmosphere of the Part II, and done rather badly. From a gay if self-centred schoolboy he was turning into a reticent and solemn young man, wearing a dignity as unfitting for his years as a middle-age spread. He was even something of a prig. When he had left Cambridge that summer to start his three years’ clinical course at Smithers Botham, Graham had assumed he would move in with them at Cosy Cot. But Desmond was reluctant.
    He suggested it might somehow hold him up to ridicule, particularly in the eyes of his cousin Alec, Edith’s child, who was arriving to study at Smithers Botham the same autumn. Desmond arranged to live in the hospital itself, as one of the dozen-strong students’ ‘Emergency Squad’ under the direct orders of Captain Pile—though for what emergency this squad was held in readiness, and how it would tackle it when it arose, everyone had long ago forgotten.
    Graham dismissed all this as the self-dramatization to which the young were so distressingly liable. Desmond had probably been mixing with the wrong sort of people at college. Though perhaps the son’s disinterest was partly the father’s fault, Graham admitted. He had never taken overmuch care in Desmond’s upbringing. Before the war he was too busy making money and amusing himself. During it he was too busy with the annex. Anyway, the lad seemed to step along confidently enough by himself. But now there was another factor. The war would certainly be grinding along in 1945, when Desmond was due to qualify, to sweep him with the others into the medical branches of the Forces. Why, he might even find himself under the orders of Haileybury! Somehow, Graham determined, he must get the young man into the Navy.
    Graham set the scene of Desmond’s enlightenment carefully. He had anyway been remiss about standing the boy treats. He made the effort of booking a couple of stalls for Blithe Spirit —as Russians were then being bombed instead of Britons, a seat in a London theatre was as hard to come by as a seat in a long-distance express. After the show they went to an Italian restaurant in Soho. In the first black nights of the war Graham had sometimes cheered himself up there by toasting Allied victory in Chianti at the insistence of the proprietor, who by 1942 had been caged up for a couple of years in the Isle of Man. But the elderly head waiter remembered him, and even laid the establishment open to immediate prosecution by letting them consume not only soup and chicken but a slice of fish as well.
    Over the meal, they talked about their work. Now Desmond was growing up in medicine, Graham could enjoy the singular satisfaction of a medical parent in watching his child emerge as a professional colleague. They met often enough at Smithers Botham on perfectly easy terms, though coming to talk less of personal things than their cases, or to dissect the characters, abilities, and errors of the other consultants.
    ‘Anything interesting in the annex at the moment, Dad?’ Desmond asked across their corner table in the restaurant.
    ‘A lot of oddments.The by-products of the war, mostly. There’s a man from the Desert who gave himself a rub-down with petrol—they’re short of water, you understand. Then the idiot fit a cigarette. He was an awful mess. There’s a naval rating who was working in the engine-room of a destroyer when some fool turned on the superheated steam. Tragic cases. There’s not much glory in being run over by your own tank. Anyway, war’s a horrible business.’
    ‘Are you getting sick of it?’
    ‘I’ve never had time to pause and think. I suppose when I get back to