Like all specialist anaesthetists, John Bickley brought to his work the artistic touch of an experienced chef. First he held a triangular padded mask tight to Bluey's patchwork face, and concocted a delicately proportioned mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide gas. Then he moved a lever on a bottle of blue liquid to add a trace of trichlorethylene vapour-a more powerful anaesthetic to deepen Bluey's unconsciousness. John edged across the lever on another bottle to admit the pungent vapour of ether, the main ingredient of the dish. Bluey coughed fiercely. He always did, John reflected. He should insist that Graham stop his patients smoking for at least a week before their operations. But Graham objected that would be bad for morale, and they'd smoke in the lavatories, anyway. Graham objected to almost everything he suggested, it struck John wearily, ever since he had started calling for Sunday lunch.
Two coloured bobbins already danced up thin vertical glass tubes on John's anaesthetic trolley, indicating the volume of oxygen and nitrous oxide flowing to his patient. When he judged the anaesthesia deep enough, he sent a third bobbin spinning by adding carbon dioxide to the mixture. This stimulated Bluey's breathing, until he was heaving away as though finishing some desperate race in his sleep. With economical movements, John laid aside the face-mask, reached for a narrow, stiff, greased, red-rubber tube, and inserted it into the remains of Bluey's right nostril. He edged it inwards gently-an unsuspected nasal polyp would bring blood all over the shop and an even worse row with Graham-listening to the breath-sounds as it slipped behind Bluey's flaccid tongue, then finally through his widely open larynx into his windpipe. It was a technique invented by Harold Gillies' own anaesthetist, Ivan Magill, to deliver the anaesthetic directly into the patient's lungs while leaving his face and mouth as a sterile unoccupied battlefield for the plastic surgeon.
'That looked pretty easy, I must say,' observed the nurse, who like all nurses had long ago ceased to be impressed by her medical overlords. But her remark pleased John. The trick was rather like playing darts in the dark, not easy at all. Only the experience of twenty years made it seem so.
As Bluey himself knew, the operation was to be a simple affair. Graham cut a thin graft of skin from Bluey's thigh with a Thiersch knife like an oversized razor, then stitched it along his chin where a former one had failed to take. Bluey was back in bed within the half hour, struggling to consciousness through dreams about flying, which were always unpleasant but soon forgotten. He woke up deciding he didn't feel as bad as usual. The Gasman's injection was a winner. The next night he'd be fit enough to finish the bottle of rum in his locker, then slip out with half a dozen others to The Oak.
Knowing the habits of his patients, Graham made a point on Saturday nights of taking a bus to the pictures in Maiden Cross. That Saturday he queued to see an American film about the war, in which all the Germans conversed in villainous guttural undertones, all the British officers had Oxford accents, and all their men talked like Sam Weller. The star was Stella Garrod, the woman Graham had made a fool of himself with before the war. He wondered wryly if she ever bothered to think of him. In fact, she spoke fondly and often of her affair with the little London surgeon, immorality with Englishmen having, after Dunkirk, considerable kudos in Hollywood.
When Graham reached home on the last bus the pub was already closed, but Bluey and his companions had been disinclined to finish the evening. They had staggered down the Smithers Botham drive singing _Cats on the Rooftops,_ and the night being moonlit someone noticed a collection of builders' materials stacked outside Captain Pile's office under the gleaming portico. Bluey gave a whoop as he found a tin of paint and a brush. A porter appeared through the complicated blackout screening the front door to investigate, but identifying denizens of the annex retreated instantly. Bluey painted across the portico a single word in large letters, one on each of the four columns. Then they went singing and laughing back to the annex and bed. The night nurses were used to it.
