SURGEON AT ARMS

'I promised to see Peter Thomas this afternoon. A vital consultation-he's bursting to go on leave. Then I've someone to interview for a job. I'd like an early start in the theatre tomorrow, John,' he added. 'An awful list of oddments has piled up. Tim O'Rory's sending us a newborn baby with a hare lip. It ought to be done as soon as possible, I think, to give the poor little thing a chance to have a go at mother's milk.'

'I'll have the case on the table at eight.'

'I'd be much obliged,' said Graham.

When he had gone, Denise started clearing the dishes and declared, 'I really can't understand about Graham and Maria.'

Her husband, tall, bony, wearing an old jacket and chalk-striped flannels, stretched himself in front of the fire. 'Perhaps he doesn't think a divorce would be in Maria's own interests.'

'I couldn't believe that for a moment,' she said impatiently. 'Graham's one of the most selfish men I know. He's totally self-centred about everything, even the war.'

John started refilling his pipe. 'I imagined our Graham had undergone something of a sea change this last year.'

'I certainly hadn't noticed it.'

He stuck a spill of newspaper into the fire. Matches were becoming almost as precious as razor-blades. 'Do you think he really is so selfish? The plastic surgery racket was pretty tough in London before the war, you know. If a man didn't push himself, nobody else would take the trouble. Now that it doesn't matter a damn to Graham if he operates on three cases a week or thirty, perhaps he can afford the luxury of indulging his better nature.'

'He hasn't been showing much of it to you lately, has he? In the annex, I mean.'

John shrugged. Never an easy-going colleague, Graham was becoming worse-tempered in the theatre than ever. 'With the amount of work we're getting through, some tension between surgeon and anaesthetist is inevitable.'

Denise picked up the tray. 'If he _did _divorce the woman, it would all be perfectly respectable. He wouldn't have to take a girl for a week-end to Brighton, or anything like that.'

'I rather think you need a permit these days to pass a weekend in Brighton,' John observed mildly.

'Oh, you never take anything seriously,' she complained, disappearing into the kitchen.

Graham usually walked from the Bickleys' cottage back to Smithers Botham, on the double assumption that it did him good and he ought to save his official petrol. He started along the bare country lane wondering how he could get out of these Sunday lunches. Denise's insensitivity was deadly.

She had come into his life on the shoulders of John, a friend of twenty years' standing. John Bickley had given the anaesthetics since Graham was a young house-surgeon making a false start on throat work, in the days when children were submitted to the rape of their tonsils under the oblivion of asphyxia more than anaesthesia. Perhaps Denise was jealous, Graham wondered. The relationship of surgeon and anaesthetist had something in common with marriage. He and John had half a lifetime of shared experience, together having faced the triumphs, failures, and excitements concentrated in the few square feet round an operating table. As Graham had become a fashionable plastic surgeon so John Bickley had become a fashionable 'doper' or 'stuffist', hurrying with his rubber tubes and cylinders from nursing-home to nursing-home on a timetable more complicated than Bradshaw's. The surgeons allowed him ten per cent of the operating fee, so he had to keep in with a good many to keep going. The year before the war he had married Denise, whom he had met at a suburban golf-club. She was tall, slim, blonde, and athletic, and had money. It struck Graham that ever afterwards John occupied himself by keeping in with her.

Graham hadn't liked Denise from the start. She had taken him over, as she had taken over everything else connected with her husband, even his Saturday's golf. It was becoming a complication to their work in the theatre, and Graham wouldn't countenance any complication likely to affect his patients. The Bickleys had found a cottage near Smithers Botham-very luckily, the arrival of Blackfriars having shifted most of the white elephants squatting on local estate agents' books. Having neither children nor evacuees, Denise had first invited Graham to live with them, confessing her astonishment at his tolerating the pub. But he was never a man to lack excuses. She insisted he at least called for Sunday lunch. She had a pressing sense of social duty, devoting much energy to organizing the wives of Blackfriars consultants scattered round the countryside into cosy if meatless dinner parties, into fours of bridge or sets of tennis, and into the knitting of large quantities of Balaclava helmets.