SURGEON AT ARMS

forty-eight hours before.

'I went to a party with a lot of my old patients.'

'Those poor boys! They must look so peculiar, all together.'

'They do, but they've given up thinking about it, which was the object of the exercise.'

'How on earth could they manage to give up thinking about themselves? I should feel dreadful, quite an outcast, if I had the merest scar.'

'They manage it because I always made the effort of having people treat them like normal human beings, not as something out of a circus.'

Liz gave a faint smile. He looked in danger of being serious again. He really was a dreadful bore when he got serious. If he went on mixing with all these awful deformed creatures, he really shouldn't bother everyone by insisting on talking about them in quite repulsive detail.

'Let's go and grab something to eat,' Liz suggested. 'I think they've even got lobster.'

After ten minutes she said to him, 'You _are _grumpy tonight, I must say. What's the matter?'

'Oh, nothing.' An uneasiness had settled on him. These people really were rather dreadful, he told himself. Though why should he complain? There was wine, lobster, and bright company, all hard to come by. 'Shall we go on?' he asked her abruptly. 'To a nightclub or somewhere?'

'But darling! I've only just arrived.'

'I'm feeling restless.'

'Oh, all right, then. You do carry on peculiarly sometimes, darling, don't you?'

'Yes, I know I do. Very peculiarly. All my life. It's a bit late in the day to change my habits, I'm afraid.'

'I see you're in your interesting mood,' she told him. It was too bad, but she had to put up with it. He seemed very wealthy.

The nightclub, like a dozen others sprouting after the war, was in a basement near Piccadilly. Graham signed an order for a bottle of gin, which was supposed to be sealed and reproduced at the guest's next visit, but somehow never was. There was a rumba band and they danced for a few minutes on the overcrowded floor. 'Let's go home,' said Graham. 'This place is suffocating.'

'Darling, what's wrong with you tonight? You can hardly wait to get at it.'

'You're right. I can't. I feel like it.'

'I don't know!' She laughed. 'You're worse than any of the young ones.'

'The young ones don't need consoling.'

She ruffled the hair in the nape of his neck, which he was allowing to grow rather long. 'What do you need consoling about? You've got everything.'

'I've got nothing. Nothing that counts.'

'Now you are being interesting. I can't see anything you lack.'

'A human being, the most precious commodity of all.'

'What about me? Aren't I human?'

'Shall we go?'

'Oh, all right, darling. Though don't rush at me like a bull when we get in, will you?'

When they reached the flat she insisted on taking her time, to put him in his place. 'Can't we have a drink?'

'Yes, of course.'

As he poured out the gin she took a cigarette and remarked, 'That's a pretty picture.'

'Yes, it is pretty. That's its trouble. There's no feeling underneath.'

'Who did it?'

'I did. Before the war.'

'Really?' She looked surprised. 'I didn't know you were an artist. I mean, apart from making people faces. I suppose that's much the same thing, isn't it?'

'I am an artist. Rather than a surgeon. I am an artist obliged to conform with the discipline of a surgeon's life.'

'That doesn't seem to worry you,' she laughed.

'It does, quite often. For most of my life I've fought against the rigidity and stuffiness of the medical profession. Now I'm not so sure. It's rewarding, being set apart, being someone special. Even if it's only through your own rules, many of which can be extremely silly. I suppose it was the war which changed my mind, though I didn't realize it at the time.'

'Please, darling, don't go on about the war again.'

'I'm sorry. I'm really trying to forget it, but it keeps coming back, more and more.' He sipped his drink and reflected, 'It was really the only worthwhile time in my life, out at that annex place.'

She stubbed out her fresh cigarette. 'Come along, darling, shall we get on with it?' she invited. Anything to stop him talking about the war.

Graham had taken to copulating with the light on. He found it more amusing, and anyway had read somewhere that turning out the light was a suburban habit. Liz, possibly worn out by her exertions on the stage, fell asleep almost immediately afterwards. He lay for a long time looking up at the ceiling. She really was a ghastly female. She was fat, and her breasts fell away to the sides of her chest like a pair of half-filled sandbags. Still, she had a kind heart and she was always available, valuable and infrequent attributes in any female. He would be generous writing her cheque in the morning. He must have been rather difficult to tolerate that evening. His life was all wrong, all completely wrong. But he didn't see much prospect of setting it right, even if he had the remotest idea what the right sort of life for himself should be.

20

The same evening Desmond Trevose was entertaining his cousin Alec to dinner at high table in his Cambridge college.

Desmond had spent six months at Smithers Botham as Mr Twelvetrees' house-surgeon, and a further year as his registrar, which substituted for service in the thinning ranks of the Army. He was a good house-surgeon, competent and thoughtful, skilful enough with his hands as assistant in the theatre. But he was not really a success.

He was too cold, too brusque with the patients. He had no sense of human relationships. This was admittedly not a necessity for the effective, or even successful, medical man. Many renowned surgeons have been abominably rude. Others like Mr Cramphorn regarded hospital patients as simple-minded supplicants, unable to grasp such intellectual matters as the nature of the disease which irked them, which having a Latin name could only be discussed, if at all, by educated gentlemen. But the mood of the patients, like the mood of the nation, was becoming restless with smug authority. Medicine had advanced during the war as strikingly as aeronautics, the hospital doctor found himself turning into an applied scientist, yet the more he could do for his patients the less they seemed to regard him. It was baffling, not only for Mr Cramphorn. But the patients were only daring to express what they had expected from their medical attendants all along-to be their friend in health, their ally in sickness, and their companion in death, a relationship previously accorded only to those among them with a fee in their pockets.

Early in 1947 Desmond applied for a research scholarship at his old college, to study anatomy. It was in the blood. _The Synovial Membranes,_ the anatomical thesis by his grandfather the professor, published in the year of Desmond's birth, lay on the desk in his college rooms. The old boy had a few sound ideas, Desmond decided, though the bulk of the book was nonsense. But the synovial membranes, lining the joints of the body, might be worth a second look, and he had decided to spend a year taking it.

He had asked Alec to dinner through no feelings of duty or affection. After living with him for a year in the medical officers' mess at Smithers Botham, Desmond had allowed the lifelong tepidity of his feelings towards his cousin to cool into frosty dislike. But having him up for the night seemed the only way to pin him down. Desmond wanted his money back, and Alec showed reluctance even to discuss such ungentlemanly a subject.

'I hope you won't find that guest room too chilly,' said Desmond, standing before dinner amid the beams of his