Feeling he should prepare himself as well as the annex, Graham read as many textbooks and papers about wound surgery as he could lay hands on. He listened to Archie McIndoe at the Royal Society of Medicine, and to Sir Harold Gillies more intimately at Basingstoke-and more exhaustingly, Gillies being a forceful and sometimes eccentric exponent of his genius. Graham had resigned himself to the annex being something of a sideshow. The other four plastic units were better housed, better equipped, and better staffed, destined to take most of the work, if the war didn't fizzle out. He even half-regretted not submitting himself to Haileybury. He would at least have had a uniform. He had come to avoid his club in St James's because he felt the members looked askance on his lack of it. Most seemed to possess one, though whatever their martial duties these did not prevent their spending a good deal of time in its comfortable leather armchairs. But he had made his decision, and if it were the wrong one it unhappily wouldn't be his first.

On that New Year's Eve he left his Bentley in a mews garage off Curzon Street and walked the few yards to his house in fashionable Queen Street by the light of his pocket torch (screened by law with two thicknesses of tissue-paper). As he approached his front door he saw a girl standing on the step, her identity solved by an invitation flashed at him by a torch through her mackintosh pocket.

'Do you want to come home with me, darling?' she enquired.

'I'm afraid this is my home, here,' Graham told her politely. 'Oh, sorry. I hope you don't mind?'