Surgeon at Arms

3

'Trevose?' asked Captain Cuthbert Pile of the Royal Army Medical Corps, sitting in his office at Smithers Botham. 'Trevose? Never heard of him. What's he want, Corporal?'

'He's from Blackfriars, sir,' said Corporal Honeyman.

Captain Pile groaned. 'Not another? He doesn't need accommodation, I hope? I'm doing miracles as it is. The Ministry can't expect me to squeeze anyone else into the place. What's his line?'

'He seems to be a plastic surgeon, sir.'

Captain Pile looked horrified. The war had forced acquaintance with fellow-doctors in many outlandish specialities, but the company of professional face-lifters he felt outside the line of duty. 'I don't want to see him.'

'You made an appointment, sir. For two this afternoon.'

'Oh? Did I?'

'You'll remember the Ministry telephoned, sir. The gentleman has just joined the Emergency Medical Service.'

Captain Pile rummaged busily through the papers covering his broad desk, which commanded a fine view of the sweeping front drive. There was a fire flickering in the oversized marble grate and an overall glow of mahogany-and-leather Victorian comfort. It had been the office of the Smithers Botham medical superintendent, then a consultant psychiatrist in the Army, where he was, in time, to have greater influence and invoke more widespread exasperation than a good many generals.

'Where is this Trevose? In the hall?'

'Yes, sir. He would have come to see Annex D, sir.'

'Annex D,' observed Captain Pile sombrely. 'Very well, Corporal, I'd better have a word with him. You go back to your work.'

Corporal Honeyman withdrew to a small adjacent office to continue reading Lilliput, which he kept in a desk drawer with his bars of chocolate. He was a willowy young man with thinning, dandruff-laden hair, glasses in circular steel frames, and a battledress which chafed his long neck. He was a sight which depressed Captain Pile deeply. Corporal Honeyman had been a clerk in an estate agent's before joining the Army through love of his country and dislike of living with his mother. The Army found he could use a typewriter, and sent him to Smithers Botham. He felt he would have been tolerably happy there, had it not been for Captain Pile, whom he was coming to care for even less than his mother.

Captain Pile sat reading through some documents, feeling a little wait would put his visitor in his place. His own civilian career had been sadly frustrating. An intolerance of sick humans had led him into various medical administrative jobs, an intolerance of even healthy ones had made all of them short. But in the Army he felt he was fulfilling himself, having command of all Service patients finding themselves in Smithers Botham and charge of the general running of the place. He rose, and inspected himself carefully in the gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. Red-cheeked, dark-moustached, well built, if inclined to be stoutish for the late thirties, he felt he filled his new uniform stylishly. He placed his cap on his well-brilliantined head, took his gloves, leather-bound stick, and greatcoat, and opened the door on the hall.

'Mr Trevose?' He found the caller slight, pale, and fortyish, with large eyes in a large head, wearing under his overcoat a double-breasted chalk-striped grey flannel suit cut with smartness-flashiness, the captain might have said. 'I know nothing whatever about plastic surgery,' he told Graham proudly. 'And frankly I'm too busy to start learning such subjects now. I suppose you make women new noses and that sort of thing?'

'That sort of thing,' said Graham.

'Must be very profitable.'

They went on to the broad front steps, Captain Pile giving a quick glance up and down. There might be a soldier or two about to award him a salute. But there were no soldiers, only a schizophrenic cutting the grass. 'Annex D has been empty for a while,' he explained. 'It's not one of the best wards, but your other people from Blackfriars have bagged those already. I'm afraid you've rather missed the bus.'

They started across the lawn.

Captain Pile unlocked a heavy teak door in another yellow-brick wall with more broken glass on top. Graham's spirits, already sinking under the weight of Smithers Botham's massive ugliness, plunged further. The annex was ghastly. It looked older and bleaker than the rest of the hospital. It was as narrow as a ship, two stories high, a hundred yards long. Slates were missing from the roof, a good many windows were broken, and all of them were backed with stout iron bars. A jumble of small buildings sprouting iron stove-pipes were tacked on one end as an afterthought. The garden had for some seasons clearly been left to its own devices. Even Captain Pile looked faintly apologetic.

