Richard Gordon - SURGEON AT ARMS

Clare Mills slipped her hand into the jacket of his pyjamas, which were pure silk, prewar, made to measure in Jermyn Street. The poor lamb really was terribly thin. It was like being in bed with a skeleton beside you. 'Happy?'

'This is probably a terrible confession, but the war's been the happiest time of my life.'

'Is it so terrible?' she asked gently. 'Surely the misery needn't go undiluted?'

'I suppose happiness is a well-insulated state of mind. Most of the boys are perfectly happy, and God knows they haven't got much to justify it. Even Bluey seems happy enough these days.'

'Perhaps he's found a new girl-friend.' She ran her hand down Graham's chest. It was so smooth, the ribs standing out like the black notes on a piano. No wonder he'd once suffered from tuberculosis.

'Why do I attract you?' he asked.

She pouted thoughtfully. 'You're different. From any other surgeon.'

'Different from old Cramphorn, you mean?'

Clare laughed. 'You're gentle, you're amusing, you're kind, you understand women. And I love you. Besides, you had a tremendous build-up. I'd read so much about you. It's like being with a star you've only seen on the flicks.'

'Don't tell me I've got to match up to Clark Gable?' he asked, though feeling flattered.

She touched his small hard nipple with the dp of her forefinger. 'Tell me why I attract you? _

'You're a good housewife.'

'I thought that was it.'

'Do you realize, darling, this is the first time in my life I've had a home I could call my own? I mean a place where I could do as I pleased, without it being run by a lot of servants. Where I didn't feel I had to put on a show, to impress the world with my importance.' He looked round the room, which was hardly big enough to take the bed. The beige wallpaper had galleons sailing across it, a fumed-oak dressing table was squeezed into a corner, there were faded pink curtains, an angular hanging mirror, and a coloured print of Tower Bridge, pre-blitz. They lived in a bungalow, rented furnished in the country some ten miles from Smithers Botham, with four small rooms and a kitchen, a bath with an alarming geyser, and the name of 'Cosy Cot'.

Graham felt he would have been happy with Clare even living in a Nissen hut. She shared his new liking for books and for the concerts on the wireless. She cooked agreeably and mended his clothes with her painstaking nurse's stitches. He had enjoyed himself teaching her to dress properly, pulling her out of those awful tweeds and putting her into frocks, though the fun had been officially dimmed by the coming of clothes' rationing. She was the most adoring woman he had known, which he sometimes wryly reflected accounted for their harmony. They had always the annex to fall back on as a common interest, Graham insisting she continued with her job, declaring the ward would fall into anarchy otherwise. As for their other common interest, Graham decided she enjoyed a greater talent than any woman he had met for copulation, with all its ancillaries, which he was apt to describe as 'novelties'.

As the church bells died away he said, 'You've given me something to live for, darling. A unique gift.'

'You always had your work.'

'Only a fool or a saint lives for his vocation. Do you know, before you came along I was the prey to horrible and gloomy thoughts. Doom, impending death, extinction. Most uncomfortable. Such things don't even enter my mind now. You've exorcised the ghosts. Perhaps the magic charm is finding myself with a girl of your age. Or perhaps it's just the flattery.'

She gently kissed his unshaven cheek. 'It isn't flattery.'

'Is the distinction important? At my age, flattery's a workable substitute for love.'

'Now you're being silly.'

'Yes, I hope I am.' He looked up at the ceiling, which had a large crack running across it. 'Do you think we should have another week at that place in Wales?'

'They were awfully awkward about our identity cards.'

'They might have grown more accustomed to such irregularities by now.'

He had taken her to a village hotel, remembered from before the war, for what he liked to remember as their honeymoon. Their first sudden contact in the office, the day he had met Sheila Raleigh, he told himself was like the unexpected symptom of some smouldering disease. He had been attracted to Clare almost since setting eyes on her. But he was immediately disconcerted to discover there was another-a Royal Marine lieutenant, stationed in India, to whom she was unofficially pledged. Graham declared to himself hastily that any monkey business was out of the question. Her lieutenant was abroad in the service of his country, like the Crusades, exactly the same principle. A man of his own standing couldn't possibly stoop to such things. But he wondered how strong the psychological chastity belt was. It might be fun to try the lock. In the end it sprang open with an ease which surprised both of them, the severest difficulty being the locale. His house in Mayfair was bomb-damaged beyond habitation, and he could hardly smuggle Clare upstairs in the pub like one of the students. It occurred to him he hadn't taken a holiday since the war started. Afterwards, she declared she couldn't possibly go back to the nurses' home. In a place like Smithers Botham, everyone would know of their adventure. The other sisters were unkindly enough already, and anyway had a tendency to kiss each other good-night. They moved into Cosy Cot, and she wrote to her Royal Marine, a dreaded epistle known as a 'Dear John'.

The rest of the Smithers Botham staff thought sharing a bungalow with your ward sister rather rich, even for Graham. He didn't care. It never occurred to him to ask if Clare did. Denise Bickley was particularly outraged, about which Graham cared even less. In peacetime, Graham's goodwill represented a large slice of her husband's income, and Graham reflected grimly the war couldn't go on for ever. As for Clare's parents, who lived in Bristol, they were gratified to learn from her letters that their daughter had moved from the hospital to comfortable and apparently altogether satisfactory lodgings.

'Why don't we have our own celebration of the victory in the Desert?' Graham asked her from the pillow. 'We're alone in the house, no one's likely to call and disturb us.'

Clare laughed and got out of bed, throwing back her blonde hair and starting to take off her red-and-yellow spotted cotton pyjamas. She really had an admirable figure, Graham reflected. Her breasts were wonderful. He couldn't have made anything better himself.

'Must I keep using this toothpaste stuff?' she asked, squatting to insert her diaphragm.

'My God, yes,' said Graham hastily. 'It's terribly risky without the spermicidal jelly. All that cap does is to hold it round the cervix.'

'It's awfully messy.'

'You can't have everything, my love,' he told her, a shade primly.

'And I shall have to keep it in half the day, won't I? It'll give me backache.'

'I'll sit rubbing it with Sloan's liniment.'

She laughed again, and came back to him.

In the sexual line Graham was, as Haileybury would have put it, an enthusiast. After all, he told himself, he had a deep knowledge of the apparatus concerned, and he might as well put the information to fullest use. He often recalled with satisfaction Balzac's exhortation for no man to marry before dissecting at least one female pelvis. But he could never bring himself to feel the business more than 'a sneeze in the loins'. It was only a reflex, centred in the humblest lower segments of the spinal cord, transmitted across the pelvic basin by fibres hiding under their Latinized name 'the nerve of shame'. Even a real sneeze was a more cerebral occurrence, conducted by fine-sounding aristocratic nerves springing out of the brain itself. Of course, women took a different view. However many men sneezed in their loins, they invested it with some mystical significance. He supposed it was mainly through their fear of appearing tarts.