Surgeon at Arms

tonight? You can hardly wait to get at it.’
    ‘You’re right. I can’t. I feel like it.’
    ‘I don’t know!’ She laughed. You’re worse than any of the young ones.’
    ‘The young ones don’t need consoling.’
    She ruffled the hair in the nape of his neck, which he was allowing to grow rather long. ‘What do you need consoling about? You’ve got everything.’
    ‘I’ve got nothing. Nothing that counts.’
    ‘Now you are being interesting. I can’t see anything you lack.’
    ‘A human being, the most precious commodity of all.’
    ‘What about me. Aren’t I human.’
    ‘Shall we go?’
    ‘Oh, all right, darling. Though don’t rush at me like a bull when we get in, will you?’
    When they reached the flat she insisted on taking her time, to put him in his place. ‘Can’t we have a drink?’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    As he poured out the gin she took a cigarette and remarked, ‘That’s a pretty picture.’
    ‘Yes, it is pretty. That’s its trouble. There’s no feeling underneath.’
    ‘Who did it?’
    ‘I did. Before the war.’
    ‘Really?’ She looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were an artist I mean, apart from making people faces. I suppose that’s much the same thing, isn’t it?’
    ‘I am an artist. Rather than a surgeon. I am an artist obliged to conform with the discipline of a surgeon’s life.’
    ‘That doesn’t seem to worry you,’ she laughed.
    ‘It does, quite often. For most of my life I’ve fought against the rigidity and stuffiness of the medical profession. Now I’m not so sure. It’s rewarding, being set apart, being someone special. Even if it’s only through your own rules, many of which can be extremely silly. I suppose it was the war which changed my mind, though I didn’t realize it at the time.’
    ‘Please, darling, don’t go on about the war again.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I’m really trying to forget it, but it keeps coming back, more and more.’ He sipped his drink and reflected, ‘It was really the only worthwhile time in my life, out at that annex place.’
    She stubbed out her fresh cigarette. ‘Come along, darling, shall we get on with it?’ she invited. Anything to stop him talking about the war.
    Graham had taken to copulating with the fight on. He found it more amusing, and anyway had read somewhere that turning out the light was a suburban habit. Liz, possibly worn out by her exertions on the stage, fell asleep almost immediately afterwards. He lay for a long time looking up at the ceiling. She really was a ghastly female. She was fat, and her breasts fell away to the sides of her chest like a pair of half-filled sandbags. Still, she had a kind heart and she was always available, valuable and infrequent attributes in any female. He would be generous writing her cheque in the morning. He must have been rather difficult to tolerate that evening. His life was all wrong, all completely wrong. But he didn’t see much prospect of setting it right, even if he had the remotest idea what the right sort of life for himself should be.
     

CHAPTER TWENTY
     
    THE SAME EVENING Desmond Trevose was entertaining his cousin Alec to dinner at high table in his Cambridge college.
    Desmond had spent six months at Smithers Botham as Mr. Twelvetrees’ house-surgeon, and a further year as his registrar, which substituted for service in the thinning ranks of the Army. He was a good house-surgeon, competent and thoughtful, skilful enough with his hands as assistant in the theatre. But he was not really a success.
    He was too cold, too brusque with the patients. He had no sense of human relationships. This was admittedly not a necessity for the effective, or even successful, medical man. Many renowned surgeons have been abominably rude. Others like Mr. Cramphorn regarded hospital patients as simple-minded supplicants, unable to grasp such intellectual matters as the nature of the disease which irked them, which having a Latin name could only be discussed, if at all, by educated gentlemen. But the mood of the patients, like the mood of the nation, was becoming restless with smug authority. Medicine had advanced during the war as strikingly as aeronautics, the hospital doctor found himself turning into an applied scientist, yet the more he could do for his patients the less they seemed to regard him. It was baffling, not only for Mr. Cramphorn. But the patients were only daring to express what they had expected from their medical attendants all along—to