Surgeon at Arms (2 page)

But the Government’s enthusiasm outran its supply of trained plastic surgeons, who were as scarce as trained pilots. Apart from Graham Trevose, there were only four, installed in special new units round London. Gillies, being the senior man, insisted on first choice and went to Basingstoke in Hampshire (it was convenient for his flyfishing). An unknown surgeon called Archie Mclndoe descended on the charming little local hospital at East Grinstead in Sussex. But Graham went nowhere. He had been overlooked, he assumed deliberately.

Graham was a realist. He knew he was dismissed by his profession as a ‘beauty doctor’, a trivial practitioner, a refurbisher of distraught débutantes who had inherited daddy’s nose along with his money. He had admittedly specialized in offering hope to young actresses who saw their names one day in lights, or to old actresses for whom the lights were starting to dim. He had erased the scars of hunting accidents from the cheeks as neatly as those of dissipation from below the eyes, and the ‘Trevose nose’ was famous in London society—a little too famous: women were starting to recognize its distinctive handiwork across crowded cocktail parties. Perhaps he had made and spent too much money, lived too fashionably. Perhaps his private life unfitted him for employment by His Majesty. He had recently had a close shave from the General Medical Council over the famous ‘infamous conduct’. Or perhaps, he told himself wearily, some stupid clerk in the Ministry had simply mislaid his file.

When the war was a month old, before he had set eyes on Smithers Botham, Graham was surprised by a telephone call inviting him to meet Brigadier Haileybury at his club the following evening. Before the war, Haileybury, too, had been a civilian plastic surgeon, and the pair had for twenty years lived in mutual dislike. It was a dignified but deadly feud, and like all feuds afforded the onlookers much innocent amusement. But Graham accepted the invitation. He had nothing else to do. And it would be the first time that he could remember Haileybury buying him a drink.

The newly created brigadier was already waiting. Of all the man’s virtues, Graham found his strict punctuality the most regularly irritating.

‘Well, Trevose, you’re looking fit.’

‘That’s very kind. So are you.’

‘I’m finding it difficult to get enough exercise, sitting all day behind a desk.’ Haileybury held an administrative job in the Army medical services. He had a flair for organizing people. ‘Shall we find a quiet corner in the morning room?’

Haileybury ordered sherry. He was a tall, thin, bald, graceless man with large red hands more fitting a stevedore than a surgeon, wearing an immaculate uniform with red tabs. ‘I’ve just seen Tom Raleigh,’ he stated.

‘Oh, Tom.’ Tom Raleigh was a young plastic surgeon, Graham’s partner until the arrangement was disrupted through the Trevose temperament, which was almost as famous in London as the nose.

‘You know he’s been called up for the R.A.M.C.? I could have had him left in civvy street had you wanted his services. But you’ll remember, when I enquired, you turned the idea down very flatly indeed.’

Graham did remember. He’d learned Tom had supplied evidence leading to that close shave with the General Medical Council. A stroke of treachery he was disinclined to overlook. But he said only,
‘His
services? No one seems to find any use for my own.’

‘I assure you that you’re misinformed, Trevose,’ Haileybury said hastily. ‘I admit there was some hesitation....’ He stopped. Under the circumstances, it seemed best not to recall the past. ‘Anyway, you’ll shortly have your chance to join the civilian Emergency Medical Service. I thought that something really should be done about you.’

The condecension grated on Graham, but he said nothing. He was adjusting himself to being a nonentity, while Haileybury was now one of the nation’s élite, as you could tell from a glance at his clothes.

‘But I have something better to offer.’

Graham looked up.

‘I have never made a secret of my disagreement with you on many things, Trevose, personal and professional.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Graham concurred.

Haileybury had passed his civilian years between the wars with a modesty indistinguishable from drabness, his bachelor home in Richmond as plain as his sister’s cooking, his few amusements harmless to the point of boredom. Where Graham saw plastic surgery as an exciting art in the most rewarding medium of all, human flesh and blood, to Haileybury it was a science, the calculated repair of injuries and defects rather than interference with the endowments of Nature. He would have been almost as reluctant to reshape an actress’s nose as to perform her abortion.

