SURGEON AT ARMS

'Splendid, thank you, splendid. Aeroplanes make everything so convenient these days. I still haven't quite got used to them. All that messing about one used to do with trains and boats was quite exhausting. Yes, Rome was wonderful. In September I think the light is just right. In summer the sun's too strong, and the shadows are the most intriguing part of any building-or of any human face.'

'I gather you made a quite sensational speech to the Plastic Surgery Congress, Sir Graham?'

He chuckled. 'Hardly sensational. My days for making sensations are past. But I put over a few of my old ideas, which still hold good. The basic principles have been rather swamped by the enormous advances in surgical technique and technology. But to my mind, it's as important to grasp them as firmly in 1968 as it was in 1948, when I took over the Directorship of the National Accident hospital. In fact, these basic principles haven't changed since 1940, when I was proud of being in a position to put them to good use.' He always referred to 1940 in front of the Press.

'I hope you've managed to get some holiday in Italy at the same time, Lady Trevose?' the reporter asked Clare.

'Yes, we had an absolutely wonderful fortnight in Positano.'

'Despite the continuing currency restrictions?' grinned the reporter.

'We are extremely modest abroad,' Graham told the man, quite sharply.

It was nine o'clock before they emerged from the Customs into the bright and confusing concourse. 'It's strange how this place always looks entirely different depending on whether you're going or coming,' Graham observed. 'It's the difference between hope and anticlimax, I suppose. A common enough sequence, in my own experience.'

'You've nothing to complain about this trip, darling.'

'Perhaps a little. They didn't take my speech seriously at the Congress, you know. Not entirely.'

'But they were absolutely charming,' Clare protested. 'Particularly the Russians.'

'Yes, but they think I'm old hat. Perhaps they're right. I'm a realist. Anyway, I livened them up. We'll see how the Americans take to me in Baltimore next spring.'

Graham looked round hopefully for the chauffeur booked to drive them into London. He felt that at his age the shunning of airport buses was a luxury worth indulging in. He was spry, and as thin as ever. He let his wispy hair grow overlong, and strands of it poked under his hat. He wore glasses all the time, large and round, making his eyes look more owlish than ever. He had grown rather untidy in his clothes, presenting an amiably donnish look to the world. Clare thought fondly he resembled an elderly elf.

The car had hardly reached the M4 before Graham fell asleep. Clare picked up the tartan rug provided by the hire firm and carefully laid it over him. This was less to prevent any malevolent chill taking advantage of his unguardedness-her nursing training enabled her to take a strictly scientific view of Graham's management-but an indulgence on her part, an expression of the steadfast tenderness she had shown towards him in their twenty-one years of marriage. She settled back in her corner, looking at the street lights, trying to correlate them with the necklaces she had admired from the air. She had grown fatter, but kept her pale good looks, and, with assistance, her fair hair. Graham tended to drop off to sleep rather often these days, she reflected. Perhaps he shouldn't gad about the world so much. But seventy-three, though a respectable age, was hardly over the threshold of senility. If she remembered, Churchill was rather older when he became Prime Minister through the persuasion of the ballot-box rather than the approaching muzzles of the German guns.

They had a small flat in Chelsea, and an unimposing house in the country on the way to Oxford, past the National Accident Hospital. Graham had worked there almost a dozen years, until his retirement in 1959. They had been the happiest of his life, happier even than at the annex. It was mainly because nothing had happened to him. He sometimes wondered if it were the security of a settled job, or the fires of his personality dimming to a comfortable glow, or simply Clare keeping a firm hand on him. He had busied himself with his work, developed a relish for committees, lectured enthusiastically, and drew veneration from the world as effortlessly as a well-established oak draws moisture from the soil. He enjoyed the respect, though it amused him. It was not so much the poacher turning gamekeeper, as the swashbuckling pirate becoming Admiral of the Fleet. Perhaps he possessed the same luck as his seafaring Cornish ancestors, he wondered, who had never turned from a chance of smuggling and generally ended clothed with gold lace and dignity.

There was a pile of letters inside the door.

'I can't face that lot at this hour of the night,' Graham said, as Clare started gathering them. 'I'll have a go at them in the morning. Anything from Dick?'