Richard Gordon - SURGEON AT ARMS

'I'm perfectly prepared to answer whatever the coroner feels like asking me,' John retaliated. 'I've nothing to hide.'

Graham made an impatient gesture. 'Oh, you'll come out of the inquest with your skin. Unavoidable mistake, pressure of work, patient's difficult airway. You'll continue with your job here as though nothing had happened. I shan't even be here to inconvenience you. You and Denise can go on putting out poisonous gossip about me, as much as you care. That probably helped to get me sacked, if you looked into it.'

'It's not fair to say that, Graham,' John told him patiently.

'It may not be, but it's the truth and you know it. Denise doesn't like me. She never has.'

'If Denise has sometimes been…well, indiscreet,' John admitted, 'she's been careful nothing could go further. Not outside the hospital. But now you're talking as if we were sworn enemies. Of course we're not. You're imagining things. Haven't we been friends, you and I, close friends, for years? Ever since the E.N.T. days? We've been through enough together, God knows. We've lost patients before.' He hesitated. 'We've even covered up for each other before. I wouldn't like to think that, however tragic, this incident meant the end of our personal relationship.'

'Be that as it may, but never in your life will you give another anaesthetic for me,' Graham told him angrily. 'At this particular moment, I doubt if that strikes you as much of a penalty. I'm down, I know it. But I won't stay down. When the war's over there'll be fifty anaesthetists in London breaking their necks chasing after my work. I'm going to make my fortune again. And this time you won't get ten per cent of it. Now please leave me in peace.'

That night, Clare woke with pain in her back. When she looked, she saw there was some vaginal bleeding. Graham telephoned Mr O'Rory. Then he carried her outside in a blanket, tucked her into the back of the Morris, and drove the ten miles to Smithers Botham. The gynaecologist was already waiting, greeting them with some mild joke about plastic surgeons working at the right end to avoid calls from their sleep. He put Clare into his ward, tipping up the foot of her bed on wooden blocks. He surrounded her with hot-water bottles, ordered an injection of morphine, prescribed doses of bromide, and added well-polished reassurance.

'Is she aborting?' asked Graham, outside the ward.

'Well, now, it's a threatened abortion,' Mr O'Rory said amiably. 'It's just eight weeks since the end of the lady's last menstrual period. So it wouldn't be an unheard-of occurrence at such a time, would it?'

'Could anything have caused it?' Graham asked anxiously. 'Mental distress, that sort of thing? You know what worry we've been having.'

'Oh, these things happen, they just happen. To tell the truth, none of us knows really why.'

'What's the chance of saving the foetus?'

'I'd say quite good. Yes, quite good. Though the lady will have to take life with queenly ease for quite a while afterwards.'

'That's nothing to bother about, nothing at all.'

'And anyway,' smiled the gynaecologist, 'the lady isn't necessarily destined to repeat the performance on a second occasion, is she? If all is lost, there's plenty more where that one came from. Eh, Graham?'

Graham began to wonder if he really liked Tim O'Rory after all.

The bleeding went on. The following day Mr O'Rory shook his head and said he feared the lady must visit his operating theatre. They gave Clare another dose of morphine and wheeled her along the cold concrete corridor. Mr O'Rory's anaesthetist administered gas and trichorethylene, they stuck her legs in the air, Mr O'Rory settled himself comfortably on a metal stool between them, and with a curette removed Graham's latest achievement for good.

Graham spent the night alone in the bungalow. Depression was no stranger at his side, but he had never known such misery before. Everything was running against him. When he told John Bickley that he wouldn't stay down he'd meant it. But for the first time he now sensed he was finished for good. He'd never recover professionally. Not when everyone could point to him as the man who was sacked in the war. The child was lost, and in such straits they'd be insane to start another. He wondered if Clare would stay with him. He had really little to offer her, and at her age she must surely expect something rewarding from life. It never occurred to Graham how much she might love him for himself. He always expected to take so much from others, he sometimes felt obliged to offer more than he possibly could.

Haileybury would not have been surprised at this mental turmoil. He knew Graham's moods well enough. He was unaware of the pregnancy, and only faintly aware of Clare, whom he had dismissed as another of Graham's pick-ups. The following morning a car arrived at his mansion, containing a general. Haileybury knew the general well. They had been to the same public school, they belonged to the same London club, before the war they had been off golfing and mountaineering together. The general marched up to his office, saying nothing. He laid on Haileybury's desk a slip of typewritten paper, which declared simply,

_Pray, why has one of our most famous and able doctors been dismissed his post? The news of his work has vastly heartened men and women in all the Allied Services. He will be reinstated immediately. I wish to know who is responsible._

Haileybury gave a deep sigh. It was useless to fight Trevose. When they both got to Heaven he was bound to get God on his side.

'Abortion?' said Mr Cramphorn to Denise Bickley at Smithers Botham. 'I'll bet Graham did it himself. With a knitting-needle.'

It was a glorious afternoon. The sun streaked the water with gold and warmed the grassy slope where twenty-two-year-old Alec Trevose lay with his face roofed by Sir Robert Muir's _Textbook of Pathology,_ all 991 pages of it. The slope ran down to a white-painted hotel which had once housed holidaymakers at Southsea, near Portsmouth, but was now a makeshift hospital. Both sea and sky were for once free of men and their machinery, except for an approaching landing-craft, its silver balloon floating nonchalantly overhead, bringing smashed vehicles and possibly smashed humans back from Normandy. By mid-July both the weather and the progress of the invasion had improved noticeably. Montgomery had liberated Caen, the Americans had started moving down the eastward side of the Cherbourg Peninsula, and the coloured-headed pins stuck into maps on the walls of homes all over the country began to lose their faintly worrying immobility.

Beside Alec on the grass was his sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a frayed Blackfriars tie, and a semi-stiff collar. He had cast off his shoes, and his big toes poked through the holes in his socks. His striped shirt was open to display his thin chest-he suffered from asthma, an awkward complaint, liable to grip him in moments of emotion, sexual or otherwise. Alec often put down the asthma to some obscure psychological effect of having been delivered by his own father, the medical missionary, in the Malayan jungle several hundred miles from alternative professional attention. It was the first of many uncomfortable things which seemed to happen to him.

While his cousin Desmond had gone to a splendid public school, he had attended an odd establishment for the education of the sons of other missionaries, to be reared in a strong atmosphere of piety, chastisement, and carbolic soap. Even the cost of his education was being met by his Uncle Graham (or his cousin, Desmond, however you looked at it), though his bills were thankfully met by anonymous lawyers. He had started the telescoped medical course at Cambridge when the war was a year old. It wasn't much fun, he reflected, with no one to talk to except potential doctors, engineers, and clergymen, all three professions being thought essential by the Government to ensure eventual victory. But he had seen Cambridge as it should be seen, with King's Chapel shining in the pure moonlight like an iceberg, Great Court at Trinity a mystery of stones and shadows, Clare College running lightless to the river as a silver screen, the alleys returned to their rightful medieval blackness. It was Cambridge as Newton and Milton had seen it. His tutor was an ancient cleric in a purple stock encrusted with the memorials to countless college soups, who wore both gown and air-raid warden's helmet during alerts, taking seriously his responsibility for the physical as well as the moral safety of his pupils. The science dons had mostly disappeared to concoct new devilment for the enemy. On the whole, Alec thought the University rather superior about the war. It had lived through plenty before with fitting scientific detachment. The church clock still stood at ten to three, and for most of the time honey was off the ration.