SURGEON AT ARMS

He noticed she was young, and very plain. The regulations which forbade the lighting of shop windows threw a kindly shade on goods more immediately for sale, and the West End of London was as alive with seductive murmurs as Prospero's Isle. Graham supposed the girls hadn't enjoyed such a busy time of it since the lightless days of Boswell. He entered the empty house, reflecting sombrely that the difference between many women he knew of easy-going morals and these seedy and undoubtedly infected creatures was exactly the same as between Haileybury and himself. Even Haileybury had done the occasional beautifying job for guineas. But Graham had for the best part of fifteen years sold his services without question to all comers. And what was left? He had been dreadfully extravagant. His contract at Smithers Botham had exchanged an income of thousands for one of hundreds and debarred him from private practice-if he could have found any, plastic surgery suddenly being fashionable no longer, perhaps because the possibility of having one's head blown off ousted any dissatisfaction with the look of it. 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.