SURGEON AT ARMS

Their nineteen-year-old son was on holiday in Spain, with, Graham suspected, the girl he had met at the university. Well, it would be a bit of fun, he wished he'd had the chance to do the same at Dick's age, but then trips to Spain were only for the rich and venturesome. And the sunshine would do the girl good, he thought. She had struck him as a dismally anaemic young woman.

'There's a letter he seems to have sent from Malaga.'

'Read it to me, darling, will you?' Graham sat in the armchair. 'I'm rather tired, and his handwriting's dreadful.'

'And there's something from Blackfriars.' She tore open a large envelope. 'They've made it at last,' she exclaimed. 'They're actually going to open the new Arlott Wing by Christmas. Of course, they want you to perform the ceremony.'

Graham laughed. The rebuilding of Blackfriars beside the Thames had long ago become a harmless joke. When the war had ended, the staff imagined they would quit Smithers Botham in a year or two, but the volume of hospital work so increased with the National Health Service, and the volume of hospital building so diminished with the national bankruptcy, the country was several times on the brink of another war before they finally parted company. 'I think we've beaten St Thomas's to it, haven't we?' he asked. 'Or is it more or less a dead heat?' He opened and closed his hands. 'Perhaps they might ask me to perform an inaugural operation on some unlucky fellow? It's an amusing thought. I wouldn't mind having a knife in my hands again. After all, John Bickley's still giving anaesthetics for private cases all over London. Though perhaps he only does it to get away from Denise.'

John had worked for Graham again. Graham's private practice had in fact continued almost as busily as ever, through an interesting fraction written into the Health Service known as 'nine-elevenths'. The consultants were paid for the nine-elevenths of their time spent in the Service, the other two-elevenths being free to extract money from those members of the public feeling disinclined to accept its benefits. And two-elevenths of a consultant's time, with evenings, early mornings, and week-ends, was a handsome period for profits. Without this concession, the consultants would have dug in their toes and there would have been no Health Service at all. But Nye Bevan was an even more penetrating realist than Graham.

Clare read their son's letter, which said a lot about the sunshine, wine, beaches, and bullfights, but nothing about girls. The omission confirmed Graham's suspicion. He got up to pour himself a drink, and said, 'I suppose he'll get married pretty soon?'

'I don't know. He's no one in mind.'

'But they all seem to get married these days as soon as they're legally entitled to. Perhaps they look upon it in the same light as learning to drive a car. Once the obstacle to any enjoyment's removed, you indulge yourself automatically.'

'He'll wait until he's qualified, surely?'

'In my day, even in Desmond's day, that seemed to be the rule. But of course we lived on our parents or our wits. Now they live on everyone else's parents. Doubtless it's all a good idea.'

'He'll wait till he finds the right girl. He's terribly sensible.'

Graham smiled. 'I had to wait a very long time till I found the right girl. Even then I didn't realize it, did I?' She said nothing. He seldom brought up their times at Cosy Cot. She felt he liked to imagine the episode had never happened, that he had met her for the first time when he had entered, extremely dramatically, her children's ward one wet March morning in 1947. It was a forbidden topic, just like Maria's divorce.

Graham sipped his whisky. 'Do you know, Clare, I'm beginning to think that life resembles something I haven't experienced for donkey's years-it's like Saturday night in an old-fashioned public house.' As she looked puzzled, he gave a grin and said, 'It gets better towards closing-time.'

When they went to bed he lay reading for half-an-hour. He snapped the book shut and said, '"Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks:" Strange how those lines of Eliot's keep coming back to me. I must have read them years ago, when I first started at the annex. But it's right, isn't it? Everything else is the trimmings. It's the most useful thing you can learn from medicine. How to sort the two out. What's the time?'

'Half-past midnight.'

Graham turned over. 'For God's sake remind me in the morning I'm due to see a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons. He wants to touch me for some charity, I imagine.'

He turned out the light. At twenty to four he woke, switched on the light, gasped at the pain exploding from his throat into his left arm, and died.

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