When their Trident landed at Heathrow there was a reporter and a photographer waiting. Graham had lost nothing of his attraction for the Press.
'How kind of you to come along,' he smiled. He had also lost nothing of his touch with newspapermen.
'Good evening, Sir Graham. I hope you had a good trip?'
'Splendid, thank you, splendid. Aeroplanes make everything so convenient these days. I still haven't quite got used to them. All that messing about one used to do with trains and boats was quite exhausting. Yes, Rome was wonderful. In September I think the light is just right. In summer the sun's too strong, and the shadows are the most intriguing part of any building-or of any human face.'
'I gather you made a quite sensational speech to the Plastic Surgery Congress, Sir Graham?'
He chuckled. 'Hardly sensational. My days for making sensations are past. But I put over a few of my old ideas, which still hold good. The basic principles have been rather swamped by the enormous advances in surgical technique and technology. But to my mind, it's as important to grasp them as firmly in 1968 as it was in 1948, when I took over the Directorship of the National Accident hospital. In fact, these basic principles haven't changed since 1940, when I was proud of being in a position to put them to good use.' He always referred to 1940 in front of the Press.
'I hope you've managed to get some holiday in Italy at the same time, Lady Trevose?' the reporter asked Clare.
'Yes, we had an absolutely wonderful fortnight in Positano.'
'Despite the continuing currency restrictions?' grinned the reporter.
'We are extremely modest abroad,' Graham told the man, quite sharply.
It was nine o'clock before they emerged from the Customs into the bright and confusing concourse. 'It's strange how this place always looks entirely different depending on whether you're going or coming,' Graham observed. 'It's the difference between hope and anticlimax, I suppose. A common enough sequence, in my own experience.'
'You've nothing to complain about this trip, darling.'
'Perhaps a little. They didn't take my speech seriously at the Congress, you know. Not entirely.'
'But they were absolutely charming,' Clare protested. 'Particularly the Russians.'
'Yes, but they think I'm old hat. Perhaps they're right. I'm a realist. Anyway, I livened them up. We'll see how the Americans take to me in Baltimore next spring.'
Graham looked round hopefully for the chauffeur booked to drive them into London. He felt that at his age the shunning of airport buses was a luxury worth indulging in. He was spry, and as thin as ever. He let his wispy hair grow overlong, and strands of it poked under his hat. He wore glasses all the time, large and round, making his eyes look more owlish than ever. He had grown rather untidy in his clothes, presenting an amiably donnish look to the world. Clare thought fondly he resembled an elderly elf.
The car had hardly reached the M4 before Graham fell asleep. Clare picked up the tartan rug provided by the hire firm and carefully laid it over him. This was less to prevent any malevolent chill taking advantage of his unguardedness-her nursing training enabled her to take a strictly scientific view of Graham's management-but an indulgence on her part, an expression of the steadfast tenderness she had shown towards him in their twenty-one years of marriage. She settled back in her corner, looking at the street lights, trying to correlate them with the necklaces she had admired from the air. She had grown fatter, but kept her pale good looks, and, with assistance, her fair hair. Graham tended to drop off to sleep rather often these days, she reflected. Perhaps he shouldn't gad about the world so much. But seventy-three, though a respectable age, was hardly over the threshold of senility. If she remembered, Churchill was rather older when he became Prime Minister through the persuasion of the ballot- box rather than the approaching muzzles of the German guns.
They had a small flat in Chelsea, and an unimposing house in the country on the way to Oxford, past the National Accident Hospital. Graham had worked there almost a dozen years, until his retirement in 1959. They had been the happiest of his life, happier even than at the annex. It was mainly because nothing had happened to him. He sometimes wondered if it were the security of a settled job, or the fires of his personality dimming to a comfortable glow, or simply Clare keeping a firm hand on him. He had busied himself with his work, developed a relish for committees, lectured enthusiastically, and drew veneration from the world as effortlessly as a well- established oak draws moisture from the soil. He enjoyed the respect, though it amused him. It was not so much the poacher turning gamekeeper, as the swashbuckling pirate becoming Admiral of the Fleet. Perhaps he possessed the same luck as his seafaring Cornish ancestors, he wondered, who had never turned from a chance of smuggling and generally ended clothed with gold lace and dignity.
There was a pile of letters inside the door.
'I can't face that lot at this hour of the night,' Graham said, as Clare started gathering them. 'I'll have a go at them in the morning. Anything from Dick?'
Their nineteen-year-old son was on holiday in Spain, with, Graham suspected, the girl he had met at the university. Well, it would be a bit of fun, he wished he'd had the chance to do the same at Dick's age, but then trips to Spain were only for the rich and venturesome. And the sunshine would do the girl good, he thought. She had struck him as a dismally anaemic young woman.
'There's a letter he seems to have sent from Malaga.'
'Read it to me, darling, will you?' Graham sat in the armchair. 'I'm rather tired, and his handwriting's dreadful.'
'And there's something from Blackfriars.' She tore open a large envelope. 'They've made it at last,' she exclaimed. 'They're actually going to open the new Arlott Wing by Christmas. Of course, they want you to perform the ceremony.'
Graham laughed. The rebuilding of Blackfriars beside the Thames had long ago become a harmless joke. When the war had ended, the staff imagined they would quit Smithers Botham in a year or two, but the volume of hospital work so increased with the National Health Service, and the volume of hospital building so diminished with the national bankruptcy, the country was several times on the brink of another war before they finally parted company. 'I think we've beaten St Thomas's to it, haven't we?' he asked. 'Or is it more or less a dead heat?' He opened and closed his hands. 'Perhaps they might ask me to perform an inaugural operation on some unlucky fellow? It's an amusing thought. I wouldn't mind having a knife in my hands again. After all, John Bickley's still giving anaesthetics for private cases all over London. Though perhaps he only does it to get away from Denise.'
John had worked for Graham again. Graham's private practice had in fact continued almost as busily as ever, through an interesting fraction written into the Health Service known as 'nine-elevenths'. The consultants were paid for the nine-elevenths of their time spent in the Service, the other two-elevenths being free to extract money from those members of the public feeling disinclined to accept its benefits. And two-elevenths of a consultant's time, with evenings, early mornings, and week-ends, was a handsome period for profits. Without this concession, the consultants would have dug in their toes and there would have been no Health Service at all. But Nye Bevan was an even more penetrating realist than Graham.
Clare read their son's letter, which said a lot about the sunshine, wine, beaches, and bullfights, but nothing about girls. The omission confirmed Graham's suspicion. He got up to pour himself a drink, and said, 'I suppose he'll get married pretty soon?'
'I don't know. He's no one in mind.'
'But they all seem to get married these days as soon as they're legally entitled to. Perhaps they look upon it in the same light as learning to drive a car. Once the obstacle to any enjoyment's removed, you indulge yourself automatically.'
'He'll wait until he's qualified, surely?'
'In my day, even in Desmond's day, that seemed to be the rule. But of course we lived on our parents or our wits. Now they live on everyone else's parents. Doubtless it's all a good idea.'
'He'll wait till he finds the right girl. He's terribly sensible.'
Graham smiled. 'I had to wait a very long time till I found the right girl. Even then I didn't realize it, did I?' She said nothing. He seldom brought up their times at Cosy Cot. She felt he liked to imagine the episode had never happened, that he had met her for the first time when he had entered, extremely dramatically, her children's ward one wet March morning in 1947. It was a forbidden topic, just like Maria's divorce.
Graham sipped his whisky. 'Do you know, Clare, I'm beginning to think that life resembles something I haven't
