Surgeon at Arms

just eight weeks since the end of the lady’s last menstrual period. So it wouldn’t be an unheard-of occurrence at such a time, would it?’
    ‘Could anything have caused it?’ Graham asked anxiously. ‘Mental distress, that sort of thing? You know what worry we’ve been having.’
    ‘Oh, these things happen, they just happen. To tell the truth, none of us knows really why.’
    ‘What’s the chance of saving the foetus?’
    ‘I’d say quite good. Yes, quite good. Though the lady will have to take life with queenly ease for quite a while afterwards.’
    ‘That’s nothing to bother about, nothing at all... ‘And anyway,’ smiled the gynaecologist, ‘the lady isn’t necessarily destined to repeat the performance on a second occasion, is she? If all is lost, there’s plenty more where that one came from. Eh, Graham?’
    Graham began to wonder if he really liked Tim O’Rory after all.
    The bleeding went on. The following day Mr. O’Rory shook his head and said he feared the lady must visit his operating theatre. They gave Clare another dose of morphine and wheeled her along the cold concrete corridor. Mr O’Rory’s anaesthetist administered gas and trichorethylene, they stuck her legs in the air, Mr O’Rory settled himself comfortably on a metal stool between them, and with a curette removed Graham’s latest achievement for good.
    Graham spent the night alone in the bungalow. Depression was no stranger at his side, but he had never known such misery before. Everything was running against him. When he told John Bickley that he wouldn’t stay down he’d meant it. But for the first time he now sensed he was finished for good. He’d never recover professionally. Not when everyone could point to him as the man who was sacked in the war. The child was lost, and in such straits they’d be insane to start another. He wondered if Clare would stay with him. He had really little to offer her, and at her age she must surely expect something rewarding from life. It never occurred to Graham how much she might love him for himself. He always expected to take so much from others, he sometimes felt obliged to offer more than he possibly could.
    Haileybury would not have been surprised at this mental turmoil. He knew Graham’s moods well enough. He was unaware of the pregnancy, and only faintly aware of Clare, whom he had dismissed as another of Graham’s pick-ups. The following morning a car arrived at his mansion, containing a general. Haileybury knew the general well. They had been to the same public school, they belonged to the same London club, before the war they had been off golfing and mountaineering together. The general marched up to his office, saying nothing. He laid on Haileybury’s desk a slip of typewritten paper, which declared simply.
    Pray, why has one of our most famous and able doctors been dismissed his post? The news of his work has vastly heartened men and women in all the Allied Services. He will be reinstated immediately. I wish to know who is responsible.
    Haileybury gave a deep sigh. It was useless to fight Trevose. When they both got to Heaven he was bound to get God on his side.
    ‘Abortion?’ said Mr Cramphorn to Denise Bickley at Smithers Botham. ‘I’ll bet Graham did it himself. With a knitting-needle.’
     

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     
    IT WAS A GLORIOUS AFTERNOON. The sun streaked the water with gold and warmed the grassy slope where twenty-two-year-old Alec Trevose lay with his face roofed by Sir Robert Muir’s Textbook of Pathology, all 991 pages of it. The slope ran down to a white-painted hotel which had once housed holidaymakers at South-sea, near Portsmouth, but was now a makeshift hospital. Both sea and sky were for once free of men and their machinery, except for an approaching landing-craft, its silver balloon floating nonchalantly overhead, bringing smashed vehicles and possibly smashed humans back from Normandy. By mid-July both the weather and the progress of the invasion had improved noticeably. Montgomery had liberated Caen, the Americans had started moving down the eastward side of the Cherbourg Peninsula, and the coloured-headed pins stuck into maps on the walls of homes all over the country began to lose their faintly worrying immobility.
    Beside Alec on the grass was his sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a frayed Blackfriars tie, and a semi-stiff collar. He had cast off his shoes, and his big toes poked through the holes in his socks. His