Surgeon at Arms

which said a lot about the sunshine, wine, beaches, and bullfights, but nothing about girls. The omission confirmed Graham’s suspicion.
    He got up to pour himself a drink, and said, ‘I suppose he’ll get married pretty soon?’
    ‘I don’t know. He’s no one in mind.’
    ‘But they all seem to get married these days as soon as they’re legally entitled to. Perhaps they look upon it in the same light as learning to drive a car. Once the obstacle to any enjoyment’s removed, you indulge yourself automatically.’
    ‘He’ll wait until he’s qualified, surely?’
    ‘In my day, even in Desmond’s day, that seemed to be the rule. But of course we lived on our parents or our wits. Now they live on everyone else’s parents. Doubtless it’s all a good idea.’
    ‘He’ll wait till he finds the right girl. He’s terribly sensible.’
    Graham smiled. ‘I had to wait a very long time till I found the right girl. Even then I didn’t realize it, did I?’ She said nothing. He seldom brought up their times as Cosy Cot. She felt he liked to imagine the episode had never happened, that he had met her for the first time when he had entered, extremely dramatically, her children’s ward one wet March morning in 1947. It was a forbidden topic, just like Maria’s divorce.
    Graham sipped his whisky. ‘Do you know, Clare, I’m beginning to think that life resembles something I haven’t experienced for donkey’s years—it’s like Saturday night in an old-fashioned public house.’ As she looked puzzled, he gave a grin and said, ‘It gets better towards closing-time.’
    When they went to bed he lay reading for half-an-hour. He snapped the book shut and said, ‘ “Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:” Strange how those lines of Eliot’s keep coming back to me. I must have read them years ago, when I first started at the annex. But it’s right, isn’t it? Everything else is the trimmings. It’s the most useful thing you can learn from medicine. How to sort the two out. What’s the time?”
    ‘Half-past midnight.’
    Graham turned over. ‘For God’s sake remind me in the morning I’m due to see a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons. He wants to touch me for some charity, I imagine.’
    He turned out the light. At twenty to four he woke, switched on the light, gasped at the pain exploding from his throat into his left arm, and died.
     

CHAPTER THIRTY
     
    CLARE HAD RATHER HOPED for something at the Abbey, but whoever invisibly decides such delicate questions demurred. Official memories are long and not subject to the mellowing of human ones. A knighthood for Graham Trevose had been acceptable, in times when a man’s merit mattered more than the man himself. But a memorial service at the Abbey... the doctor, though distinguished, was far from impeccable. Someone in some small quiet office remembered there was really a bad scandal—he had lived openly with a mistress during the war.
    In the end, the final pageant was held in St. Pancras Church, a frequent choice for such affairs in memory of medical men, possibly because of its nearness to the red-brick ramparts of the British Medical Association in Bloomsbury. It was a befittingly miserable day in late September, with cold wet winds from the north blowing down the railway lines to the termini which dominate that depressing part of London. Haileybury stumped along, a thick overcoat over his blue suit, wondering if it were going to trigger off his bronchitis again. It was becoming increasingly burdensome to run the laps of the years. It occurred to him to list mentally his own infirmities. Apart from the chest, there was presbyopia, ptosis, arthritis of the left hip, a bilateral hallux valgus, a small inguinal hernia he ought to have something done about, and of course the piles. But a man was as old as his arteries, as the physicians kept saying when everything else was falling to bits. He supposed if his number didn’t come up in the cancer lottery a good surgeon and antibiotics would keep him going a while. At least that morning he was alive, while Trevose was dead. To Haileybury’s mind, death restored the formality of surnames.
    ‘Excuse me, Sir Eric—’
    Haileybury paused on the pavement outside the church, staring blankly at a young man in a raincoat.
    ‘I’m from the Daily Press,’ said the young man.
    Graham deceased had the news value of Graham alive. The London evening placards