‘Neither have I made a secret of my admiration for your workmanship,’ Haileybury went on. ‘Your surgery on burns at Blackfriars called for far wider recognition.’

‘I found it a very interesting branch of plastics.’

‘I supposed you didn’t publish it because you found the surgery of pretty women even more interesting.’

‘That’s unfair. It was simply because I hadn’t the time.’

‘Forgive me. Perhaps it’s not the first occasion I’ve misconstrued your motives.’

‘Misconstrued?’ Graham smiled. ‘Axe you being honest with yourself?’

‘I think that my next remarks will prove that. I am going to offer you a responsibility which, to be frank, I would offer no-one else.’ The brigadier leaned back impressively. ‘The responsibility for all facial and related wounds in the Army. Let your mind dwell on it a moment. I can promise you a perfectly free hand. Within the usual limits you will be your own master. I can promise you first-class accommodation and equipment. You can pick your own team. You can organize your own training programme and choose whom you want to train. No one will interfere. I give you my guarantee. Come! Just think. Isn’t it a splendid chance to make a second reputation?’

Graham said nothing. His quick mind had fallen on the suggestion like a terrier, worrying the different elements from it.

‘Of course, you’re already famous,’ Haileybury conceded. ‘Far more than myself. Everyone in London knows Graham Trevose.’

‘By “everyone in London”,’ Graham suggested, ‘I presume you mean the few despised for regularly getting their names in the papers by the many who wish they could?’

Haileybury shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m trying to say this would bring a different sort of fame. It’s a chance to get yourself remembered as Gillies was in the last war. Surely that would be reward enough?’

The idea appealed to Graham. He would be making himself known to men who had, at the most, only seen his name in the gossip columns. It suited his exhibitionism, which had saddened his friends in the profession as much as it had enraged his enemies. He would be running his own show, pushing his own ideas, moulding his own assistants. Haileybury would be as good as his word—that was another of his infuriating virtues. Anyway, it would be better than doing nothing.

A thought struck him. ‘You mean I’d have to join the Army?’

Haileybury looked surprised. ‘That would be inescapable.’

‘What rank?’

‘Lieutenant-colonel.’

‘Is that the best you can do?’ Graham asked crossly. ‘That’s a very high rank.’ Haileybury was shocked. ‘Quite a number of senior men are coming in as majors.’

‘Then it’s out of the question.’

Why, he would be subordinate to Haileybury! Even if he, too, became in time a brigadier, the fellow would by then be a general, or some such. He would have to call the bloody man ‘sir’! A grisly thought.

‘Totally out of the question,’ Graham repeated. ‘I was a civilian in the last war and I’d best stay a civilian in this one. I’m not the military type.’

Haileybury sipped his sherry with a pained look.

‘Neither are most young men in the country, but they are finding themselves obliged to be.’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting I lack a sense of duty?’

‘I am suggesting nothing of the kind,’ said Haileybury patiently. ‘If anything, I am suggesting you lack a sense of perspective. I made my offer because I thought, firstly, it was in the best interests of the Army, and secondly, it was in the best interests of yourself. You turned it down with hardly a second thought.’

Graham sat looking surly. Haileybury saw the delicately built-up reconciliation was about to come down with a crash.

‘Perhaps I am pressing you too severely,’ he retreated. ‘I cannot expect you to decide on such a far-reaching matter in a couple of minutes. Please excuse my unreasonableness,’ he apologized with unexpected good grace. ‘Perhaps you will accept it as evidence of my enthusiasm for your services? Telephone me in a day or two, when you’ve mulled it over. Here is the number of my extension.’

Haileybury spent the rest of the meeting talking about the disastrous effect of the war on county cricket, a topic Graham found painfully boring.

CHAPTER THREE

‘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 somberly. ‘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 giltframed 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.
_t
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.