For the last year of the war they saw each other regularly. Hal brought her a good deal of Spam, Life magazine, and some nylons-her eyes shone as she smoothed the wonderfully sheer material with her fingers. When he asked her to marry him she was amazed. Marriage simply hadn't entered into her scheme of things. Illness and death, yes, but widowhood had become a settled way of life, to be borne as patiently as residence in the Malayan jungle or in the Devon guest-house. Yet she realized that she belonged to the dread class of 'distressed gentlefolk'. What would she do after the war? She was frightfully poor, she would have to go typing for solicitors until her fingers became too infirm for the keyboard. Hal was really very kind. And he was a doctor. The emotions of her life had been entwined round doctors, as pliantly as the serpents round Aesculapius' staff. She would have to live in America, but America was the place for self-betterment, everyone said so. The ideal of self-betterment had driven her as a girl from her father's butcher's shop in Ramsgate-to where? After a quarter of a century, to running a boarding-house. It was a chance. Only one thing could she be certain of. It would be her last.

  That summer, the inhabitants of two Japanese cities were off-handedly incinerated, and the war was over. A week later Lease Lend was cut off, equally off-handedly. It occurred only to Lord Keynes that the country was broke, and the millennium which so agitated Mr Cramphorn would have to be financed by a loan of American money. So the country, like Edith, escaped from the possibility of German mastership to the certainty of American, with as much excitement and less thought

  Edith, Hal, and Alec met for the first time in the basement restaurant of the Criterion in Piccadilly. It was a disturbing gathering. Alec seemed to find Edith's lover only funny. She had been worried for months at the peculiar excited flippancy in her son, quite unlike the stolid outlook of his father. She gave him a cheque for a hundred pounds, explaining it was all she could afford, and he must save it to visit her in America, once she was married and transported by the United States Government with eighty thousand other British women. Alec decided to spend it on a car. The medical profession lived at the time in a weird intimacy with the motor trade. Though the petrol ration was small, increased by the new Government so meanly as to arouse the irritation of even the _New Statesman,_ doctors, who went on errands of mercy, were allowed more or less as much as they could use, with a bit of fiddling. He'd raise the fare to see his mother when the time came, he decided. He was never able to give a serious thought to the future of anything, particularly when there was fun to be found in the present.

  During the rest of the hot summer of 1945 the war began to run down at Smithers Botham as gaily as everywhere else. There still wasn't much to drink, but there was A.F.N. Munich on the radio, the jam ration was said to be going up (incorrectly), and the place was enlivened by the first demobilized medical officers, sent on a six-month course to refit them for gentler practice. Captain Pile was finally demobilized. He went to Olympia for his new suit, and at once returned to Smithers Botham. He had grown to like the country hospital, and the future medical world was filled with half-glimpsed hazards. He had taken the post of medical officer to Smithers Botham as a mental institution, and was charged with preparing its return to normal function whenever Blackfriars could be evicted. As he walked up the long drive from the bus, once again mere Dr Pile, he saw the portico had for a second time been decorated. A Union Jack was spread across the columns, and a painted banner announced, 'Welcome Home Our Heroic Cuthbert'.

  18

  The first annual dinner of the Annex Club at the beginning of 1947 was predictably a noisy affair. It was held at a restaurant frustrated like all others from doing its best for its diners, by the Government order that only three courses might be served, including the soup. The law took itself seriously, an establishment serving asparagus on a separate plate instead of accompanying the sliver of meat having already incurred prosecution. But the millennium had arrived. The coal mines had been nationalized, the railways and the doctors were next. The rations were reduced, coupons were needed for bread, and cigarettes were as hard to come by as ever.

  The club was Peter Thomas's idea. Military units seemed hardly able to await their dispersal before arranging their reunions, so why not the patients who had passed through the annex? Besides, some sort of society was needed to help those who suffered from disability, official meanness, or bad luck. And it would be tragic for the buoyant comradeship of Smithers Botham to be lost without trace in the rough waters of the postwar world. The annex itself still existed, almost as busily as ever, with Tudor Beverley in charge. Graham had left, as he had promised himself, with the end of the war. His status as a Blackfriars consultant entitled him to half a dozen beds in the main wards at Smithers Botham for civilian cases, the arrangement to which Haileybury had tried to condemn him in 1942. But the time for self-sacrifice was past, Graham thought, personal and financial. One day the annex would have to close and Smithers Botham evacuated, he'd be back in the bright new wards of Blackfriars again beside the Thames-though from the permanent look of the hospital's rubble, that day seemed as unlikely to dawn as the one of settled amity across the split face of Europe.

