Surgeon at Arms

12

To find himself confronted with fatherhood on a second occasion filled Graham with the same numb shock as on the first, almost exactly twenty-two years previously. With Maria, their sexual endeavours were so beset with difficulties he somehow felt her reproductive system too inefficient for conception. With Clare, he had put a touching faith in science. As usual, the human element had let him down. It was the same in the annex, when they got a run of infection after the nurses forgot to sterilize the needles properly in carbolic.

Monday was Mr Tim O'Rory's day at Smithers Botham. Graham caught the gynaecologist at lunch in the medical officers' mess and invited him for a stroll on the lawn.

'It's Clare,' he said, once out of earshot. 'I think she's pregnant.'

'Well, now,' said Mr O'Rory. A thick-set, dark-haired, red-faced, humorous Irishman, he looked kindly on feminine failings through his heavily rimmed glasses and seemed to find them an endless source of innocent merriment. 'And what gives rise to this little suspicion?'

'She's a fortnight overdue. She's always been as regular as clockwork before. Of course, it might be a chill, something like that, mightn't it?'

'Sitting on a damp park bench, doctor?' Mr O'Rory chuckled. 'Maybe so.'

'You don't think that's a possibility?'

'You know my low mind, Graham. Any woman outside a nunnery, who misses a period between the ages of fifteen and fifty, must be assumed pregnant until proved otherwise. And I'm not so sure about the nunnery these days, either.'

Graham was in no mood for professional pleasantries. 'Can you do a test in the lab?' he asked irritatedly.

'I will certainly invoke the assistance of a small frog, Graham, if you want. I'll be needing a specimen of the lady's urine.'

'I've got one in the car.'

'But don't get too alarmed,' Mr O'Rory added amiably. 'The lady may have made a mistake in her dates. It's remarkable how unreliable the feminine gender is at its fundamental calculations.'

The telephone at Cosy Cot rang the following evening. 'That was Tim,' said Graham, putting down the receiver. 'It's on.'

Clare turned her eyes back to her sewing. Graham stuck his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the small sitting-room, which was filled with books, medical journals, files of notes, photographs of his patients, and had a coloured picture of Bubbles over the fireplace.

'It's wonderful news, isn't it?' he declared.

She looked up again. 'Are you sure you want it?'

'But of course I do! As long as you do?'

'More than anything.'

Graham perched on the edge of her chair and put his arm round her tightly. So, he thought, one of my wriggling little spermatozoa has threshed with its hair-like tail across the black mucoid depths of Clare's pelvis, to sink itself joyfully into the speck of jelly comprising her ovum. The stark object of the most fashionable wedding, with all its elaborate trimmings of an ecclesiastical, legal, floral, and emotional nature, had been simply achieved. No trouble at all. The human race really did surround itself with a lot of fuss over its reproduction. Clare wondered what he was going to say. At least he'd declared he wanted the child, she thought. She didn't dare to question whether he really meant it. Living with Graham, she rarely dared to question whether he really meant anything.

'There'll be a terrible lot of practical details to settle,' Graham announced.

He immediately threw himself vigorously into solving the varied problems set by the new pregnancy. He decided Clare must leave the annex at once. Staff-nurse Jones could enjoy unexpected promotion, he must find someone to succeed the girl as staff-nurse. Appointments must be made with Mr O'Rory. Specimens must be collected. A woman must be sought to help in the bungalow. They would go away for the holiday in Wales, it would do Clare good. Her ration-book must be exchanged at the Food Office for a pregnant woman's green one. Extra milk and vitamins must be applied for, with a dozen Government forms. Pregnancy struck Graham as a highly complicated item of official business. It had been so much simpler last time. Which reminded him, he really must do something about Maria.

Graham had been meaning to do something about Maria for over a year. But there had always seemed a last-minute snag. Whenever he steeled himself to start instructing his lawyers there was somehow a rush of work in the annex, keeping his mind occupied for weeks. The solicitors had anyway been bombed out of the City, and re-established themselves at some inaccessible address near Southend-on-Sea. There seemed then no urgency. Clare appeared perfectly content with their arrangement. Graham couldn't see how ten minutes in a registry office would make the slightest difference to the pair of them. Or perhaps, he sometimes suspected, he still had his fingering reluctance about disowning Maria for good. Or perhaps…perhaps he was afraid of committing himself wholly to Clare? It was too difficult to think about, and the problems of the annex came first. Clare certainly raised the topic of a divorce. He felt it only to be expected, but she never harped on it for long. It never occurred to Graham that she saw how much it distressed him, nor that her silence was the expression of her terror of losing him.

