Richard Gordon - SURGEON AT ARMS

She was facing him, leaning against the table, and he saw she had started to cry. Women were unaccountable. 'What's the matter?' he asked, not particularly kindly. 'I haven't said anything wrong, surely?'

'I thought the annex meant everything to you, Graham.'

'It's something I'll look back on with considerable affection.'

'Like me?'

'Why do you say that?' he asked irritably. 'You're being fanciful.'

'I'm not. It's perfectly true. I'm just part of the annex, as far as you're concerned.'

'Now you're being downright silly.'

'You don't want to marry me, do you? You don't want to at all.'

She advanced on him angrily. Graham was startled. All his life he had surrounded himself with submissive people, and it was always unsettling when they turned on him.

'Clare, you're simply saying a lot of irresponsible things which are making you overwrought.'

'I'm saying things which I should have said months ago, years ago. My God, I've been a fool. Do you imagine all this hasn't been boiling in my mind since I came here? Of course you don't want to marry me. You've always had some excuse, something to put it off. Even when you got me pregnant you didn't want me as your wife. You were scared stiff at the thought. You didn't want that child either. You were as pleased as Punch when I aborted. That's the truth, isn't it?'

He stood up. 'Of course it wasn't the truth,' he told her crossly. 'I did everything I could to save it, didn't I? I was upset when we lost it, dreadfully upset. Do you think I don't know my own mind?'

'No, you don't know it at all, Graham. That's your trouble. There're plenty of wonderful things about you, and you don't recognize them. There are plenty of horrible things about you too, and you don't recognize those either. Or you won't bring yourself to face them, which is the worse for you.'

'So you're suggesting I'm going to turn you out after the war, like some camp-follower?'

'It won't come to that. We can't go on with this play-acting any longer. We've got to split up.'

'You can't mean that?' He was alarmed at this practical turn in the conversation.

'It'll only get worse if I stay.' She looked down at the threadbare carpet and went on more calmly, 'I haven't made up my mind just this minute, Graham. I decided…oh, months ago, I don't know when. Perhaps I didn't decide at all. It just crept up on me.'

'Clare-' He approached her, but she pushed him away. 'Supposing I said I'd marry you tomorrow?'

'No, it wouldn't do. It wouldn't work. We'd be in a worse mess than ever. Once you got back to London you'd want to be rid of me. I'm not your type. You don't love me. I don't think you could love anyone. Your attitude to women is like your attitude to the boys in the annex. So many 'construction jobs', as you say. You overlook that I've got the right to any feelings at all.'

Graham stuck his hands in his pockets. It was all most distressing. He hated emotional scenes. Perhaps they were both upset with the business of Maria. Clare would be over it tomorrow. 'Why did you take up with me in the first place?' he asked, a shade resentfully. 'You knew enough about me, about my past affairs?'

'Every woman's a heroine, I suppose. She expects to succeed where others have succumbed.'

'Possibly.' They stood looking at each other. 'You can't mean it?' he asked more quietly. 'About going away?'

'Yes, I do. I'll get a job somewhere.'

'Let's discuss it again tomorrow, when we're ourselves.'

'No,' she told him. 'There's nothing else to say.'

A week later Clare left the bungalow and Graham took a room in a London hotel, explaining to everyone at Smithers Botham that this temporary change in domestic arrangements was necessitated by his searching for a flat. The pair had parted politely, even amicably. A continued emotional tempest would have worn out both of them, and they were old enough to take such things sensibly. In the end, Graham was rather pleased. He would miss Clare, of course, but she was right. She was a simple, kindly girl, but not at all the sort to stand beside the fashionable plastic surgeon, Graham Trevose, now returning like the exiled European governments to his rightful dominions. A marriage would have been a disaster. And supposing this 'gong' materialized? Lady Trevose? Decidedly not. To fill that role he wanted someone far more intelligent, more versed in the ways of the world, more socially adept, someone of better family than the seedy commercial artist's.

Someone like Maria? he thought.

Yes, someone like Maria.

Maria in death, like Maria in life, always came out top in the end.

By Christmas, when the fighting should have been over, the German armies broke through at the Ardennes for the second time in the war. Luckily for the Allies, the weather cleared and they could bomb them to pieces on the twisting hilly roads-which they would have saved themselves a great deal of trouble by doing in 1940, if only they'd had any aeroplanes. In London the flying-bombs were replaced by rockets, which perplexed and affronted the Government, as Lord Cherwell had worked out most carefully they were too expensive for the Germans to use. The rockets particularly harassed Alec Trevose, who was doing his two months' midwifery training at a sandbagged lying-in hospital in north London. Every time one fell the noise sent half a dozen local women into labour, and it was no fun finding your way through blacked-out back streets on a bicycle, loaded like a mule with bags of instruments and dressings, suspected by policemen of being some sort of saboteur, and wondering if the next unheralded missile had your number on it.

Alec didn't like midwifery. He was beginning to see himself as an intellectual, a man of culture, and childbirth was an extremely uncultured pursuit Tor all concerned. Alec hated the babies. He hated the midwife in charge of him, a sparse-bosomed Scotswoman with a vinegary tongue. She in turn seemed to hate him, and indeed men in general, which he felt was reasonable from her toilsome occupation. Only the jovial Mr O'Rory brought levity to the solemn reproductive circus with his visits twice a week. He was a Catholic, and therefore unable to perform abortions-though he stretched a point when they were natural, like Clare's miscarriage, and passed the others to his houseman, back-seat driving over his right shoulder. Female sterilization was for him, he confessed, quite out of the question. He would perform the operation to the crucial point, then demand genially of his assistant, 'Just tie a a knot in those two ligatures round the Fallopian tubes, my boy, there's a good fellow. My religion doesn't allow me to do that sort of thing at all.'

Alec rather took to Mr O'Rory. He felt he had the cultured approach.

In the spring the Nazi magnificos suddenly appeared in the papers as haggard and anxious old men, shuffling about in baggy civilian suits. It induced feelings of freakishness rather than triumph. To anyone of Alec Trevose's age, a world empty of Hitler and Mussolini was as strange as one without Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Himmler bit the cyanide capsule in his tooth, and vomited himself to death over the trousers of a British officer. If nobody really knew what had happened to Hitler, nobody really cared. There were rejoicings in British streets, of a seemly nature. The Government, in a burst of official relaxation, allowed the citizenry to use binoculars again. If the population were restrained by the scarcity of hard liquor from getting lit up when the lights went up in London, at least they had some sort of fling before the authorities switched them off again through shortage of fuel. On the June day when the world inaugurated the United Nations in San Francisco and so abolished war for ever-for the second occasion in a quarter of a century-both Alec and Desmond found they had qualified as doctors.