'Do you realize, darling, this is the first time in my life I've had a home I could call my own? I mean a place where I could do as I pleased, without it being run by a lot of servants. Where I didn't feel I had to put on a show, to impress the world with my importance.' He looked round the room, which was hardly big enough to take the bed. The beige wallpaper had galleons sailing across it, a fumed-oak dressing table was squeezed into a corner, there were faded pink curtains, an angular hanging mirror, and a coloured print of Tower Bridge, pre-blitz. They lived in a bungalow, rented furnished in the country some ten miles from Smithers Botham, with four small rooms and a kitchen, a bath with an alarming geyser, and the name of 'Cosy Cot'.
Graham felt he would have been happy with Clare even living in a Nissen hut. She shared his new liking for books and for the concerts on the wireless. She cooked agreeably and mended his clothes with her painstaking nurse's stitches. He had enjoyed himself teaching her to dress properly, pulling her out of those awful tweeds and putting her into frocks, though the fun had been officially dimmed by the coming of clothes' rationing. She was the most adoring woman he had known, which he sometimes wryly reflected accounted for their harmony. They had always the annex to fall back on as a common interest, Graham insisting she continued with her job, declaring the ward would fall into anarchy otherwise. As for their other common interest, Graham decided she enjoyed a greater talent than any woman he had met for copulation, with all its ancillaries, which he was apt to describe as 'novelties'.
As the church bells died away he said, 'You've given me something to live for, darling. A unique gift.'
'You always had your work.'
'Only a fool or a saint lives for his vocation. Do you know, before you came along I was the prey to horrible and gloomy thoughts. Doom, impending death, extinction. Most uncomfortable. Such things don't even enter my mind now. You've exorcised the ghosts. Perhaps the magic charm is finding myself with a girl of your age. Or perhaps it's just the flattery.'
She gently kissed his unshaven cheek. 'It isn't flattery.'
'Is the distinction important? At my age, flattery's a workable substitute for love.'
'Now you're being silly.'
'Yes, I hope I am.' He looked up at the ceiling, which had a large crack running across it. 'Do you think we should have another week at that place in Wales?'
'They were awfully awkward about our identity cards.'
'They might have grown more accustomed to such irregularities by now.'
He had taken her to a village hotel, remembered from before the war, for what he liked to remember as their honeymoon. Their first sudden contact in the office, the day he had met Sheila Raleigh, he told himself was like the unexpected symptom of some smouldering disease. He had been attracted to Clare almost since setting eyes on her. But he was immediately disconcerted to discover there was another-a Royal Marine lieutenant, stationed in India, to whom she was unofficially pledged. Graham declared to himself hastily that any monkey business was out of the question. Her lieutenant was abroad in the service of his country, like the Crusades, exactly the same principle. A man of his own standing couldn't possibly stoop to such things. But he wondered how strong the psychological chastity belt was. It might be fun to try the lock. In the end it sprang open with an ease which surprised both of them, the severest difficulty being the locale. His house in Mayfair was bomb-damaged beyond habitation, and he could hardly smuggle Clare upstairs in the pub like one of the students. It occurred to him he hadn't taken a holiday since the war started. Afterwards, she declared she couldn't possibly go back to the nurses' home. In a place like Smithers Botham, everyone would know of their adventure. The other sisters were unkindly enough already, and anyway had a tendency to kiss each other good-night. They moved into Cosy Cot, and she wrote to her Royal Marine, a dreaded epistle known as a 'Dear John'.
The rest of the Smithers Botham staff thought sharing a bungalow with your ward sister rather rich, even for Graham. He didn't care. It never occurred to him to ask if Clare did. Denise Bickley was particularly outraged, about which Graham cared even less. In peacetime, Graham's goodwill represented a large slice of her husband's income, and Graham reflected grimly the war couldn't go on for ever. As for Clare's parents, who lived in Bristol, they were gratified to learn from her letters that their daughter had moved from the hospital to comfortable and apparently altogether satisfactory lodgings.
'Why don't we have our own celebration of the victory in the Desert?' Graham asked her from the pillow. 'We're alone in the house, no one's likely to call and disturb us.'
Clare laughed and got out of bed, throwing back her blonde hair and starting to take off her red-and-yellow spotted cotton pyjamas. She really had an admirable figure, Graham reflected. Her breasts were wonderful. He couldn't have made anything better himself.
'Must I keep using this toothpaste stuff?' she asked, squatting to insert her diaphragm.
'My God, yes,' said Graham hastily. 'It's terribly risky without the spermicidal jelly. All that cap does is to hold it round the cervix.'
'It's awfully messy.'
'You can't have everything, my love,' he told her, a shade primly.
'And I shall have to keep it in half the day, won't I? It'll give me backache.'
'I'll sit rubbing it with Sloan's liniment.'
She laughed again, and came back to him.
In the sexual line Graham was, as Haileybury would have put it, an enthusiast. After all, he told himself, he had a deep knowledge of the apparatus concerned, and he might as well put the information to fullest use. He often recalled with satisfaction Balzac's exhortation for no man to marry before dissecting at least one female pelvis. But he could never bring himself to feel the business more than 'a sneeze in the loins'. It was only a reflex, centred in the humblest lower segments of the spinal cord, transmitted across the pelvic basin by fibres hiding under their Latinized name 'the nerve of shame'. Even a real sneeze was a more cerebral occurrence, conducted by fine- sounding aristocratic nerves springing out of the brain itself. Of course, women took a different view. However many men sneezed in their loins, they invested it with some mystical significance. He supposed it was mainly through their fear of appearing tarts.
'You look sad,' she said teasingly afterwards.
'Do I? It's physiological after an orgasm. Isn't there a classical tag? Though the single one I can remember is _calor, rubor, tumor, dolor, _and that's only inflammation.'
She ran the tip of her finger round his umbilicus. 'That's a strange thing we have.'
'It's only a cicatrix, a scar.'
'What's inside it?'
'Nothing. The remains of the blood-vessels which fed us before we were born.'
'It's quite pretty, really, like a flower. A budding rose.'
'Most are like cabbages.'
Her hand slipped down to his penis, off duty in the at-ease position. 'It's full of tissue like a sponge, isn't it? I remember from our anatomy lectures. It was awfully funny, the sister-tutor was a terribly dried-up old thing. She told us all about an erection, with diagrams on the blackboard, as though she was talking about the moon. She could never have seen one in her life.'
'It's a really most interesting organ. The arteries dilate enormously, quite unlike any others in the body.'
'It must be fascinating to have one.'
'According to the psychiatrists, all women think so. Penis-envy. Though quite where that interesting discovery gets us, I don't know.'
'Did all your women want one?' He felt this reference, under the circumstances, in rather bad taste, and said nothing. 'Have you had an awful lot of women, Graham?'
'You know I'm a married man.' As she gave a small pout he went on, 'My sex life with Maria pretty well ended with the honeymoon. You could hardly blame me for seeking out others, particularly when she went off her head. But none of them meant anything, not one.'
'Not even Stella Garrod?'
'Particularly Stella Garrod.'
'How about Edith?'
'That's rather going into ancient history,' he said quickly. 'Graham, darling, perhaps I'd better give up the annex.'
'Unthinkable!'