  Graham was naturally the club's president. It still gave him a feeling of smugness to see himself described on the printed menu as 'Sir Graham Trevose, K.B.E., D.Sc, F.R.C.S.'. The goodies had been delivered as Val Arlott had promised, and the doctorate of science had been conferred on him at the same time by a provincial university keen on entering into the spirit of the times. He had found himself more proud of the knighthood than he had expected. It was an emblem of something he sought all his life-a recognition that his work was far from trivial, but on a par with that of general surgeons majestically toiling among their sausage-chains of guts. Besides, everyone was terribly nice about it. Haileybury had called specially to congratulate him, almost with tears in his eyes. It was a well-deserved honour, he explained, not only for the surgeon and for the annex, but for the speciality of plastic surgery, to which he was himself about to return. Graham knew that Haileybury, of all his wellwishers, meant every word. He also knew the intense self-discipline which had brought the man to face him, for the first time since their meeting beside the River Itchen. He would know Graham well enough to sense the risk of a cutting rebuff. But Graham told himself the time for wounding was over, and reconciliation was in fashion.

  'Thank you,' Graham said solemnly, shaking hands. 'Thank you…Eric'

  Haileybury swallowed. 'It is a real pleasure to congratulate you…Graham.'

  It was the first time they had used each other's Christian names. In a world which could address old Cramphorn as 'Mate', reflected Graham, such relaxations were plainly overdue.

  At the dinner, Peter Thomas proposed a toast to 'The Wizz'. Graham replied. Shortly afterwards the patients started singing, something innocuous at first, _Macnamara's Band,_ moving on to _Cats on the Rooftops,_ an enduring favourite, then the _Ball of Kirriemuir._ Graham knew this always ended in argument, and sometimes in fisticuffs, over such points as the Minister's Wife Who Felt Unweel coming before The Swishing of the Pricks in the Haystacks, or the other way round. When Peter Thomas put a glass of beer on his head to play The Muffin Man, Graham thought it time to withdraw. He leant over to touch John Bickley, two places away. 'I fancy we're a little old for this, old man,' he smiled. 'Shall we see if there's the chance of a taxi?'

  The two stood in dinner jackets and overcoats, surveying the ill-lit street from the door of the restaurant without much hope. It was bitterly cold, and snow had paralyzed the country more effectively than the _Luftwaffe. _There was a scarcity of coal, new shoes were on the ration, a warming tot of whisky was a luxury, and the Government had banned even greyhound racing to save electricity on the hares.

  'What a bloody night,' muttered Graham. 'I should have brought the car.'

  'What are you driving now?' They had spoken little since the incident of Bluey, and since Graham had left the annex hardly met at all.

  'I've got a prewar Bentley. A peculiar beast with a fabric body, but it goes like a clock. I bought it from some spiv in the street, who wanted spot cash. God knows where the thing came from, probably stolen for all I know.'

  They found a taxi and Graham asked John back for a nightcap. He had a large flat in the Marylebone Road, convenient for his new consulting room in Wimpole Street. John found it furnished stylishly with Graham's stored belongings. There was brandy on the sideboard, a bowl of fruit, even a box of chocolates. Graham seemed to have climbed back on to the lap of luxury.

  'I suppose I'm allowed to switch on the electric fire?' Graham removed his overcoat 'I can never remember what the permitted hours are.'

  'Don't they just cut your current off?'

  Graham grinned. 'I'm on the same cable as the Welbeck Hospital, so I'm spared.'

  'You always did have all the luck.' As Graham poured him a drink, John added, 'It was quite a party tonight.'

