SURGEON AT ARMS

'Of course you're making excuses,' Graham told him angrily. 'You're always making excuses, whenever you make a mess of it with a patient. If you give a perivenal injection, the vein was abnormal. If you break a needle, it was a faulty one. If your oxygen cylinder runs out, you told the orderly to change it. I only hope you'll find the coroner a more sympathetic listener.'

'I'm perfectly prepared to answer whatever the coroner feels like asking me,' John retaliated. 'I've nothing to hide.'

Graham made an impatient gesture. 'Oh, you'll come out of the inquest with your skin. Unavoidable mistake, pressure of work, patient's difficult airway. You'll continue with your job here as though nothing had happened. I shan't even be here to inconvenience you. You and Denise can go on putting out poisonous gossip about me, as much as you care. That probably helped to get me sacked, if you looked into it.'

'It's not fair to say that, Graham,' John told him patiently.

'It may not be, but it's the truth and you know it. Denise doesn't like me. She never has.'

'If Denise has sometimes been…well, indiscreet,' John admitted, 'she's been careful nothing could go further. Not outside the hospital. But now you're talking as if we were sworn enemies. Of course we're not. You're imagining things. Haven't we been friends, you and I, close friends, for years? Ever since the E.N.T. days? We've been through enough together, God knows. We've lost patients before.' He hesitated. 'We've even covered up for each other before. I wouldn't like to think that, however tragic, this incident meant the end of our personal relationship.'

'Be that as it may, but never in your life will you give another anaesthetic for me,' Graham told him angrily. 'At this particular moment, I doubt if that strikes you as much of a penalty. I'm down, I know it. But I won't stay down. When the war's over there'll be fifty anaesthetists in London breaking their necks chasing after my work. I'm going to make my fortune again. And this time you won't get ten per cent of it. Now please leave me in peace.'

That night, Clare woke with pain in her back. When she looked, she saw there was some vaginal bleeding. Graham telephoned Mr O'Rory. Then he carried her outside in a blanket, tucked her into the back of the Morris, and drove the ten miles to Smithers Botham. The gynaecologist was already waiting, greeting them with some mild joke about plastic surgeons working at the right end to avoid calls from their sleep. He put Clare into his ward, tipping up the foot of her bed on wooden blocks. He surrounded her with hot-water bottles, ordered an injection of morphine, prescribed doses of bromide, and added well-polished reassurance.

'Is she aborting?' asked Graham, outside the ward.

'Well, now, it's a threatened abortion,' Mr O'Rory said amiably. 'It's just eight weeks since the end of the lady's last menstrual period. So it wouldn't be an unheard-of occurrence at such a time, would it?'

'Could anything have caused it?' Graham asked anxiously. 'Mental distress, that sort of thing? You know what worry we've been having.'

'Oh, these things happen, they just happen. To tell the truth, none of us knows really why.'

'What's the chance of saving the foetus?'

'I'd say quite good. Yes, quite good. Though the lady will have to take life with queenly ease for quite a while afterwards.'

'That's nothing to bother about, nothing at all.'

'And anyway,' smiled the gynaecologist, 'the lady isn't necessarily destined to repeat the performance on a second occasion, is she? If all is lost, there's plenty more where that one came from. Eh, Graham?'

Graham began to wonder if he really liked Tim O'Rory after all.

The bleeding went on. The following day Mr O'Rory shook his head and said he feared the lady must visit his operating theatre. They gave Clare another dose of morphine and wheeled her along the cold concrete corridor. Mr O'Rory's anaesthetist administered gas and trichorethylene, they stuck her legs in the air, Mr O'Rory settled himself comfortably on a metal stool between them, and with a curette removed Graham's latest achievement for good.

Graham spent the night alone in the bungalow. Depression was no stranger at his side, but he had never known such misery before. Everything was running against him. When he told John Bickley that he wouldn't stay down he'd meant it. But for the first time he now sensed he was finished for good. He'd never recover professionally. Not when everyone could point to him as the man who was sacked in the war. The child was lost, and in such straits they'd be insane to start another. He wondered if Clare would stay with him. He had really little to offer her, and at her age she must surely expect something rewarding from life. It never occurred to Graham how much she might love him for himself. He always expected to take so much from others, he sometimes felt obliged to offer more than he possibly could.