The Children Act Read online

  Runcie was raising a hand in greeting and there was no choice but to stop in front of him and be affable.

  “My dear.”

  “Good morning, Sherwood.”

  “I read a wonderful little exchange in Stephen Sedley’s new book. Just your thing. It’s from a Massachusetts trial. A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he’s absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it’s possible he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.”

  Even as Runcie exploded into hilarity at his own story, his eyes were fixed on hers, gauging whether her mirth would match his own. She did her best. Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.

  At last, installed behind her desk with her now lukewarm coffee, contemplating the matter of a child removed from the jurisdiction. She pretended not to notice Pauling on the other side of the room as he cleared his throat to say something, then thought better of it and vanished. At some point, her own concerns also vanished as she forced her attention on the submissions and began reading at speed.

  The court rose to her on the stroke of ten. She listened to counsel for the distressed mother, applying to retrieve her child through the Hague Convention. When the Moroccan husband’s counsel got to his feet to persuade Fiona of some ambiguity in his client’s assurance, she cut him off.

  “I was expecting to find you blushing on behalf of your client, Mr. Soames.”

  The matter was technical, absorbing. The thin frame of the mother remained partly hidden behind counsel, and seemed to shrink further as the arguments became more abstract. It was likely that when the court rose, Fiona would never see her again. The sad affair would come before a Moroccan judge.

  Next, she heard an urgent application on behalf of a wife seeking maintenance pending suit. The judge listened, she asked questions, she granted the application. At lunchtime she wanted to be alone. Pauling brought her sandwiches and a bar of chocolate to eat at her desk. Her phone lay under some papers, and at last she gave in, scanned the screen for texts or missed calls. Nothing. She told herself she felt neither disappointment nor relief. She drank tea and allowed herself ten minutes to read the newspapers. Mostly Syria, reports and lurid photographs: the government shelling civilians, refugees on the road, impotent condemnations from foreign ministries around the world, an eight-year-old boy on a bed, left foot amputated, weak-chinned etiolated Assad shaking hands with a Russian official, rumors of nerve gas.

  There was far greater misery elsewhere, but after lunch she confronted more of the local kind. She was dismissive of an ex parte application for an order excluding a husband from the matrimonial home. The presentation was protracted; the owlish counsel’s nervous blink irritated her further.

  “Why are you doing this without notice? I see nothing in the papers that would make that necessary. What communication have you tried to have with the other side? None, as far as I can see. If the husband’s happy to give an assurance to your client, you really shouldn’t be bothering me with this. If he isn’t, then serve notice and I’ll hear both sides.”

  The court rose, she stalked out. Then back to hear argument for and against a prohibitive-steps order on behalf of a man who said he feared violence from his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Much legal argument about the boyfriend’s prison record, but it concerned fraud, not assault, and finally she refused the application. An assurance would have to do. A cup of tea in her room, then back again to hear a divorcing mother’s emergency application for her three children to have their passports lodged with the court. Fiona was minded to grant it, but after she heard argument about the aggravating complication that would follow, she refused.

  Back in her room at five forty-five. She sat at her desk, staring blankly at her bookshelves. When Pauling came in, she started, and thought she may have been asleep. He let her know that press interest in the Jehovah’s Witness case was now strong. Most of tomorrow morning’s papers would carry the story. On the press websites there were pictures of the boy with his family. The parents themselves may have been the source, or a relative grateful for some quick cash. The clerk put in Fiona’s hands the papers for the case and a brown envelope which clinked mysteriously as she unsealed it. A letter bomb from a disappointed plaintiff? It had happened before, when a device, clumsily assembled by an enraged husband, failed to explode in the face of her then clerk. But yes, her new keys, opening the way to her other life, her transformed existence.

  And so, half an hour later, she set off toward it, but by a circuitous route, for she was reluctant to enter the empty apartment. She left by the main entrance and walked west on the Strand to the Aldwych, then went north along Kingsway. The sky was battleship gray, the rain barely noticeable, the Monday rush-hour crowds lighter than usual. In prospect, another one of those too long, dim summer evenings of low cloud. Total darkness would have suited her better. When she passed a key-cutting shop, she made her heart beat harder imagining a shouting row with Jack about the lockout, face-to-face in the square under the dripping trees, overheard by neighbors, who were also colleagues. She would be entirely in the wrong.

