Surgeon at Arms

her part, an expression of the steadfast tenderness she had shown towards him in their twenty-one years of marriage. She settled back in her corner, looking at the street lights, trying to correlate them with the necklaces she had admired from the air. She had grown fatter, but kept her pale good looks, and, with assistance, her fair hair. Graham tended to drop off to sleep rather often these days, she reflected. Perhaps he shouldn’t gad about the world so much. But seventy-three, though a respectable age, was hardly over the threshold of senility. If she remembered, Churchill was rather older when he became Prime Minister through the persuasion of the ballot-box rather than the approaching muzzles of the German guns.
    They had a small flat in Chelsea, and an unimposing house in the country on the way to Oxford, past the National Accident Hospital. Graham had worked there almost a dozen years, until his retirement in 1959. They had been the happiest of his life, happier even, than at the annex. It was mainly because nothing had happened to him. He sometimes wondered if it were the security of a settled job, or the fires of his personality dimming to a comfortable glow, or simply Clare keeping a firm hand on him. He had busied himself with his work, developed a relish for committees, lectured enthusiastically, and drew veneration from the world as effortlessly as a well-established oak draws moisture from the soil. He enjoyed the respect, though it amused him. It was not so much the poacher turning gamekeeper, as the swashbuckling pirate becoming Admiral of the Fleet. Perhaps he possessed the same luck as his seafaring Cornish ancestors, he wondered, who had never turned from a chance of smuggling and generally ended clothed with gold lace and dignity.
    There was a pile of letters inside the door.
    ‘I can’t face that lot at this hour of the night,’ Graham said, as Clare started gathering them. ‘I’ll have a go at them in the morning. Anything from Dick?’
    Their nineteen-year-old son was on holiday in Spain, with, Graham suspected, the girl he had met at the university. Well, it would be a bit of fun, he wished he’d had the chance to do the same as Dick’s age, but then trips to Spain were only for the rich and venturesome. And the sunshine would do the girl good, he thought. She had struck him as a dismally anaemic young woman.
    ‘There’s a letter he seems to have sent from Malaga.’
    ‘Read it to me, darling, will you?’ Graham sat in the armchair. ‘I’m rather tired, and his handwriting’s dreadful.’
    ‘And there’s something from Blackfriars.’ She tore open a large envelope. ‘They’ve made it at last,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’re actually going to open the new Arlott Wing by Christmas. Of course, they want you to perform the ceremony.’
    Graham laughed. The rebuilding of Blackfriars beside the Thames had long ago become a harmless joke. When the war had ended, the staff imagined they would quit Smithers Botham in a year or two, but the volume of hospital work so increased with the National Health Service, and the volume of hospital building so diminished with the national bankruptcy, the country was several times on the brink of another war before they finally parted company. ‘I think we’ve beaten St Thomas’s to it, haven’t we?’ he asked. ‘Or is it more or less a dead heat?’ He opened and closed his hands. ‘Perhaps they might ask me to perform an inaugural operation on some unlucky fellow? It’s an amusing thought. I wouldn’t mind having a knife in my hands again. After all, John Bickley’s still giving anaesthetics for private cases all over London. Though perhaps he only does it to get away from Denise.’
    John had worked for Graham again. Graham’s private practice had in fact continued almost as busily as ever, through an interesting fraction written into the Health Service known as ‘nine-elevenths’. The consultants were paid for the nine-elevenths of their time spent in the Service, the other two-elevenths being free to extract money from those members of the public feeling disinclined to accept its benefits. And two-elevenths of a consultant’s time, with evenings, early mornings, and week-ends, was a handsome period for profits. Without this concession, the consultants would have dug in their toes and there would have been no Health Service at all. But Nye Bevan was an even more penetrating realist than Graham.
    Clare read their son’s letter,