But now the solicitors were written to. A divorce was imperative, the wheels of the law must be geared to the rapid process of reproductive physiology. The solicitors wrote back with a promise of doing their best, explaining the Court would doubtless be sympathetic, but there were innumerable difficulties in wartime. He fixed a visit to Southend for the end of the month. He also agreed at last to see Clare's parents in Bristol. It was a glum prospect, even his charm might not prove an antidote to all unpleasantness, particularly as Mr Mills was hardly older than himself. Besides, a journey in the crowded, slow, and foodless wartime trains would be terrible.

First of all he must put matters to his son Desmond.

Something seemed to have gone wrong with Desmond. At Cambridge he had taken a fair degree in Part I of his Tripos, stayed on a year to breathe the rarefied academic atmosphere of the Part II, and done rather badly. From a gay if self-centred schoolboy he was turning into a reticent and solemn young man, wearing a dignity as unfitting for his years as a middle-age spread. He was even something of a prig. When he had left Cambridge that summer to start his three years' clinical course at Smithers Botham, Graham had assumed he would move in with them at Cosy Cot. But Desmond was reluctant. He suggested it might somehow hold him up to ridicule, particularly in the eyes of his cousin Alec, Edith's child, who was arriving to study at Smithers Botham the same autumn. Desmond arranged to live in the hospital itself, as one of the dozen-strong students' 'Emergency Squad' under the direct orders of Captain Pile-though for what emergency this squad was held in readiness, and how it would tackle it when it arose, everyone had long ago forgotten.

Graham dismissed all this as the self-dramatization to which the young were so distressingly liable. Desmond had probably been mixing with the wrong sort of people at college. Though perhaps the son's disinterest was partly the father's fault, Graham admitted. He had never taken overmuch care in Desmond's upbringing. Before the war he was too busy making money and amusing himself. During it he was too busy with the annex. Anyway, the lad seemed to step along confidently enough by himself. But now there was another factor. The war would certainly be grinding along in 1945, when Desmond was due to qualify, to sweep him with the others into the medical branches of the Forces. Why, he might even find himself under the orders of Haileybury! Somehow, Graham determined, he must get the young man into the Navy.

Graham set the scene of Desmond's enlightenment carefully. He had anyway been remiss about standing the boy treats. He made the effort of booking a couple of stalls for _Blithe Spirit_-as Russians were then being bombed instead of Britons, a seat in a London theatre was as hard to come by as a seat in a long-distance express. After the show they went to an Italian restaurant in Soho. In the first black nights of the war Graham had sometimes cheered himself up there by toasting Allied victory in Chianti at the insistence of the proprietor, who by 1942 had been caged up for a couple of years in the Isle of Man. But the elderly head waiter remembered him, and even laid the establishment open to immediate prosecution by letting them consume not only soup and chicken but a slice of fish as well.

Over the meal, they talked about their work. Now Desmond was growing up in medicine, Graham could enjoy the singular satisfaction of a medical parent in watching his child emerge as a professional colleague. They met often enough at Smithers Botham on perfectly easy terms, though coming to talk less of personal things than their cases, or to dissect the characters, abilities, and errors of the other consultants.

'Anything interesting in the annex at the moment, Dad?' Desmond asked across their corner table in the restaurant.

'A lot of oddments. The by-products of the war, mostly. There's a man from the Desert who gave himself a rub-down with petrol-they're short of water, you understand. Then the idiot lit a cigarette. He was an awful mess. There's a naval rating who was working in the engine-room of a destroyer when some fool turned on the superheated steam. Tragic cases. There's not much glory in being run over by your own tank. Anyway, war's a horrible business.'

'Are you getting sick of it?'

'I've never had time to pause and think. I suppose when I get back to bobbing noses, it'll be a relief knowing the patients' real suffering is only in the pocket.' Graham added after a moment, 'Sometimes it's difficult for me to realize our present highly abnormal form of life won't go on for ever. I suppose the same goes for all our generals.'

'Do you expect a lot of changes after the war?'

'I can tell you one.' Graham picked up his small glass of sloe gin, doing wartime duty for cognac. 'I'm going to obtain a divorce from your mother.'

Desmond considered this for some moments. 'That comes as something of a surprise, I must say. After all this time.'

'But surely my decision doesn't mean much to you, does it?' Graham asked, rather over-anxiously. 'Your mother's been ill for so long. You were only a child when she first had to go into hospital. You can hardly remember her when she was…well, as she used to be.'

