SURGEON AT ARMS

The next morning Graham had a letter from Haileybury, confirming his new appointment and inviting him to lunch with some political figures who were enthusiastic over the new hospital. Mr Bevan himself, he added, might possibly be joining them for the coffee. Graham wrote resigning his post as consultant surgeon to Blackfriars. He would devote himself wholly to his new interest. He would have the best part of fifteen years in the place before he retired, and he would leave it as a splendid monument to himself. He would meanwhile live alone and put up with it. After all, he was a widower, not some crabby never-loved bachelor like old Crampers. He wondered vaguely if Crampers were still alive. He doubted it. The Welfare State seemed to have been the death of him.

26

The politicians' lunch was held in the House of Commons, a fair proportion of which, like a fair proportion of the capital itself, lay in apparently permanent ruins. Graham was interested to see for the first time the inside of the place, though confessing as he was escorted rapidly through the corridors and stairways a feeling of disappointment. The marble floors, the vulgar murals, the pillared corners and vaulted ceilings, the solemn dress-suited attendants, reminded him of somewhere-yes, it was the casino at Monte Carlo. He supposed that both structures had been raised about the same time, and had much in common in their function.

The party gathered in a smallish upstairs room with mullioned leaded windows and an over-abundance of carved pale oak, overlooking the river. Graham at once realized the importance of the affair. Of the thirty-odd men in the room, about half he recognized as top medical people, including Haileybury. Clearly, the Government had taken the new hospital to its heart.

Never a martyr to the self-inflicted tortures of modesty, Graham was flattered to notice the stir his arrival made among the politicos. They would have heard enough of him during the war, he supposed. Or perhaps, he reflected wryly, they were aware of his having married the daughter of the first Lord Cazalay, and his kinship to the rogue at the seat of their present troubles. Graham was coming to detach himself from the man in Brixton prison with more assurance every day. He decided his brother-in-law had enough on his hands without dragging him into the mess-though with a man like that you never could tell. But if anything about himself was exposed by the promised radical surgery of the tribunal, he fancied even the memory of the present feast would induce in his hosts an attack of acute dyspepsia.

Graham found himself sitting next to a young Member of Parliament with junior rank in the Government, though he was vague what, and felt it would be discourteous to reveal such ignorance. Graham was far too self-centred to have much interest in politics, a quality which, combined with his exhibitionism, might have made him a successful politician. He had troubled neither to vote in the recent election, nor even to hear Churchill's broadcast speeches during the war. Like most medical people, he saw mankind less as noble sufferers in adversity than as sadly muddle-headed ignoramuses, to be saved from themselves by well-educated ladies and gentlemen as kindly as possible. With a lazy if reasonable over-simplification, Graham wrote off the Tories as appealing to the populace's natural greed, and the Socialists to its natural envy. If the Government were now trying to organize everyone's life from the cradle to the grave he felt it probably a sound idea, most inhabitants of a growingly complicated world apparently being incapable of even crossing the road with impunity. Long ago, in the days of the first Lord Cazalay, he had grasped that politicians ran to their own rules, as detached from those of everyday life as the rules of some game of cards. You had to let them get up to whatever they wished, running your life as best you could and allowing for their existence like the bacteria contaminating every article you touched.

The young M.P. revealed himself over the soup as a strong enthusiast for the coming National Health Service.

'My father,' he explained forcefully to Graham, 'suffered from bad eyes. He couldn't afford to attend a doctor, or an optician, or anyone qualified for the job. Do you know what he was obliged to do? Go to one of the cheap sixpenny stores, where they had a card affair, with those different-sized letters on it. Right on the counter, among all the tubes of toothpaste. He'd pick up lenses and try them till he found the right ones. Thousands of sufferers from bad eyesight had to do exactly the same. Those cheap stores were providing a valuable social service on behalf of their shareholders, if they but knew it. But it's disgraceful, isn't it, Sir Graham? In future, every citizen will be entitled to a properly fitted pair of spectacles as a right. Just as he's entitled to clean water or the protection of the law.'