'Thanks. I will.'
'Let's suppose you did marry Nurse Plumtree,' he continued in a reflective tone, lying down again. 'The worst part's over of course-being inspected 'by the family. Think yourself lucky. Many fellows have gone down to the old folks busting with love, and found themselves kicked into the rhododendrons before the fruit and coffee came round. You were a great success.'
I grunted.
'Then, as Father observed, you'd need a ring. Terribly expensive, engagement rings. The thing the best man loses in church is a brassy job worth a couple of quid, but the one you choose together in Mappin and Webb's is a sort of down payment on delivery of goods. You'll have to put it in _The Times_ of course-you pay for that too-which will load your post for weeks afterwards with advertisements for photographers, florists, and contraceptives. All your bachelor chums will slap you on the back and tell you what a lucky chap you are, clearly implying what lucky chaps _they_ are. They stand you drinks, I admit, but you don't get much chance for drinking because you spend all your spare time sitting on the edge of the sofa in her front parlour discussing the wedding. By now you may have decided that you don't want to marry the girl after all-'
'Must you go on?' I demanded. 'This isn't a bit funny.'
'…but that won't do you the slightest good because once you've set the terrible machinery of marriage in motion you stand as much chance as a crate of eggs under a pile-driver. You'll soon discover that marriage is nothing to do with the fusion of two souls, but an excuse for women to buy lots of expensive clothes. The bride is decked out to ride in triumph round the social circus, to the delight of her relations, the relief of her married friends, and the gratifying jealousy of those still single. You, of course, will be the horse. But I anticipate rather, because for several months you'll be forced to listen politely to exhaustive discussions about whether the bridesmaids should wear Juliet caps and if the bride can go to the altar in her usual undies. Incidentally the bridesmaids themselves- whom you'll later have to reward handsomely-will apparently be recruited from a home for female morons, while your own best man will be as socially acceptable to the bride, mother, and steering committee of aunts as Jack the Ripper. Your last loophole of escape is meanwhile blocked by a landslide of saucepans, teaspoons, egg-cups, gravy- ladles, toasting forks, and hand-embroidered tea-cosies, for all of which you will have to write a letter extending over at least one page beginning, 'Dear Uncle Augustus and Aunt Beatrice. Thank you a thousand times for your delightful contribution to our new little home.''
Grimsdyke took another drink, and staring at the ceiling continued: 'Brightly dawns your wedding day. You have a terrible hangover as you climb into the outfit you've hired from Moss Bros and you still can't find your collar when the best man arrives to collect you. He generally tries to cheer you up with a few funny jokes. The last thing you want to do in the world is get married, but before you know what's happening you're in church with your eyes on the level of the clergyman's boots. The reception afterwards will be upstairs in a tea-shop, there won't be nearly enough to drink and everyone will make speeches-some of the uncles twice-several of the aunts will be in tears, and only the waiters will at all be mellowed by alcohol. Then the 'going-away'-frightfully pagan and primitive really, old shoes and tin cans on the back of the car in the middle of the High Street on a Saturday afternoon. This brings me to the honeymoon. There you are, arriving at St Ives in a snowstorm in your best clothes, trying to pretend you've been married for years and feeling that everyone is looking at you as though you were performing one of those
I smashed his glass on the floor and walked out.
The next morning was my most miserable since the final examinations. The newspapers seemed concerned only with actions for breach of promise, judges' remarks about broken homes, and advertisements for cheap wedding rings. I could hardly eat any breakfast and hurried across the quadrangle to the surgical block feeling that every nurse in the hospital was pointing her finger at me and giggling. As I scrambled into my operating trousers I wondered if Nurse Plumtree had already spread the news around the Nurses' Home or was waiting for the Matron's blessing and a ring.
In the operating theatre it was one of those mornings. The Sister was in a bad temper, the catgut broke, the artery forceps slipped, the transfusion needles came adrift, the scissors were blunt, the swabs were lost. My own assistance was so clumsy that even mild Mr Cambridge was moved to murmur, 'My dear Mr Er-er, couldn't you do something more helpful to the patient than gaze at his umbilicus?'
Hatrick screwed up his eyes as he grinned and said through his mask, 'He must be in love, sir.'
I almost wept into the wound.
As I grasped my retractor through the long surgical morning I glanced at Grimsdyke, who was sitting smugly at my right elbow, and wondered if he was perhaps right. Should I give in and marry Nurse Plumtree? After all, I was past the facile flirtations of a penniless medical student, and almost every morning _The Times_ proclaimed the virtuous love of one of my classmates. Nurse Plumtree would at least never be a nagger or a gossip, she was a tolerably good cook, and genuinely anxious to look after me. As the years rolled by I might be able to tolerate her brother and sister, while thankfully her parents could not live for ever.
Lunch was later, colder, and soggier than usual. Afterwards, I made an excuse about discussing the next anaesthetic and managed to have a word with Grimsdyke alone.
'Sorry I was rather unsympathetic last night,' he said cheerfully in the anaesthetic room, gripping the chin of a freshly-unconscious patient. 'But your cosy little evening
'I think I may take your advice after all,' I announced.
'What? Marry the woman? But you're not even in love with her, are you?'
I shrugged my shoulders, and started fiddling with an ampoule of pentothal. 'What's love?' I said. 'It merely means that a certain system of genes in my chromosomes is about to be placed in relationship to an arrangement of genes in hers. To this biological end certain endocrine cells in her and myself pour out secretions that produce our secondary sex characteristics, such as the full bosom and rounded hips of Nurse Plumtree and the deep voice and hair on the chest of myself. I don't see that there's any more to it-'
'What disgusting nonsense! Anyway, you can't possibly marry a nurse. They make your life a horror of purgatives.'
'Then what the devil
'The answer's simple, old lad. Have a bash at another woman. Hadn't you thought of it before?'
They wheeled the patient into the theatre then, but I finished the operating list in a happier frame of mind. In the emotional stress of the last two days I had forgotten Nurse Macpherson, and it cheered me to think that I could choose the primrose path to escape.
18
I saw little of Nurse Plumtree that day, for the operating list ended in a string of hernias, varicose veins, lipomas, biopsies, and cystoscopies that kept Hatrick and myself in the theatre until eight at night. I threw a white coat over my blood-smudged theatre clothes and hurried down to the wards, which on operating evenings resembled the French lines after Agincourt. Outside Constancy I was surprised to run into Nurse Plumtree in her cloak.
'I've got a strep. throat,' she said gazing at me sadly. 'I've got to go off duty.'
'Oh, hard luck.' I tried not to sound delighted. 'At least, it's nothing serious. I'll go round the ward with Nurse Summers instead. I couldn't have met you tonight anyway, not after that colossal list.'
'Don't give too much responsibility to that Nurse Macpherson,' she warned me. 'She's quite unreliable. Only this morning she mixed up the castor oils with the blanket baths. And don't stay up too late writing your notes. Promise?'
