the full resources of the Welfare State at his elbow. It was the most exciting, if the most exhausting, of all. He could hardly be expected to play Alec's nursemaid at the same time. Anyway, the man was in his middle twenties, a qualified doctor, and should be able to look after himself. Edith wrote again rather pathetically. Graham finished her long letter with a deep sigh. The woman really was rather a nuisance. She'd never missed a chance to make use of him. Never since he'd deflowered her in a seaside summerhouse during the warmer months of 1918.
Graham let young Alec drop from his mind. Then one afternoon in November he was hurrying along Shaftesbury Avenue from a lunch appointment in Soho, and saw the name ALEC TREVOSE facing him from a placard outside a theatre. Graham stopped, frowning. He felt for his newly prescribed glasses, the announcement not being in particularly large type. The name was among three others claiming authorship of a revue, which Graham vaguely remembered as wringing amiable notices from the critics (he had turned his back on the theatre of late). Lower down, there was Alec Trevose again, in even smaller letters, among the cast. Well, it was not an uncommon name, Graham reflected, and sounded well enough for any player to sport. There was no immediate way of telling if the actor-dramatist might be his own nephew. The simplest course seemed to buy a couple of tickets for the show, which he obtained for the following evening, with the greatest difficulty.
A glance at Clare's programme as they took their seats told Graham it was Alec right enough. The sketch he had written and in which he was about to display himself was entitled simply _At The Doctor's._ The pair of them sat through the foregoing scenes, which struck Graham as exactly like every other revue he had seen, with mounting impatience and foreboding. Then Alec finally appeared. He acted a patient, subjected to an ingenious variety of indignities and discomforts by a dozen white-coated doctors. The audience bellowed. Once recovering from the shock of his nephew's entrance, Graham had to admit it was well put together and surprisingly funny, perhaps because every line that Alec had written and every situation he had depicted occurred often enough in a real hospital. He turned his head, to see Clare dabbing away tears of laughter with her handkerchief. He wondered what Edith would have thought.
After the final curtain Graham said without enthusiasm, 'We'd better go round and have a word with him, I suppose?'
'Yes, I'd love to,' agreed Clare eagerly. 'I've never been behind the scenes before.'
Graham gave his name to the stage-door keeper, who directed them down a flight of stone stairs leading to a narrow, green-painted, ill-lit passage, smelling strongly of disinfectant. The dressing-rooms that Graham had visited during his theatrical phase had been spacious flower-filled apartments, but Alec's seemed hardly bigger than a railway compartment, with a wooden stand in the middle for the mirrors fringed with electric bulbs, at which three other young men were busy wiping away their make-up.
'Why, it's Uncle Graham!' Alec leapt up, a scrap of filthy towelling in his hand. 'But what a lovely surprise! And Auntie Clare. I say, I should have congratulated you or something, shouldn't I? I'm dreadfully sorry. Life's been an absolute rush, I've had hardly a moment to think of my nearest and dearest.'
'Perhaps it is we who should congratulate you?' remarked Graham rather drily, shaking hands.
'Did you enjoy the show?' asked Alec, with a pressing eagerness he shared with even the greatest actors.
'I'd hoped we clapped loudly enough to make that an unnecessary question.'
Alec lit a cigarette. 'I expect it shattered you a bit? Seeing me from out front?'
'It's admittedly an unexpected talent brought to light.'
'It all started in Smithers Botham. Dency thought it would help if I tried some form of self-expression. He knows someone in the management here, and sent the sketch along. At first I was only supposed to help out with the technical details-you know, wearing your stethoscope the right way round, putting on gloves the regulation way, that sort of thing. After I'd been fooling about at rehearsals one of the cast went sick. So they gave me a chance. Success story.'
One of the other young men, none of whom Alec had introduced, picked up his jacket and with a call of 'Good- night, darlings,' left them. Graham noticed with amusement Clare looked shocked. He himself had come to learn the endearing expression was merely the equivalent of the Communists' 'Comrade' in an ever-shifting and commendably classless society.
'A success story so far,' Graham agreed, nodding.
'Now, Uncle, you're being damping. But I've half another show written, I'm getting work on broadcasting-I've even got an agent. Oh, I know it isn't a solid job like medicine, but you can't imagine how much better I've been feeling since I tried my hand at it. And this poisonous underground atmosphere has absolutely cured my asthma. The pollens can't get at you.'
A girl, who seemed to Graham to be wearing only her underclothes, put her head round the dressing-room door, said, 'Oh, sorry,' and disappeared again.
'I was a misfit in medicine,' Alec continued cheerfully, wiping off the remains of his grease-paint. 'God knows why I started it in the first place. Mother, I suppose. Weight of family tradition. Or perhaps you think I've let the side down?' he asked, genuinely concerned.
'Not entirely. I was something of a misfit myself.'
'Well, I'm not the first doctor to make an exhibition of myself in public. The great Charles Wyndham was qualified. He ended up a grand actor-manager, with a knighthood and a theatre called after him.'
'I don't think Wyndham ever played in revue,' Graham observed. With the vague feeling that Alec was probably starving in some attic, he added an invitation to supper. But his nephew declined graciously, explaining he was already engaged to sup with some important director who thought highly of his work. Graham imagined the girl in the underclothes his more likely companion, but was glad enough to accept the refusal.
'You really ought to send some sort of word to your mother,' he finally admonished him. 'She's written saying how disturbed she is about you.'
'Dear mother!' Alec started putting on his shirt. 'She always did fuss so. Yes, I really must send her a line.'
'Or perhaps you'd prefer me to write?' Graham saw Alec in his present mood as a doubtful correspondent.
Alec turned with a bright smile. 'Just do that little thing for me, will you, Uncle?'
In the taxi going home, Graham said, 'God knows what will come of Alec's wild ideas. It
'Haven't you said often enough, darling, you can't suppress a true artist? Even if he can only chalk sunsets on the pavements? You never let them suppress you.'
'Perhaps so,' he admitted. 'Perhaps Alec and I are the same thing, really.'
He took her hand and stared gloomily out of the cab window. It would all be intolerably difficult to describe to Edith. But his thoughts as usual turned back to the new hospital, and he said, 'Remind me I've got to go to the Board of Trade tomorrow afternoon. Something about importing American equipment. I'm seeing the new Minister- fellow called Harold Wilson. One of Attlee's bright boys.'
Clare said, 'Tomorrow I'm going to listen to the wedding on the radio.'
'Wedding? What wedding?'
'Oh, Graham! Princess Elizabeth's wedding, of course.'
'I'm sorry, it was out of my mind for the moment.' After another long silence he said, 'It's odd to think that one day we shall have a Queen on the throne again. Though I shan't be alive to see it. I just remember when the last Queen died. At least, I imagine I do. I have a mental picture of my mother telling me the news in father's old study in Hampstead. I could only have been seven years old at the time. It was just before my mother died herself of T.B., and I remember that well enough. 'Queen Elizabeth' has a fine ring about it, hasn't it?' He began to sound more cheerful as the problem of Alec settled into its true insignificance. 'The country's having a pretty thin time of it at the moment, but perhaps a new Elizabethan age will dawn upon us. Oh, we'll end up top dogs again, sooner or later, like we were before the war.'
That so many fellow-countrymen imagined the same as Graham Trevose at the time was the great mid- twentieth-century British tragedy. Or perhaps comedy. They are only two ways of looking at the same thing.
29
