'Staff-nurse Jones could easily take over. She's awfully good with the boys.'
'But why this sudden change of heart? I thought you liked the work. You'd get bored all day here.'
'I haven't used the toothpaste once or twice. I didn't think it would matter. I haven't seen anything now for a fortnight. Of course, it may be perfectly all right. Just a delayed period.'
His large eyes stared at her across the pillow.
'If it isn't all right, will you be pleased?' she asked timidly. 'No, don't answer. Wait till we know.' She kissed him and got out of bed abruptly. 'It's Sunday. That means fried eggs for lunch. Something lovely to look forward to, isn't it?'
12
To find himself confronted with fatherhood on a second occasion filled Graham with the same numb shock as on the first, almost exactly twenty-two years previously. With Maria, their sexual endeavours were so beset with difficulties he somehow felt her reproductive system too inefficient for conception. With Clare, he had put a touching faith in science. As usual, the human element had let him down. It was the same in the annex, when they got a run of infection after the nurses forgot to sterilize the needles properly in carbolic.
Monday was Mr Tim O'Rory's day at Smithers Botham. Graham caught the gynaecologist at lunch in the medical officers' mess and invited him for a stroll on the lawn.
'It's Clare,' he said, once out of earshot. 'I think she's pregnant.'
'Well, now,' said Mr O'Rory. A thick-set, dark-haired, red-faced, humorous Irishman, he looked kindly on feminine failings through his heavily rimmed glasses and seemed to find them an endless source of innocent merriment. 'And what gives rise to this little suspicion?'
'She's a fortnight overdue. She's always been as regular as clockwork before. Of course, it might be a chill, something like that, mightn't it?'
'Sitting on a damp park bench, doctor?' Mr O'Rory chuckled. 'Maybe so.'
'You don't think that's a possibility?'
'You know my low mind, Graham. Any woman outside a nunnery, who misses a period between the ages of fifteen and fifty, must be assumed pregnant until proved otherwise. And I'm not so sure about the nunnery these days, either.'
Graham was in no mood for professional pleasantries. 'Can you do a test in the lab?' he asked irritatedly.
'I will certainly invoke the assistance of a small frog, Graham, if you want. I'll be needing a specimen of the lady's urine.'
'I've got one in the car.'
'But don't get too alarmed,' Mr O'Rory added amiably. 'The lady may have made a mistake in her dates. It's remarkable how unreliable the feminine gender is at its fundamental calculations.'
The telephone at Cosy Cot rang the following evening. 'That was Tim,' said Graham, putting down the receiver. 'It's on.'
Clare turned her eyes back to her sewing. Graham stuck his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the small sitting-room, which was filled with books, medical journals, files of notes, photographs of his patients, and had a coloured picture of Bubbles over the fireplace.
'It's wonderful news, isn't it?' he declared.
She looked up again. 'Are you sure you want it?'
'But of course I do! As long as you do?'
'More than anything.'
Graham perched on the edge of her chair and put his arm round her tightly. So, he thought, one of my wriggling little spermatozoa has threshed with its hair-like tail across the black mucoid depths of Clare's pelvis, to sink itself joyfully into the speck of jelly comprising her ovum. The stark object of the most fashionable wedding, with all its elaborate trimmings of an ecclesiastical, legal, floral, and emotional nature, had been simply achieved. No trouble at all. The human race really did surround itself with a lot of fuss over its reproduction. Clare wondered what he was going to say. At least he'd declared he wanted the child, she thought. She didn't dare to question whether he really meant it. Living with Graham, she rarely dared to question whether he really meant anything.
'There'll be a terrible lot of practical details to settle,' Graham announced.
He immediately threw himself vigorously into solving the varied problems set by the new pregnancy. He decided Clare must leave the annex at once. Staff-nurse Jones could enjoy unexpected promotion, he must find someone to succeed the girl as staff-nurse. Appointments must be made with Mr O'Rory. Specimens must be collected. A woman must be sought to help in the bungalow. They would go away for the holiday in Wales, it would do Clare good. Her ration-book must be exchanged at the Food Office for a pregnant woman's green one. Extra milk and vitamins must be applied for, with a dozen Government forms. Pregnancy struck Graham as a highly complicated item of official business. It had been so much simpler last time. Which reminded him, he really must do something about Maria.
Graham had been meaning to do something about Maria for over a year. But there had always seemed a last- minute snag. Whenever he steeled himself to start instructing his lawyers there was somehow a rush of work in the annex, keeping his mind occupied for weeks. The solicitors had anyway been bombed out of the City, and re- established themselves at some inaccessible address near Southend-on-Sea. There seemed then no urgency. Clare appeared perfectly content with their arrangement. Graham couldn't see how ten minutes in a registry office would make the slightest difference to the pair of them. Or perhaps, he sometimes suspected, he still had his fingering reluctance about disowning Maria for good. Or perhaps…perhaps he was afraid of committing himself wholly to Clare? It was too difficult to think about, and the problems of the annex came first. Clare certainly raised the topic of a divorce. He felt it only to be expected, but she never harped on it for long. It never occurred to Graham that she saw how much it distressed him, nor that her silence was the expression of her terror of losing him.
But now the solicitors were written to. A divorce was imperative, the wheels of the law must be geared to the rapid process of reproductive physiology. The solicitors wrote back with a promise of doing their best, explaining the Court would doubtless be sympathetic, but there were innumerable difficulties in wartime. He fixed a visit to Southend for the end of the month. He also agreed at last to see Clare's parents in Bristol. It was a glum prospect, even his charm might not prove an antidote to all unpleasantness, particularly as Mr Mills was hardly older than himself. Besides, a journey in the crowded, slow, and foodless wartime trains would be terrible.
First of all he must put matters to his son Desmond.
Something seemed to have gone wrong with Desmond. At Cambridge he had taken a fair degree in Part I of his Tripos, stayed on a year to breathe the rarefied academic atmosphere of the Part II, and done rather badly. From a gay if self-centred schoolboy he was turning into a reticent and solemn young man, wearing a dignity as unfitting for his years as a middle-age spread. He was even something of a prig. When he had left Cambridge that summer to start his three years' clinical course at Smithers Botham, Graham had assumed he would move in with them at Cosy Cot. But Desmond was reluctant. He suggested it might somehow hold him up to ridicule, particularly in the eyes of his cousin Alec, Edith's child, who was arriving to study at Smithers Botham the same autumn. Desmond arranged to live in the hospital itself, as one of the dozen-strong students' 'Emergency Squad' under the direct orders of Captain Pile-though for what emergency this squad was held in readiness, and how it would tackle it when it arose, everyone had long ago forgotten.
Graham dismissed all this as the self-dramatization to which the young were so distressingly liable. Desmond had probably been mixing with the wrong sort of people at college. Though perhaps the son's disinterest was partly the father's fault, Graham admitted. He had never taken overmuch care in Desmond's upbringing. Before the war he was too busy making money and amusing himself. During it he was too busy with the annex. Anyway, the lad seemed to step along confidently enough by himself. But now there was another factor. The war would certainly be grinding along in 1945, when Desmond was due to qualify, to sweep him with the others into the medical branches of the Forces. Why, he might even find himself under the orders of Haileybury! Somehow, Graham determined, he must get the young man into the Navy.
Graham set the scene of Desmond's enlightenment carefully. He had anyway been remiss about standing the boy treats. He made the effort of booking a couple of stalls for _Blithe Spirit_-as Russians were then being bombed