  She turned east, passed the LSE, skirted Lincoln’s Inn Fields, crossed High Holborn, then, to delay her arrival home, went west again, down narrow streets of mid-Victorian artisanal workshops, now hairdressers, lockups, sandwich bars. She crossed Red Lion Square, past empty wet aluminum chairs and tables of the park café, past Conway Hall, where a small crowd was gathered waiting to go in, decent, white-haired, careworn people, Quakers perhaps, ready for an evening of remonstration with things as they stood. Well, she had her own such evening ahead. But to belong to the law and all its historical accumulation bound one closer to things as they stood. Even as you resisted or denied it. More than half a dozen embossed invitation cards lay on a polished walnut table in the hallway at Gray’s Inn Square. The Inns of Court, the universities, charities, various royal societies, eminent acquaintances, calling on Jack and Fiona Maye, themselves crafted through the years into a miniature institution, to step out in public in their best clothes, lend their weight, eat, drink, talk and return home before midnight.

  She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, whether it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought. To be caught out enacting her part in a cliché showed poor taste rather than a moral lapse. Restless husband in one last throw, brave wife maintaining her dignity, younger woman remote and blameless. And she had thought her acting days ended on a summer lawn, just before she fell in love.

  As it turned out, coming home was not so difficult after all. She was occasionally back from work before Jack, and it surprised her to feel soothed as she stepped into the sanctuary dimness of the hall and its scent of lavender polish, and half pretend to herself that nothing had changed, or that it was about to come right. Before she turned on the lights she put her bag down and listened. The summer cold had brought on the central heating. Now the radiators ticked unevenly as they cooled. She heard the faint sound of orchestral music from a downstairs apartment, Mahler, langsam und ruhig. Less faintly, a song thrush pedantically repeating each ornamental phrase, the sound conducted cleanly down a chimney flue. Then she went through the rooms, turning on the lights, even though it was barely seven thirty. Back in the hall to retrieve her bag, she noticed that the locksmith had left no trace of his visit. Not even a wood shaving. Why should he, when he was only changing the barrel of the lock, and why should she care? But the absence of any tra
ce of his visit was a reminder of Jack’s absence, a little tug downward on her spirits, and to counter it she took her papers into the kitchen and skimmed through one of the next day’s cases while she waited for the kettle to boil.

  She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real. Too soon for sympathy or advice, too soon to hear Jack damned by loyal chums. Instead, she passed the evening in an empty state, a condition of numbness. She ate bread, cheese and olives with a glass of white wine, and passed an interminable period at the piano. First, in a spirit of defiance, she played through her Bach partita. Occasionally, she and a barrister, Mark Berner, performed songs, and she had seen that afternoon that he was listed for tomorrow to represent the hospital in the Jehovah’s Witness case. The next concert was many months ahead, just before Christmas, in the Great Hall in Gray’s Inn, and they had yet to agree on a program. But they had a few encore pieces off by heart and she played through them now, imagining the tenor’s part, lingering over Schubert’s mournful “Der Leiermann,” the hurdy-gurdy man, who is poor and wretched and ignored. Such concentration protected her from thoughts, and she had no sense of passing time. When she rose at last from the piano stool, her knees and hips were stiff. In the bathroom she bit into half of a sleeping pill, stared at the ragged remainder in her palm, then swallowed that too.

  Twenty minutes later she lay in her half of the bed listening through closed eyes to the radio news, the shipping forecast, the national anthem, then the World Service. As she waited for oblivion, she heard the news again and perhaps a third time, then calm voices discussing the day’s savagery—suicide bombers in crowded public places in Pakistan and Iraq, shelling of apartment blocks in Syria, Islam’s war with itself conducted by means of twisted car frames and rubble, and body parts flung across marketplaces, and ordinary people wailing in shock and grief. Then the voices turned to discuss American drones over Waziristan, last week’s bloody assault on a wedding party. While the reasonable voices pressed on into the night, she curled up for a troubled sleep.

  THE MORNING PASSED like a hundred others. Applications, submissions rapidly assimilated, argument heard, judgments delivered, orders dispensed, and Fiona moving between her room and the court, bumping into colleagues on the way, something even festive in their quick exchanges, the clerk’s weary call of “Court rise,” her minimal nod toward the opening barrister, her occasional weak joke fawningly received by counsel for both sides with little attempt to conceal their insincerity, and the litigants, if they were a divorcing couple, as they all were this Tuesday morning, seated well apart behind their representation, in no mood to smile.

  And her mood? She counted herself reasonably adept at monitoring it, naming it, and she detected a significant shift. Yesterday, she now decided, she had been in shock, in an unreal state of acceptance, prepared to tell herself that she had, at worst, to endure the commiseration of family and friends and a degree of severe social inconvenience—those embossed invitations she must refuse while hoping to conceal her embarrassment. This morning, waking with a cold part of a bed to her left—a form of amputation—she felt the first conventional ache of abandonment. She thought of Jack at his best and longed for him, the hairy bony hardness of his shins, down which, half asleep, she would let the soft underside of her foot slide at the alarm clock’s first assault, when she would roll onto his outstretched arm and wait and doze beneath the duvet’s warmth, face into his chest, until the clock’s second call. That naked childlike surrender, before she rose to assume an adult’s armor, seemed first thing this morning like an essential from which she was banished. When she stood in the bathroom, when she stepped out of her pajamas, her body looked foolish in the full-length mirror. Miraculously shrunken in some parts, bloated in others. Bottom-heavy. A ridiculous package. Fragile, This Way Up. Why would anyone not leave her?