Inside was dark, damp, and empty. On the bare floor were sheets of newspaper, streaming toilet rolls, a pile of black-chipped enamel mugs, and other wreckage beyond Graham's powers of identification. Something scampered in the corner. The smell was strange, but predominantly faecal.

'Do you mean human beings actually lived here?' Graham exclaimed. 'And not so very long ago?'

'It's a bit musty,' Captain Pile agreed. 'I gather they used to keep their senile dementias in the place. You can't expect those sort of cases to take much notice of their surroundings.'

Graham eyed a wooden partition dividing the long room, its door swinging ajar. 'What's through there?'

'The night ward. This would be the day room.'

Graham picked his way gloomily through the rubbish to the far end of the annex. Of the tacked-on buildings, one revealed itself as the kitchen, with a stone floor and a black iron range. The second contained some cracked washbasins and three large bath-tubs raised proudly on pedestals in the middle. In the third, Graham found himself facing what appeared to be a row of horse-boxes. He discovered the half-doors opened inwards, to disclose lavatories with no seats and the chains encased in lengths of pipe running from cistern to handle.

The patients have hanged themselves on the chains,' Captain Pile told him informatively.

Graham stuck his hands in his pockets. After turning down Haileybury's offer he had signed a contract with the Emergency Medical Service, and was committed to install and run a plastic surgery unit at Smithers Botham. Though he was always able to see a new face in the battered and bleeding remains of an accident, as a sculptor can in a lump of stone, it was beyond him to depict the rotting building as a busy, complex, cheerful, sterile centre for healing the wounded.

'That day room would have to be my operating theatre,' he suggested glumly. 'The place must be ripped apart, replumbed, fitted with sinks, sterilizers, electric points. We'll have one ward in the night room and another upstairs. God knows how we'll shift anaesthetized patients up there-fireman's lift, I suppose. I'll want partitions for the anaesthetic room, the surgeons' room, the nurses' room…and where am I supposed to fit the photographer's studio, X-ray, somewhere for the dentists? I'll need extractor fans, heating, reinforced ceilings for the lights, doors widening, new windows made. Those horrible iron bars must come off for a start. I want the whole place painted a bright pastel shade. Duck-egg blue, something like that. I'll have gay curtains, white bedside lockers, flowers everywhere, comfortable chairs, radios, the prettiest nurses in the hospital. My patients get depressed enough with themselves, without any encouragement from their surroundings.'

'Duck-egg blue, did you say? murmured Captain Pile, mystified.

'I want those two far tubs in the awful wash-house partitioned off. They'll have to do for the saline bath unit. The kitchen we'll have to equip again from scratch. We'll put locks on the lavatories. I'm far more likely to hang myself on the chain than the patients are. No, no, it's all impossible,' he decided abruptly. 'No one could turn this place into anything but a pigsty. They can bum it to the ground, as far as I'm concerned. They'll have to send me somewhere else.'

Captain Pile grunted. 'Where else had you in mind?'

Graham lit another cigarette. The dreadful man was right, of course. Hospital accommodation was as precious as anti-aircraft guns. It was Smithers Botham or nowhere.

'We'll have to make the most of it, I suppose,' he said resignedly. 'Baron Larrey did wonders for Napoleon's wounded in cowsheds.'

'Well, it's not my pigeon.' The captain was becoming impatient. 'You'll have to take up rebuilding problems direct with the Ministry. Have you seen enough? I've got to get back to the grindstone.'

Graham stopped half-way along the ward. He noticed a door with a cracked glass panel leading to a veranda under a rusty green-painted roof. It reminded him of a similar one in the sanatorium where he had been sent to die as a young man, a war ago. He wondered if that verandah were still there, and who was lying in his place to count the rivets of the roof in the feverish boredom of tuberculosis. As he turned away, another door with a small glass peephole caught his eye. He swung it open. A tiny high barred window disclosed a cubicle lined entirely with black padded leather, even the floor. A padded cell. Graham couldn't recall seeing one before.

'I expect you'll find a use for it,' Captain Pile suggested helpfully.

Graham walked back across the lawn in silence. It was all horribly depressing. But, he reminded himself, it was better than having to say 'Sir' to Haileybury.