He was terribly in debt. And the income-tax inspector, as always, clanked across his life like Marley's ghost.
He fixed the blackout in the upstairs drawing-room, switched on the light, and poured a whisky at the corner cocktail cabinet. Usually he drank only to relieve the tedium of other people's company, now he was drinking twice as much to relieve the tedium of his own. His servants had left, a genteel middle-aged woman came in daily from Finchley to clear up his mess, which she referred to as her 'war work'. His son Desmond was in his first year at Cambridge, reading medicine. Unlike the First World War, which emptied the medical schools into the ranks of Kitchener's army, the Second barred medical students from joining the colours as firmly as miners or middle-aged ploughmen. For safety's sake, Graham had sent Desmond to spend Christmas with his cousin Alec, also destined for medicine, Alec's mother Edith then running a guest house for the better class of evacuee in Devon. Graham swirled the whisky round his glass. Edith Trevose had been successively his own fiancйe, his sister-in-law, his brother's widow, and his mistress, but despite these disturbing changes in status still his friend. He wondered whether to ring her up, but decided against it. It might start new complications. And anyway, the long-distance telephones were becoming dreadfully unreliable.
He reflected again that he should give up his Queen Street home, store the furniture, and take a room at The Oak inn on the village green at Smithers Botham. He would exchange the Bentley for a Morris, and be patriotic over petrol. It was all an excuse to save money, to live a simpler life, until the fuss was over-as everyone knew from the newspapers, the Germans were already short of everything from shells to shoeleather. He poured himself another drink. Here was Graham Trevose, he thought sadly, the fashionable plastic surgeon, the favourite guest of a thousand smart parties, and nobody even wanted to talk to him. He had always far keener pity for himself than for his patients. He felt loneliness like pain, to exist without a woman's company struck him as hard as solitary confinement. Without the compensation of a caress he became as wretched as a stray dog, to wake at night alone he felt a foretaste of the grave. He'd enjoyed affairs enough before the war, but what was their lasting satisfaction? he asked himself bitterly. As little as a handshake. Now everyone he knew seemed to have disappeared, and if the Germans did arrive that night to blow him to pieces there was hardly anyone to care.
He had a wife, of course, but she was in a home in Sussex, mad for fifteen years.
5
The hurricane had two self-sealing petrol tanks in the wings and another in the fuselage, directly in front of the pilot. On the August Sunday morning when a Messerschmitt 109 caught him over Dungeness he calculated, after a panicky moment wondering if he were alive at all, that he still had a fair chance of eating his dinner that night. As he jettisoned the cockpit hood a stench of petrol struck him. In a second his world was alight. He never remembered how he fell clear. His next recollection was the petrol replaced by a smell even more pungent. It reminded him of something. It was the stink of burning wool, which stuck in your nose when they cleared up after the clip back home.
He didn't remember getting clear of his parachute harness, but he must have managed it somehow because he was free when they reached him. His only worry was whether a Mae West could really keep a man afloat. The sea was dead calm, he felt no pain, no unusual sensation at all. Like everyone else, he'd been flying without goggles and gloves. It made it easier to see the enemy and to handle the controls. He watched with detached interest bits of skin and flesh come away from his hands and forearms, like fragments of roast chicken, and float in the water. A civilian lifeboat picked him up. As two men in black oilskins got him aboard he noticed their faces, and wondered what the hell they were staring at.
It was the same expression on the face of the girl looking down at him. She was in a white apron, a nurse he supposed. Pain, shock, and morphine had by then turned him from a human being to a collection of organs struggling to function together as best they could. He asked 'where he was, but she didn't seem to understand. He wondered suddenly if he were in France, put in the bag by the Germans. Then she said, 'You're all right. You're in hospital. In Kent, not far from Tunbridge Wells.'
He'd heard of Tunbridge Wells. It struck him as an odd sort of place to find himself in.
He floated on a cloud of euphoria as they were obliged continually to increase his dose of morphine. He didn't know if he'd been lying there for a couple of days or a week, though it was in fact more than a month. Gradually his body seemed to grow some sort of skin against the painful world. A variety of doctors in white coats came to see him, and generally dug about with forceps and probes, most painfully. As he began to notice things again, he saw when they changed his dressings his hands were black, clawed, and wizened. They reminded him of the hands he'd once seen on the body of an aboriginal, brought into the sheep station after lying for months shrivelling in the sun of the outback. He asked for a mirror, but was told the hospital hadn't any to spare. They had been broken by a freak of blast in the bombing, they explained, and glass was in short supply.
His room was small, white-painted, and sunny, looking on to a small garden. He wondered what sort of hospital it was, and if there were any other patients. He certainly saw no sign of them. Over the next few weeks the pain began to ease and the needles became less frequent. One afternoon he noticed there was a mirror right in the room. It was over the washbasin, though they'd covered it with flowered curtain material fixed by strips of sticking-plaster. He crawled out of bed, staggered, and fell. He managed to struggle across the floor, and to tug the flowered covering aside with the point of his elbow. He wondered who he was looking at. The face in the glass was swollen, black, and running with pus. There was no nose, and the eyes stared through a pair of encrusted lids. The door opened and the young nurse came in, scolding him like a naughty child for getting out of bed.
A few mornings later the blue-uniformed sister, a stout and kindly woman, appeared at his bedside with a stranger. He was a civilian, thin, pale, weedy-looking, with a large head and eyes showing too much white.
'Bluey Jardine, isn't it?' began the visitor affably. 'The Australian? I've heard a lot about you. Sorry to make your acquaintance in these particular circumstances.'
The patient looked suspicious. Whenever anyone new appeared in the room, it seemed to mean something unpleasant was going to happen.
'My name's Trevose,' the civilian went on. 'I'm a surgeon who specializes in your sort of trouble. I suppose you know well enough you were pretty badly burnt?'
'Am I going to live?'
'Yes, of course you are. But it'll take a good deal of treatment getting you into shape. We're going to see rather a lot of each other in the immediate future, I'm afraid.' Graham took a bundle of case-notes from the sister. 'You weren't wearing goggles and gloves?'
'I don't reckon so.'
'A sadly common omission,' murmured Graham. With sterile forceps and a kidney-bowl he began picking away the dressings. Another case of 'airman's burn'. If only these chaps would keep their gloves and goggles on, he thought, they'd have at least some sort of protection in the cockpit. The first-aid station had smeared tannic acid jelly all over the raw surfaces, of course. Damnable stuff! Why couldn't the muttonheads at the top issue orders banning it? It would take weeks for him to pick the dried tannic acid crust away, before he could even think about skin-grafting. The hands were terrible. The face was a pretty bad mess too, but that didn't matter so much. A face was a decoration, but you needed hands to live.
'Right, Sister,' Graham decided. 'I'll have this one.' He turned to the man in bed. 'Would you like a change of scene? This hospital, however excellent otherwise, hasn't the facilities for the sort of surgery you need. I run a little show nearer London where we can look after you properly.'
Bluey hesitated and said, 'I reckon I'm in the hands of you quacks now, aren't I?'
'Good. I'll send a car for you tomorrow morning. Do you like ice-cream?'
'I don't mind it.'
'Vanilla or strawberry? I'm afraid there's no chocolate.'
'Vanilla will do me.' Bluey was mystified. Bits of him were burnt to cinders, and they talked about ice-cream. This doctor, whoever he was, seemed an odd bloke.
'We'll be feeding you it till you're sick,' Graham told him cheerfully. 'See you later.'
In the corridor the sister chided Graham with more severity than usual, 'But Mr Trevose! You
'This officer will be my last-honestly.'