  'It's good to find the boys enjoying themselves. Though I could see that Tudor Beverley's got a deal of work to do on some of them. But at least it's a club where we can feel glad the membership won't be increasing.'

  'It was good of you to ask me along.'

  Graham looked surprised. 'But of course you had to be there. We couldn't do without "The Gasman", surely?'

  '"The Gasman", if you'll recall, Graham, was requested not to call.'

  Graham gave a short laugh. 'The famous Trevose temperament. Do you still hold it against me? I was upset at the time, all sorts of things were pressing on me. After all, they were trying to get rid of me, and damn near succeeded.' They took the comfortable armchairs on each side of the fire. The three bars gave a welcome glow. The central heating was off, and the block of flats as inhospitable as an iceberg. 'I know I've been a bastard often enough in my life,' Graham continued. 'As you get older you begin to see yourself properly. It was my temperament which wrecked our partnership. It wrecked my partnership with Tom Raleigh. It wrecked a lot of other relationships in my life. But I couldn't help it. If I'd managed psychologically to emasculate myself, I'd have had no drive to achieve anything at all.'

  Graham sipped his drink in silence. The reference to tempestuous partnerships set John wondering about his host's present arrangements for sexual relaxation. He generally had some of a sort, though John had picked up no gossip round the nursing-homes of the West End. He wondered if the fellow were getting past it. By way of a probe, he asked, 'Do you live in this palace all alone?'

  Graham nodded. 'It's too big, but I had to take what I could. The squatters were in downstairs, you know.'

  'You were lucky to get your hands on it.'

  'London's a peculiar place just now. Everyone knows someone who can obtain the unobtainable. This austerity's a bore, isn't it? I certainly didn't expect it after the war. I thought everything would more or less click back into place again. I must have been mad.'

  'You weren't the only one. The Tory party suffered the same insanity.'

  'I suppose I'm amusing myself. Though the people you meet are peculiar. Not at all like before the war. I wonder what happened to them all.'

  'Haven't they gone to Kenya and Rhodesia and such places?'

  'I'd rather put up with things here. I'm not doing badly, you know,' Graham told him defiantly. 'The plastic game's as tough as ever, if not tougher. But I'm well and truly inside the magic circle now.' He smiled. 'The new handle helps, I suppose, "Sir Graham" and all that. The outsiders have a thin time of it, trying to break in. I'm certainly not going to help them. I suffered enough myself, and nobody was inclined to give me a leg-up.'

  'Aren't you afraid of what Bevan's going to do?'

  'Not really. The scheme won't touch us consultants much. We might even be better off-after all, we'll get paid for the work we do free in hospital. The g.p.s will get the dirty end of the stick, and that's too bad. The B.M.A. have spotted that, of course, that's why they're kicking up such a shindy. They're the g.p.s' trade union. The Royal Colleges, who represent people like me, are coming round to Bevan's line of thinking. The letter from the three presidents last month certainly seemed to indicate something like that. You see, Bevan's split the profession. Cunning blighter. I rather admire the man. If I'd gone into politics, which God forbid, I should have modelled myself on him. He knows what he wants, and can be perfectly charming as he invariably gets it. How are you doing, John?'

  'Very busy. I've Smithers Botham, the Cavendish Clinic, half a dozen hospitals scattered round London. I'd almost forgotten I was on the staff of half of them.'

  'I missed you badly at the annex, I don't mind admitting it.'

  'Nice of you to do so now, 'John said drily.

  'That Australian we got was all right as a stuffist, but the anaesthetist's the stage-manager of the operating unit. With you, everything went so smoothly.' The vague idea of staging a reconciliation with John, already in Graham's mind before the dinner, now struck him as urgent. After all, he had a real affection for the man, they had been professional brothers-inarms for the best part of thirty years. 'How's Denise?' he asked.

  'She's been a bit off colour, recently. Nothing definite. One of the physicians had a look at her. Trying to run a home these days is enough to get any woman down.'

  Graham hesitated, and added, 'If you'd like to get away, I've a villa you could borrow in the south of France. At Roque-brune, up above Monte Carlo.'

  John raised his eyebrows. 'How on earth did you get the currency?'

