Surgeon at Arms Read Online Free Page A

about wound surgery as he could lay hands on. He listened to Archie McIndoe at'the Royal Society of Medicine, and to Sir Harold Gillies more intimately at Basingstoke— and more exhaustingly, Gillies being a forceful and sometimes eccentric exponent of his genius. Graham had resigned himself to the annex being something of a sideshow. The other four plastic units were better housed, better equipped, and better staffed, destined to take most of the work, if the war didn’t fizzle out. He even half-regretted not submitting himself to Haileybury. He would at least have had a uniform. He had come to avoid his club in St James’s because he felt the members looked askance on his lack of it. Most seemed to possess one, though whatever their martial duties these did not prevent their spending a good deal of time in its comfortable leather armchairs. But he had made his decision, and if it were the wrong one it unhappily wouldn’t be his first.
    On that New Year’s Eve he left his Bentley in a mews garage off Curzon Street and walked the few yards to his house in fashionable Queen Street by the light of his pocket torch (screened by law with two thicknesses of tissue-paper). As he approached his front door he saw a girl standing on the step, her identity solved by an invitation flashed at him by a torch through her mackintosh pocket.
    ‘Do you want to come home with me, darling?’ she enquired.
    ‘I’m afraid this is my home, here,’ Graham told her politely.
    ‘Oh, sorry. I hope you don’t mind?’
    He noticed she was young, and very plain. The regulations which forbade the lighting of shop windows threw a kindly shade on goods more immediately for sale, and the West End of London was as alive with seductive murmurs as Prospero’s Isle. Graham supposed the girls hadn’t enjoyed such a busy time of it since the lightless days of Boswell. He entered the empty house, reflecting sombrely that the difference between many women he knew of easy-going morals and these seedy and undoubtedly infected creatures was exactly the same as between Haileybury and himself. Even Haileybury had done the occasional beautifying job for guineas. But Graham had for the best part of .fifteen years sold his services without question to all comers. And what was left? He had been dreadfully extravagant. His contract at Smithers Botham had exchanged an income of thousands for one of hundreds and debarred him from private practice—if he could have found any, plastic surgery suddenly being fashionable no longer, perhaps because the possibility of having one’s head blown off ousted any dissatisfaction with the look of it. He was terribly in debt. And the income-tax inspector, as always, clanked across his life like Marley’s ghost.
    He fixed the blackout in the upstairs drawing-room, switched on the fight, and poured a whisky at the corner cocktail cabinet. Usually he drank only to relieve the tedium of other people’s company, now he was drinking twice as much to relieve the tedium of his own. His servants had left, a genteel middle-aged woman came in daily from Finchley to clear up his mess, which she referred to as her ‘war work’. His son Desmond was in his first year at Cambridge, reading medicine. Unlike the First World War, which emptied the medical schools into the ranks of Kitchener’s army, the Second barred medical students from joining the colours as firmly as miners or middle-aged ploughmen. For safety’s sake, Graham had sent Desmond to spend Christmas with his cousin Alec, also destined for medicine, Alec’s mother Edith then running a guest house for the better class of evacuee in Devon. Graham swirled the whisky round his glass. Edith Trevose had been successively his own fiancée, his sister-in-law, his brother’s widow, and his mistress, but despite these disturbing changes in status still his friend. He wondered whether to ring her up, but decided against it. It might start new complications. And anyway, the