Desmond said nothing. Graham wondered what Maria would be like had she kept her wits and her money. Doing something energetic in the war, doubtless. She was always the busy type.

'She's a complete wreck of her former self,' Graham added. 'Only I can appreciate the change.'

'She's not in very good shape, admittedly.'

'That's a mild way of putting it, Desmond. I assure you it makes not the slightest difference to your mother if I remain her husband or not. The whole conception of marriage is far beyond her ability to grasp. She's certified, you understand-certified as insane. Of course, I'll see she's looked after. Just as I do now. She'll stay in that home in comfort until the end of her days.'

'But why, Dad?' Desmond looked more solemn than ever. 'Why this sudden decision?'

'Because I'm going to marry Clare. Surely you must have expected that?'

'No. Not really. I didn't think you felt it necessary.'

'It's decidedly necessary,' said Graham, nettled by the remark. 'Clare's pregnant.'

Desmond stared at him.

'It's going to call for a measure of mental readjustment in both of us,' Graham continued. 'But it's a demonstrable fact. The embryo has been created. Your baby half-brother or sister already exists, ectoderm, endoderm, mesoderm, yolk-sac, amnion, the lot. Two or three millimetres long, snug in the mucosa of Clare's uterus. We can't get away from that.'

'What's Alec going to say?'

'Why do you always bother what Alec's going to say?' Graham asked irritably.

'He's always trying to get some sort of hold over me. He's got a nasty tongue when he likes.'

'I'm sure you can cope with Alec'

'It's bad enough his taking my money.'

'I'm certainly not going into that again now,' Graham told him promptly. 'If the cost of his education is coming from your trust fund, it was the least I could do for both the family and for Aunt Edith.'

Alec's father, the medical missionary, had maintained that the rewards of his vocation were to be found not in this world but the next, where presumably he had been enjoying them for seven years since dying, flat broke, in Malaya.

'Anyway, it's only a loan,' Graham pointed out. 'Alec's supposed to pay it all back once he's qualified. In the end you'll be no worse off.'

'What do you suppose Aunt Edith is going to say about your marrying again?'

Graham raised his eyebrows. That delicate little complication hadn't occurred to him. 'Desmond, I'm afraid I've got to go ahead with this divorce. I hope you'll come to see it as the right step.'

'I only see it as being rather hard on mother.'

'That's ridiculous.' Graham became angry. 'You know perfectly well most of the time your mother hasn't even the first idea who I am.'

'Still, she is my mother. I feel sorry for her.'

He really had little affection for his mother. But he was desperately frightened about doing the 'wrong thing'. He was becoming aware of inner forces which could drive him along the same devious paths as his father, and that must be avoided at all costs. Graham's life had already made his son an easy target for ridicule, not only from Alec but from any of the other students disposed to a bit of ragging. For security he must fly into conventionality.

'Now you're just being pompous,' said Graham curtly. Desmond turned red, and Graham rebuked himself. He'd been too savage. Desmond was really very young, and confused with the ways of the world. Just as he had been himself at the same age. 'Come, Desmond,' he added more kindly. 'Try and adjust yourself. Clare won't be more to you than a stepmother in name. She'll be terribly tactful. I promise you that. You'll come to like her tremendously.'

Desmond hesitated, and said, 'I think I prefer to make up my own mind about people, Dad.'

Graham called for the bill. Desmond really could be terribly difficult when he wanted. Just like Maria.

Everyone at Smithers Botham seemed to know about the baby from its conception. Graham had confided in John Bickley, and he supposed Denise had spread the news with enthusiasm. Crampers had grunted something at him-congratulatory, Graham hoped. Even Captain Pile had made the point of repeating that no woman whatever was permitted to give birth within the hospital's glass-topped walls. Graham didn't care about the notoriety. He rather enjoyed it. He told himself more forcibly every day he was delighted with their child. A young life, something to perpetuate himself right to the end of the century, was an anodyne for any painfully intruding ideas about death and extinction. He could have no possible reservations about it whatever, he decided. And it would be wonderful for Clare. He treated her with the greatest tenderness, physical and mental. As for the effect on the mother-to-be of her circumstances in general, and her standing in the eyes of everybody at Smithers Botham in particular, it never crossed his mind to enquire.

All this happened in the busy fortnight following the Sunday when they rang the church bells. Then he had a letter from the Ministry terminating his contract at the annex.