  Graham laughed. 'Oh, there are ways and means. I bought it a month ago-very reasonably, once I got hold of the francs. I don't think one should take these restrictions too seriously. After all, there are so many of them, if we observed the letter of all the laws we wouldn't be able to stray from our front doors.'

  'It's a very kind offer, Graham, but I don't know when we'll have a chance to take you up on it.'

  'I've hardly had a chance myself. I'm sending Sheila Raleigh down there next month-you know, Tom Raleigh's widow. She needs a holiday. I've given her the job of secretary to this Annex Club. There's an awful lot of work to do, quite a lot of money in the kitty It's a way for me to make amends. If I have any amends to make.' Graham finished his drink. 'It was sad about Tom. It shook me badly at the time. Too much so, perhaps. I felt somehow I was responsible. But how could I have been? I must have been feeling oversensitive in those days. Anyway, Sheila's getting married again this summer, some fellow out of the Navy. Do you want another drink?'

  'No, I must get home, I'm afraid.' John rose. 'I promised Denise I wouldn't arrive back in too alarming a condition.'

  'Do you think you'll find a taxi?'

  'I'll walk. We're not far away, across the Park.'

  'John, I wonder if you'd like to take over my anaesthetic work again?'

  John paused, getting into his overcoat. This will prove, Graham thought, if he holds everything against me still.

  'It's good of you, Graham, but I'm afraid my time for private work is absolutely booked.'

  'Too bad,' murmured Graham.

  He does hold it against me, Graham told himself. And quite badly. Probably Denise is behind it

  'Perhaps when things become more organized we can team up again?' Graham suggested vaguely.

  'Yes, perhaps we can,' said John.

  Graham closed the door behind his guest. He stood alone in the middle of the room. Something was disturbing him. He looked round, then sprang towards the mantelpiece and seized the ornamental clock. He looked at it foolishly for a moment, and carried it out to the kitchen. He had let it run down, and the woman who cleaned the flat must have rewound it. He hated clocks. Tick tock, tick tock. Every one a click along the ratchet towards extinction. Such thoughts came upon him often now that he lived alone. He sat down heavily in the armchair, telling himself he was really becoming dreadfully neurotic. Perhaps it was all to do with the symptoms of the male menopause.

  19

  The party was in Grosvenor Square, in a block of flats occupied mainly by Americans left over from the war, the only class of people in the country who could afford the rent. Lord Cazalay occupied the penthouse which covered most of the top floor. Graham admitted that his brother-in-law seemed to be making a success of his life. Despite the currency restrictions, the travel business appeared to be prospering, and he claimed to have his fingers in all manner of tasty pies. He always treated Graham with the warmest affability. Graham did not deceive himself this was through fraternal love, or remorse for past malevolence. Sir Graham Trevose was a useful name to keep around him. Graham didn't object overmuch. If you wanted such things as whisky, beefsteaks, suit lengths, or villas on the Riviera, you couldn't be squeamish over the company you kept.

  'Graham, I'm delighted you could come.' Lord Cazalay pushed his way through the noisy crowd of guests. 'I hope you got over that dinner last night. I read about it in the papers.'

  'I left before they started breaking the place up.'

  'Very wise. It must be gratifying to know you've got these young men in such good spirits again.'

  'I only did my best,' Graham told him modestly. 'Some of them would still give a girl a nasty scare on a dark night.'

  'Champagne? I was rather lucky to get this consignment across the Channel. There's someone I'd like you to meet.'

  Lord Cazalay led Graham across the room, putting his arm round his shoulders, to demonstrate either affection or possession, Graham wasn't sure.

  'Fred, this is Sir Graham. I know you'll be glad to meet him.' Graham found himself facing a short, square man with a leathery face, smoking a pipe. 'This is Fred Butcher,' Lord Cazalay introduced him. 'You know, from the War Office.'

  Graham recognized one of the Ministers who had been swept to breathtaking heights by the flood of electoral popularity, to be left sitting forlornly on his isolated peak as the tide abruptly turned. He was a rather colourless public figure, a fair-minded, hard-working, trade union official with a valuable flair for bedding down lambs with lions. Graham wondered how he got on with the more peppery generals.

 

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