Surgeon at Arms

15

Maria's funeral caused a frightful fuss. She lingered a week, regaining consciousness, her hand groping the air, her eyes askew, speechless. During the days she was passive enough, but at nights she grew restless, clawing at her sheets, trying to get out of bed. The nurses were perfectly used to such behaviour. They brought long boards to slot along the sides of her bed, as though she were in her coffin already. On the Thursday morning she had another cerebral haemorrhage, and left life as she had entered it, with a gasp.

When they telephoned Graham at Smithers Botham he shrugged his shoulders. But he was surprised at his inner distress. It is a merciful quality of the human mind never completely to expect the inevitable. There were practical details again. He knew his wife wished to be buried at Biddenden, in more glorious days the Cazalay family's country 'place'. She had told him as much when her life was in danger once before, at the stormy birth of Desmond. But Biddenden was in Kent, and since the opening of the second front a military area. Graham seemed to remember that permits were needed to venture there. He approached Captain Pile, who confessed it outside his authority-though he had taken to Graham since the surgeon had become a national figure, often boasting to his cronies of association with this wonderful work. The undertakers finally sorted things out, and the following Wednesday morning Graham set off in the Morris again with Desmond. They started late, Graham having been called to a soldier brought into the annex from a bad road smash. In an age infested with priorities, he supposed that the dying could claim precedence over the already dead.

Graham remembered the Cazalays' old house well enough. It was a mile or two from Biddenden, near another village with a few houses, a pub, and the church. You first caught sight of it as the road turned on the hill, through a gap in the trees-but the trees had grown. Graham tried to remember the last time he'd been invited to spend a night in its spacious and chilly bedrooms. It was not really an old house, its twisted chimneys, leaded windows, and timbered gables going no farther back than the reign of King Edward the Seventh. It was rather vulgar, really, like the late Lord Cazalay himself. He wondered how the famous glasshouses were, the airfields in the area having been plastered by the Germans generously. As he drove past the lodge gates he saw a notice announcing HEADQUARTERS-FORCES AND WORKERS ENTERTAINMENT SERVICE. Well, he supposed, that was carrying on the first Lord Cazalay's tradition.

'Did you ever visit the place?' Graham asked Desmond.

'I don't know. I could hardly remember, could I? I was too young before the family disgrace.'

Graham grunted. He disliked to think of the disgrace spilling on to his own family. He had brought nothing but honour to the Cazalay tree. 'We're late,' he said, as the church came in sight. 'Everyone's gone in.'

They hurried inside, making for the front pew. Graham found himself beside a fat man with the bar of a black moustache across his red face-Maria's brother Charles, the second Lord Cazalay. They inclined their heads gravely. The elderly clergyman rose. A familiar noise intruded into the church, a phut-phut-phut coming steadily nearer. Graham shifted his feet uncomfortably. Now they had moved the anti-aircraft guns to the coast and left the Spitfires and Hurricanes to prowl inshore, most of the flying-bombs were being shot down. It occurred to him they were standing in the middle of the area proscribed by the Air Ministry for exactly this purpose. The noise grew closer. The clergyman stood with his mouth open. Graham noticed the church windows had already been blown out and boarded up. It would be a strange end, to be buried alive at his wife's funeral. The engine cut out. Silence. Then an explosion which shook the earth under them. The clergyman started the burial service in a tone of deep relief.

It was all mumbo-jumbo, Graham thought. The only difference between a human body alive and a human body dead was that between an engine running and switched off, though the stopped engine didn't inconveniently rot to pieces. There were a surprising number of people in the church, twenty or thirty. Old friends of Maria's, he supposed. Living ghosts, come to clank the rusty chains of their memories in his ears. He hoped the old clergyman would get it all over quickly. He probably would, there was always the chance of another flying-bomb.

As they wheeled Maria out, Graham noticed the route to the graveside passed a row of elaborate memorials to others of the Cazalay family. Though not her father and mother, who had died in the arid air of Venezuela, a destination recommending itself for Lord Cazalay's retirement through its lack of an extradition treaty with Great Britain. As Maria's remains were lowered from sight another flying-bomb came out of the distance. As the engine stopped, heads turned heavenwards in anxiety rather than supplication. It exploded with a distant thump. Graham wondered idly who was unfortunate enough to be underneath it.

