Surgeon at Arms

lake, the chilly spring air restored Haileybury to his usual oppressive sobriety. They talked animatedly for half an hour about the first steps for bringing the new unit into being, until Graham broke off unexpectedly, ‘You know, Eric, this new task you’ve saddled me with has saved my life. Literally, I mean. I’ve never thought of suicide—and I know a surprising number of one’s acquaintances have at least once, quite seriously. But I wouldn’t have been too sure of myself, not at this stage of my life, without some fresh interest.’
    ‘You’re being fanciful again,’ Haileybury told him with a thin smile.
    ‘I suppose you’re entitled to think so. You know me better than almost anybody. But I mean it. Without something big to tackle, some worthwhile achievement to make, I’d get depressed. Dreadfully depressed. It seems to get worse with age. And when a patient’s depressed, you know well enough, they’ve a different personality, there’s no knowing what they might do. It’s as dangerous as walking along the edge of a cliff.’ Haileybury nodded slowly as they walked. ‘What makes you imagine I haven’t suffered myself?’
    Graham looked at him sharply. He had imagined Haileybury’s personality breasting the tides of life with the unexciting stability of a coal-barge on the Thames. It struck him that although Haileybury had grown to understand a good deal of his own inner workings, he knew absolutely nothing of Haileybury’s.
    ‘I hope the intolerable amount of work you are about to undertake will put such unpleasant notions from your mind,’ Haileybury added.
    ‘I’m safe as long as I’m occupied every minute of the day. I hate living alone.’ Graham hesitated, but decided to go on. Haileybury, of all people, had become his only confessor. ‘I’d hoped to cure that particular deficiency, btu I’m afraid it’s not to be.’
    ‘You’re thinking of taking a companion?’
    ‘I notice you avoid the word “wife”, and I can’t blame you for that either.’ Graham sounded a shade weary. ‘You know I lived with a girl during the war? She was my ward sister from the annex. We’ve met up again. I want to marry her. I can’t live without her. That’s a stupid expression, much overused, but as I explained a moment ago it might have been quite literally true. But she doesn’t want to take the same risk with me twice, and I can hardly object to her point of view.’
    ‘Who might this lady be? Would I have met her?’
    ‘I should imagine so. She’s the children’s ward sister at the Kenworth.’
    Haileybury stopped dead. ‘Sister Mills? But what an amazing coincidence!’
    ‘It isn’t at all. John Bickley got her the job after I kicked her out in 1944.’
    ‘I see,’ said Haileybury. He put his fingers together and blew on them.
    ‘I do wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Graham burst out. ‘It’s irritated me for years.’
    Haileybury hastily thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m sorry there’s a difficulty between you,’ he sympathised.
    ‘She can’t understand that I don’t want to go back to my old ways—because of the war, or old age,’ Graham ended gloomily, ‘or perhaps just disgust with myself in general.’
    ‘I suppose to some extent the seven ages of man are all strangers to each other,’ Haileybury observed.
    ‘Just look at those ducks,’ said Graham, pointing across the lake. ‘They must run up a tremendous oxygen debt, keeping their beaks under water as long as that.’
    He didn’t care to reveal more of himself to Hailey?-bury. He had said too much as it was. He had written Clare a long and thoughtful letter, uncloyed with passion. There had been no reply. It seemed best to forget about her, as deliberately as he had once forgotten about Edith. As the two surgeons resumed their walk, Graham began with growing disquiet to hope that Haileybury would forget about her too. Haileybury had been his enemy once, and in this shifting and faithless world who knew when he might be again?
     

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
     
    BUT HAILEYBURY did not forget about Clare at all.
    He had heard rumour during the war of Graham living ‘in sin’ at Smithers Botham, but had vaguely imagined his consort some painted and skittish female of the type portrayed on his rare visits to the cinema by Dorothy Lamour (Haileybury suffered a guilty affection for the comedies starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope). That she was the quiet and efficient Sister Mills, whom he had