The wedding was to Graham as joyless as a funeral. He found it impossible to be even faintly amiable afterwards. He pleaded work, and drove straight back to Smithers Botham. He knew that everything Sheila said was perfectly correct. To come face to face with his old self was harrowing. Things had so changed. Or had they? His egotism and jealousy, which had cost poor Tom his partnership and then his life, he supposed must still be in his system somewhere. Perhaps he was merely redirecting them to temporarily more acceptable ends, like some thug given a rifle and praised for killing Germans? Was it too much to hope he really was becoming a better sort of man? How could he tell? There was no one near enough to ask.
At Smithers Botham he made for his office. He had to find some work, anything to occupy himself, to stop his self-inflicted mental wounds. He paused in the doorway, surprised to find Sister Mills at his desk. Then he remembered he'd asked her to collect case reports of something-what was it? Maxillary fractures. He was about to ask her to go when she noticed his face and jumped up, exclaiming, 'What's the matter? Was it something in the blitz?'
He shut the door behind him.
'I killed a man,' he said wearily. 'Unwittingly and indirectly, but I killed him. Tom Raleigh-did I ever mention him? He was my partner. We had a row. He should have been working with me out here on the unit. I wouldn't take him. So instead, he was killed in Greece.'
He sat in a chair by the desk.
'I'm so sorry,' said Sister Mills quietly. 'It must have been terrible news.'
'Particularly as I got it from his widow. Who knew exactly what the facts were.' He stretched out his legs. 'She told me what she thought of me. She was perfectly right. To her, I couldn't be anything but the vilest and wickedest creature in the world.'
'She'd be feeling emotional. She let her tongue run away with her.'
'I'd like to think so. But my whole life before the war doesn't stand much examination.'
'Doesn't it? You brought a lot of happiness to people.'
'At a price.'
'Well, why not?' she asked simply. 'What is the price of happiness?'
'Anyway, I didn't give a damn about the happiness. Only the guineas.'
'That's quite impossible to believe. Not after all I've seen here.'
He sat staring in front of him. Then he noticed she was crying.
'I must apologize.' He got up abruptly. 'All these troubles I've brought back are upsetting you. I shouldn't have mentioned them. I've no right asking you to share them.'
'I'm crying for you,' she told him. 'You're so much the nicest person in the world, and you fight so terribly hard against it.'
Then he had her in his arms, and she was kissing him with a passion even he found exciting.
Meanwhile, Mrs Sedgewick-Smith was holding another of her regular Monday afternoon tea-parties. She had told Stephanie severely that she mustn't keep crossing her legs like that. After all, she was really getting quite a big girl.
11
On Sunday mornings Graham would lie in bed, reading the papers, _Picture Post,_ the _Strand Magazine,_ a novel, anything unconnected with the annex. It was only the bad doctor, he reflected, who killed himself to cure his patients.
By that November Sunday of 1942 the posters in the Smithers Botham entrance hall had changed from the ringing warning YOUR FREEDOM IS IN PERIL to the more sophisticated COUGHS AND SNEEZES SPREAD DISEASES and IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? The place was by then more than simply a hospital. It was another of the countless closed communities stretching across the globe from Spitzbergen to the Falklands, all more interested in themselves than in the war which had fathered them. There was always something going on there. The fashion of the times provided the staff with bountiful opportunity for self-expression, self-examination, and self-instruction, with dramatics and debating, brains trusts of varying trustworthiness, lectures on everything from Britain's War Aims to Milk Production, plus E.N.S.A., A.B.C.A., and I.T.M.A. Conversation in the long corridors never lacked an interesting case or an interesting scandal. The housemen continued to entertain the nurses. The matron continued to entertain doubts.
The war had swept a remarkable assortment of illnesses and injuries into the vast wards. It was an Aladdin's cave of clinical medicine, if only the students had bothered to rub the lamp of learning. There were special units for surgery of the head, the chest, the limbs, and the arteries, created not through the benevolence of some millionaire but through the malevolence of Adolf Hitler. Its beds contained Free French, Free Poles, Free Norwegians, Free Dutch, Free Czechs, and unfree Germans (who made model patients, there being nothing like several years' Nazi indoctrination for fitting in with the ideas of an old-fashioned British ward sister). Captain Pile was still there, and still a captain. Corporal Honeyman was still there, and still a corporal. Dr Pomfrey, after a baffled half-hour with his car at full throttle, unaware that his rear bumper was enmeshed in the stout railings of the coal store, had decided to settle for a second-hand bicycle. But to anyone who read the newspapers, Smithers Botham in 1942 was the place where a man called Graham Trevose performed his miracles.
The annex was no longer a sideshow but one of the busiest surgical units in the country. The huts in the grounds had doubled and the staff had trebled. Graham was receiving more patients from the R.A.F. than he could handle. His work had attracted surgeons-and journalists with their photographers-from every Allied nation, even the Russians. Women in fish-queues could talk to each other about Graham Trevose. Every morning brought a letter or two, generally badly written and spelt, with a few shillings towards the comforts fund. Graham thought this the most rewarding recognition of all. And it had all started because he had gone to Val Arlott seeking some zips for trousers.
An unaccustomed sound crept across the misty morning. Church bells in the distance. For more than two years these accompaniments of Christian joys and sorrows had been silenced, reserved by the Government to herald not the coming of the Lord but of the German armies.
'Listen.' Graham slipped his hands between his head and the pillow. 'I remember in the last war they rang the bells after Cambrai. It was when we used tanks for the first time, and broke the German lines. In a week or two we were back where we started, of course. It always seemed the case in those days. Let's hope this Alamein affair is more permanent.'
Clare Mills slipped her hand into the jacket of his pyjamas, which were pure silk, prewar, made to measure in Jermyn Street. The poor lamb really was terribly thin. It was like being in bed with a skeleton beside you. 'Happy?'
'This is probably a terrible confession, but the war's been the happiest time of my life.'
'Is it so terrible?' she asked gently. 'Surely the misery needn't go undiluted?'
'I suppose happiness is a well-insulated state of mind. Most of the boys are perfectly happy, and God knows they haven't got much to justify it. Even Bluey seems happy enough these days.'
'Perhaps he's found a new girl-friend.' She ran her hand down Graham's chest. It was so smooth, the ribs standing out like the black notes on a piano. No wonder he'd once suffered from tuberculosis.
'Why do I attract you?' he asked.
She pouted thoughtfully. 'You're different. From any other surgeon.'
'Different from old Cramphorn, you mean?'
Clare laughed. 'You're gentle, you're amusing, you're kind, you understand women. And I love you. Besides, you had a tremendous build-up. I'd read so much about you. It's like being with a star you've only seen on the flicks.'
'Don't tell me I've got to match up to Clark Gable?' he asked, though feeling flattered.
She touched his small hard nipple with the dp of her forefinger. 'Tell me why I attract
'You're a good housewife.'
'I thought that was it.'
