She handed him a thick chipped cup and said, 'Yes, I remember reading some of the things they said about you.'
'I hope they were nice things. Many of them weren't. But you must have been only an impressionable schoolgirl at the time.'
It always put him in a better humour talking to Sister Mills. And he noticed she had become less solemn, less nervous of him. A sympathetic ear was a luxury when he was expected to bear the troubles of everyone in the annex.
'My father was always interested in your activities,' she told him.
'Is he a doctor?' He had never asked about her background before.
'No, he's a commercial artist. Not a particularly successful one, I'm afraid to say. Now he's working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production.'
'I used to paint at week-ends before the war. I don't think I was much good at it. I used to delude myself it was based on the same principles as my surgery. But it isn't. My job's more like plumbing, really. Whatever the look of the result, everything's got to join up the right way underneath.'
'Your own father was at Blackfriars, wasn't he?'
'Yes, the formidable old boy was the professor of anatomy,' Graham said fondly. 'He wrote an erudite volume about the synovial membranes, so erudite that only about fifty people in the country understood it. We've always been doctors of a sort. My grandfather was a semi-educated bonesetter. My greatgrandfather wasn't educated at all, but an out-and-out quack. He left a fortune. He could diagnose everything known to medical science, and a good deal that wasn't, by merely inspecting the patient's urine in a flask. What's called a piss-prophet.'
She smiled. 'Quite a weight of medical tradition to carry.'
'The family business, I suppose. My son Desmond's going in for it. You must meet him when he comes down from Cambridge. He stays with me at the pub, and I let him mess about here trying his hand at being anything from assistant anaesthetist to theatre porter. You'll like him. He's a charmer.'
'I'm sure I shall. I'll look forward to it.'
Graham fell silent. He had a vague uneasiness about mentioning Desmond. 'The fuss about the newspaper will soon blow over,' he went on.
'"The Wizz".' He laughed and got up. 'If I'm making a reputation I'd better live up to it, by doing some work. I've got to see a pneumonia John Bickley's inflicted. The fellow uses far too much ether.'
Despite his protestations, the realist in Graham admitted readily enough that he enjoyed recapturing the glory of print. He was an exhibitionist in a neurotically self-effacing profession, and finding himself so long in a surgical backwater where nobody was inclined to wander had been galling. But it was more gratifying still to find the article reviving Val Arlott's twenty-years-old interest in plastic surgery. He telephoned asking if Graham lacked equipment, promising to jolt action out of the authorities. The longed-for extra huts seemed at last likely to appear. Val even suggested a fund to provide the annex with 'comforts'-an excellent idea, Graham thought, it would keep the place in the public eye for months. But the best news of all was Peter Thomas becoming engaged to marry one of the nurses. He still looked a mess, but there he was, to marry in the merry month of May. It put up morale in the annex wonderfully. If a girl could sleep with Peter Thomas looking like that, Bluey declared, then he was off to pick up a bloody harem.
The wedding was to be at Chelsea registry office on May the twelfth, a Monday. On the Saturday night London had its last bad raid of the war, and an unexpected guest, Rudolph Hess, floated by parachute into Scotland. While the Deputy Fuhrer's fractured ankle was being attended by a British military doctor, a younger German flier, steadfastly doing his duty above the Thames, made a mistake in his bomb-aiming and blew most of Blackfriars Hospital to pieces. Luckily, the casualties were light, the patients being at Smithers Botham and the wooden props in the basement being stronger than everyone gloomily believed. But the firemen were still working thirty-six hours later, when Graham stood with a carnation in his buttonhole soulfully inspecting the wreckage before making across battered London to the registry office. The Arlott Wing, where he had worked before the war, had simply disappeared. The rest of the building, which he could remember standing in apparently unshakeable dignity when his father had shown it off as a childhood treat, was a hardly recognizable ruin. But the pavements were still busy. The bowler hat was still worn. The tramlines still ran down the Embankment. London had shrugged off fire and plague before. The smashed eighteenth-century masonry was a shame, but what was the loss of the most splendid building, he asked himself, compared with that of the most miserable of lives?
'Graham-'
He turned. He didn't recognize her for a moment. She was small and gingery, with a scarf round her head, staring at him.
