Surgeon at Arms

the lamp-posts next. He stayed at home for a month, and his housekeeper sent a message to say he was very poorly.
    Alec’s next concern was finding his mother about to become a G.I. bride.
    Edith Trevose had spent the war in a small Devon seaside town, in a guest-house whose rooms were furnished for a fortnight’s summer endurance at the most, but had been occupied since 1939 by elderly middle-class guests from London who complained increasingly about the food, the cooking, the war in general, and each other. Edith had been a typist with a Gray’s Inn solicitor, but decided to help a friend run the place as her ‘war work’. She was still pretty, and the sun of her affections, which had dawned upon Graham and shone through the noon-day of her: life on his brother, now glowed upon her son Alec, and was crossed by the first long restful shadows of the menopause. Edith had a split social position in the town. However much she tried to disguise it from herself, in the boarding-house she was taken as a servant. When twice a week she lent a hand in the small local hospital, she was respected by everyone as the widow of a medical missionary and the sister-in-law of Graham Trevose himself. Edith bore the discrepancy cheerfully. She had put up with more disagreeable places in life than the guest-house, and always reflected that the irritation of others, like their illnesses, though painful to witness could hardly kill her.
    In the summer of 1943 something happened to change the town’s face more alarmingly than the war itself. Strange uniforms, strange vehicles and strange habits became evident everywhere. The Americans poured from a near-by camp to amuse themselves, having to draw less on their supplies of cash (which were said to be limitless) than on those of their native enthusiasm and optimism. Strange soft-packaged cigarettes, chocolate bars, chewing-gum, and tinned beer circulated everywhere, and the girls’ hair-styles improved sensationally. The Americans had glamour, in a land which was short of it outside the overpacked cinemas. All were assumed to come from spacious and labour-saving apartments in Manhattan, though most lived in towns even sleepier than a Devon village, and knew of their hosts only from their official guide-book, which told them not to say ‘bloody’, that the British could take any amount of aerial bombardment, and were deeply grateful for all the dried egg.
    Edith met Hal White at the hospital. He was a doctor, a captain, about her own age, thin, with a large Adam’s apple, glasses like Glenn Miller’s, and given to long periods of deliberation before opening his mouth about anything. He offered her a packet of Life Savers and asked her to a dance. Edith hesitated. Jennifer, the girl who helped in the kitchen, might be there. Hal explained it was an officers only affair, and she accepted. She loved dancing. It would be really quite fun to be taken out by a man again. And of course he was a doctor, and therefore a gentleman.
    The dance was exactly like a thousand others in the kingdom that Saturday night. The local recreation hall was crowded, dirty and ill-kept, with French chalk sprinkled hopefully over a rough floor with painted lines for badminton courts. The decorations were posters urging the merrymakers to dig or save for victory, and that careless talk cost lives. At one end was a trestle table where for half an hour or so they sold gin and lime, and afterwards beer, which everyone hoped would last the evening. Half a dozen G.I.s on the stage were playing with startling professionalism. Hal and Edith danced to Paper Doll and Sentimental Journey, and she thought him amazingly light on his feet. He said he lived in Yonkers and was a widower. They tried to hokey-cokey, which Edith thought silly, really, but quite fun. Hal explained he had knocked around the world a good deal, mostly doing medical jobs with construction companies, for a long stretch in Singapore. Edith exclaimed she knew Singapore well. They cheerfully explored the graveyards of their memories, exhuming a body or two to see if it were a mutual friend.
    For the last year of the war they saw each other regularly. Hal brought her a good deal of Spam, Life magazine, and some nylons—her eyes shone as she smoothed the wonderfully sheer material with her fingers. When he asked her to marry him she was amazed. Marriage simply hadn’t entered into her scheme of things. Illness and death, yes, but widowhood had become a