'Mr Trevose, you must remember me,' said an old lady in a velvet hat, voice conscientiously hushed.

'Of course I do,' Graham lied.

'I was on the committee of the Sunshine League and the Free Medicine Club with your dear wife, you know.'

The Sunshine League! Well, the war had relieved the rich of the painful necessity of lightening the burdens of the poor. Graham found himself facing a thin old man with two sticks, whom he recognized after a moment as Sir John Blazey. He'd been chairman of the small hospital at Uxbridge which Graham had used as his first step to success in plastic surgery-rather unscrupulously, he supposed. He thought the fellow had died long ago.

'Your wife was a great woman, Trevose.' The old man shook his head reflectively. 'She was quite unsparing in her sense of duty to others. We shall never know how many unfortunate people have had cause to be grateful to her.'

Graham thanked him. He had almost forgotten the Maria of the busy committees, with her picture in the _Illustrated London News_ and the _Bystander._ Now the glories of her past began to draw his eye from the shadows of her later poverty and insanity. Well, it's good to know she died a credit to me, he thought. He found himself shaking hands with Val Arlott.

'Why did you come?' Graham asked, looking surprised. 'I didn't notice you in the church.'

'Have you a moment for a stroll?'

They walked together in the country lane outside the churchyard. 'I can't say why I came, exactly,' Val told him. 'I've been wondering. Perhaps it's to make up for missing the burial of her father. I was fond of old Cazalay. In some measure, I suppose I was responsible for his plight.' Graham made an unbelieving gesture. 'It's difficult to know. There are things I might have said or done to check his recklessness. Perhaps I'm suffering unconscious feelings of guilt towards the family. This is my penance. You'd know about such matters, wouldn't you? How are things going?'

'At the annex? We're still busy. Though the excitement's gone. We're an institution now. Like all institutions we've lost the fun of getting greater and grander, we've only the worry of seeing ourselves slipping.'

'I wish I'd done more for you medical people. Particularly now I'm getting so old and infirm. Look at Nuffield-given millions, set up professors, all manner of things.'

'You know they tried to sack me?'

'Yes, I got the P.M. to scotch it.'

Graham looked faintly put out. He had imagined the intervention a tribute to his own personality. 'After the war you'll have plenty of room for your charity, I should imagine, Val. These ideas about State medicine and so on, nothing will come of them, surely?'

'Don't you believe it. When the fighting stops we'll get a socialist government.'

'Surely you're not telling me the country's going to reject Churchill?'

'Why not? What stopped us giving in after Dunkirk? Our national streak of perversity.'

Graham looked glum. 'That'll make it tough for me, trying to build up again.'

'You've got a wonderful reputation.'

'I can't eat it.'

'No, but it helps. There'll be a lot of goodies and gongs going after the war, Graham. I don't see why you should be passed by. I take it you'd be agreeable if I put you in for something?'

Graham gave a faint smile. 'Haven't I been too gay a dog to be given an official collar?'

The war's altered a lot of that. After all, if you're brave enough to win the V.C. nobody gives a damn how many women you've screwed.'

'It's certainly an attractive proposition-' He broke off, listening 'No, it's only a motor-bike somewhere. Those doodlebugs are damn scaring. I thought that one in church was going to blow the lot of us up, corpse and all.'

'Don't worry. Duncan Sandys says we've got them licked. Only about one in five get through now.'

'When's the war going to be over?'

'Against the Germans, by Christmas. Against the Japs, in a couple of years. Against the Russians, God knows.'

With this deep and disquieting observation, Val Arlott shook hands, entered his chauffeur-driven car, and made off.

Graham felt he needed a drink.

The other mourners were cramming themselves with some agitation into three or four taxis parked off the lane. His son was standing alone, looking awkward by the lych gate. 'I expect you could do with a stiff one, Desmond, couldn't you?'

'Yes, it wouldn't come amiss.'

'We'll try our luck in the pub.'

They walked a quarter-mile down the lane in silence. The funeral had already been displaced from Graham's mind by his talk with Val. Some sort of 'gong'. What sort? They could hardly hand him the O.B.E., like some zealous food official. A K.B.E. would make him Sir Graham, which would sound very pretty. But he doubted if even Val could push him into the pure light of official favour. The bigwigs in the medical profession would certainly have a say in it, and they had always mistrusted him. Someone would be resentful he won his fight over the sacking, and eager to express it practically. And Haileybury would be against him. No, not Haileybury, Graham decided, after a moment's thought. Haileybury was far too stupidly righteous to take the chance of such easy revenge. Anyway, he didn't care. He had never let official honours flicker among the varied ambitions which had burned inside him. He knew medical knights enough, and he thought most of them horribly dreary.

