Surgeon at Arms

sort of cross-country air service. Clare’s mother and father appeared from Bristol, to Graham’s relief too flattered by their daughter’s unexpectedly turning herself into Lady Trevose to utter anything but the platitudes of the occasion. He asked John Bickley to repeat his rôle of best man. Denise had to be invited as well, of course, but to Graham’s intense joy was too ill on the day to go out.
    Afterwards, Graham stood them all lunch in a hotel, where they had champagne and snoek piquante. There was a wedding-cake, with an iced covering made, in the way of the times, from detachable white cardboard. There were no speeches, though Graham’s new father-in-law had by then so fallen under the influence of his charm and his title that he had to be restrained from making one. They caught the train for a week-end’s honeymoon at Bognor Regis. Everything was punctiliously correct. The rushed two weeks since Clare had accepted him were too occupied with her work in hospital and her visits to Bristol to give them more than a moment or two together over lunch in Claridge’s. Graham mounted to their seaside bedroom reflecting with amusement that he was facing his bride like the most moral of newly wedded husbands—if one overlooked a year or two during the war. He got into bed making jokes about consummations and such other horribly dignified words festooning the sexual relationship. This time he put out the light, feeling he wanted to be as respectable about everything as possible. Then suddenly he broke into tears.
    Clare held him tightly in the darkness. ‘Darling, what is it?’ Weeping was something she had never known in him before. ‘What is it? What’s upsetting you?’
    ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Graham told her. ‘For once I just can’t express myself any other way, that’s all.’ Her hand under the bedclothes stroked his penis, that organ of superb anatomical ingenuity.
    ‘I though I’d lost you for good, Clare—I really did. I could have taken it a few years ago, but not now. Not any longer.’
    She said nothing for a moment, then confessed. ‘We have a fairy godfather. Someone who came and changed my mind.’
    ‘Oh? And who might that be?’
    ‘Mr Haileybury,’ she told him cheerfully.
    Graham sat bolt upright. ‘Haileybury? My God! That pie-faced old fossil Haileybury?’
    ‘He told me you could be relied upon to be a good boy in future,’ she added teasingly. ‘And of course, nobody could possibly doubt the good word of Mr Haileybury.’
    ‘Good God! ’ muttered Graham.
    But the news was too much. For almost the first time in his fife when in bed with a woman, Graham was put off his stroke.
     

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
     
    AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE in the hot and thundery summer of 1947, it was starting to sink into the British public that of all the ‘shortages’ bedevilling the country, which ran from electricity-generating stations to milk chocolate, a lack of United States dollars was the most serious, intractable, and baffling. After all, General Marshall was proposing to give dollars away by the shipload to European countries who had spent the war defeating one another—even to Germany, or the bits that the Russians had left of it. And we were the victors. We had fought the war from the first shot, we had won it (admittedly with a little American assistance), we had paid our whack of it. It was most frustrating. Why, the Government were even contemplating an unbelievable economy—of denying the twenty million weekly cinemagoers their accustomed Hollywood films.
    Graham then had a letter from Edith, demurely congratulating him on his marriage. He supposed she had learnt of it from some regular bundle of English newspapers dispatched to soften her exile. But most of the half-dozen pages in her large round hand concerned her son Alec. She was dreadfully worried about him. He had written early in the year explaining he was in hospital with some mild psychological disturbance. She just couldn’t understand it. Alec had been a highly strung child, and was still inclined to be excitable, but he was perfectly normal, and very clever, really. There was certainly no madness on their side of the family.
    (Graham felt slightly irritated at the barb, but supposed it unintentional.) Edith hadn’t heard from Alec since. She had no idea if he were still under treatment, or where he was. She hesitated troubling Graham, who must be terribly busy, but she was becoming desperate.