They pushed open the door of the little saloon bar, to hear a loud voice declaring, 'But of course you must have some whisky. Come along, be a good fellow, look out a bottle from under the counter. Don't you understand, I've just been to a funeral?'

Graham hesitated, but it was too late to withdraw. He had never liked Maria's brother. The man had laughed at him as her suitor, paining young Graham with the discovery that in 'society' medical people were seen with the eye of fifty years previously, when the healer was admitted only via the tradesmen's entrance-though Graham had acted afterwards on this brutal realization, most profitably. He was also rather afraid of Charles Cazalay. He had the unscrupulousness of his father, if not the intelligence which made the most of it. He had tried to damage Graham once, and wouldn't hesitate to try again if it suited him.

'Don't you know who I am?' Lord Cazalay continued to the landlord, half-chaffing and half-hectoring. 'You should, you know. I'm Lord Cazalay. I used to live in the house. Before your day. I remember the fellow who kept this place, man called Greensmith. Greensmith would have found something for me, I don't mind telling you. Now run along and see what you can do.'

Overcome either by the materialization of the local legend or the solemnity of his errand, the landlord departed anxiously to search his cellar. Graham approached and said, 'It must be twenty years since we met.'

'Graham, I'm delighted to see you again,' Lord Cazalay greeted him affably. 'I'm sorry it should be on such a sad occasion.'

Graham introduced his son. 'You can't have set eyes on Desmond since he was a baby.'

Lord Cazalay briskly brushed his moustache and remarked, 'He's grown into a fine lad. As you know, I decided to make my home for some years in France.' He lowered his voice respectfully. 'It was very distressing about Maria, Graham. I know how you must feel. Her life was such a waste, shut out of the world so long. It was always a comfort to me that my sister had you to care for her-a medical man.'

'Thank you,' said Graham shortly.

'Well, Graham-you've become more famous than ever. I always seem to be reading about you in the papers.'

'I'm only doing my job. Like a lot of others who don't get noticed.'

'I'm with security, you know.'

'I thought you were censoring civilian letters?'

'It's the same thing,' said Lord Cazalay, looking put out.

The landlord reappeared, holding an unopened bottle of Haig like a newborn baby. As he poured three measures Lord Cazalay went on, 'What are your plans for after the war, Graham?'

'I think it's only courting disappointment making any.'

'I wouldn't say that. It'll be every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Like last time. The thing is to get in early, before the mugs. There'll be pickings enough for the right people.'

'Where precisely do you intend to pick, if I may ask?'

'Travel.' Lord Cazalay swallowed his whisky and demanded another. 'People have been cooped up here all the war, they'll be bursting to get out and about. There'll be plenty of spare shipping space, Army buses, that sort of thing, if you know where to put your hands on them. I've plenty of valuable contacts in France. I doubt whether they've got into any trouble with the Germans.' He looked at his glass reflectively, and added, 'As a matter of fact, I'm starting a small company. If you're interested, I could let you have a piece of it.'

Graham thought this brazen, even for his brother-in-law. "You're asking me for money, after having tried to get me publicly disgraced as a professional man?'

Lord Cazalay looked serious, then said, 'Graham, I'm glad you raised that business. It's been on my conscience. I'd been meaning to have a word with you, but with the war, of course, everything's been difficult. It was all a tragic misunderstanding, surely? I was simply wrongly advised. It was a relief to me nothing came of it.'

'It was to me, too.'

'Don't you trust me?' he asked, part humorously and part aggressively.

'I don't think this is quite the occasion to conduct commercial affairs.'

'No, no, perhaps you're right,' Lord Cazalay said quickly. 'Now we must be going. Desmond has to catch a train for Portsmouth.'

'We'll keep in touch,' Lord Cazalay promised. 'Yes, very much in touch.'

They left him with the bottle of whisky, which he seemed about to settle down and finish, on the estimable principle that unexpected blessings needed exploiting to the full.