  Washing, dressing, drinking coffee, leaving a note and arranging a new key for the cleaning lady brought these raw feelings under control. And so she began her morning, looked for her husband in e-mails, texts and post, found nothing, gathered her papers, her umbrella and her phone and walked to work. His silence appeared ruthless and it shocked her. She knew only that Melanie, the statistician, lived somewhere near Muswell Hill. Not impossible to track her down, or look for Jack at the university. But what humiliation then, to find him in a departmental corridor, walking toward her, arm in arm with his lover. Or to find him alone. What could she propose beyond a pointless, ignominious plea for his return? She could demand confirmation that he had left his marriage, and he would tell her what she already knew and didn’t want to hear. So she would wait until a certain book or shirt or tennis racket drew him back to the locked apartment. Then it would be his task to search her out, and when they spoke, she would be on her own ground, dignity intact, outwardly at least.

  It would not have been apparent, but her spirits were heavy as she set about Tuesday’s list. The last case of the morning was prolonged by complex argument over commercial law. A divorcing husband claimed that the three million pounds he had been ordered to pay to his wife was not his to give away. It belonged to his company. It emerged, but far too slowly, that he was the sole director and only employee of an enterprise that made or did nothing—it was a fig leaf for a beneficial tax arrangement. Fiona found for the wife. The afternoon was now cleared for the hospital’s emergency application in the Jehovah’s Witness case. In her room once more, she ate a sandwich and an apple at her desk while she read through the submissions. Meanwhile, her colleagues were lunching splendidly at Lincoln’s Inn. Forty minutes later, one clarifying thought accompanied her as she made her way to courtroom eight. Here was a matter of life and death.

  She entered, the court rose, she sat and watched the parties below her settle. At her elbow was a slim pile of creamy white paper beside which she laid down her pen. It was only then, at the sight of these clean sheets, that the last traces, the stain, of her own situation vanished completely. She no longer had a private life, she was ready to be absorbed.

  Ranged before her were the three parties. For the hospital, her friend Mark Berner QC and two instructing solicitors. For Adam Henry and his guardian, the Cafcass officer, was an elderly barrister, John Tovey, not known to Fiona, and his instructing solicitor. For the parents, another silk, Leslie Grieve QC, and two solicitors. Sitting by them were Mr. and Mrs. Henry. He was a wiry, tanned man in a well-cut suit and tie in which he himself could have passed for a successful member of the judiciary. Mrs. Henry was big-boned and wore outsized glasses with red frames that shrank her eyes to points. She sat upright, with tightly folded arms. Neither parent looked particularly cowed. Outside in the corridors, Fiona assumed, journalists would soon be assembling to wait until she allowed them in to hear her decision.

  She began. “You’re all aware that we are here on a matter of extreme urgency. Time is of the essence. Everyone please bear this in mind and speak briefly and to the point. Mr. Berner.”

  She inclined her head toward him and he stood. He was smoothly bald, bulky, but with dainty feet—size five, it was rumored—for which he was mocked behind his back. His voice was a decent rich tenor and together their greatest moment had been last year when they performed Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig” at a Gray’s Inn dinner for a retiring law lord with a passion for Goethe.

  “I shall indeed be brief, My Lady, for, as you indicate, the situation is pressing. The applicant in the matter is the Edith Cavell General, Wandsworth, which is seeking the leave of this court to treat a boy, named A in the papers, who will be eighteen in less than three months. He experienced sharp stomach pains on the fourteenth of May when he was putting on his pads to open the batting for his school cricket team. During the following two days these pains became severe, unbearable even. The GP, despite great expertise and experience, was at a loss and referred—”

  “I’ve read the papers, Mr. Berner.”

  The barrister moved on.
“Then, My Lady, I believe it is accepted by all parties that Adam is suffering from leukemia. The hospital wishes to treat him in the usual manner with four drugs, a therapeutic procedure universally recognized and practiced by hematologists, as I can show—”

  “No need, Mr. Berner.”

  “Thank you, My Lady.”

  Berner advanced quickly to outline the conventional course of treatment and this time Fiona did not intervene. Two of the four drugs targeted the leukemia cells directly, whereas the other two poisoned much in their path, in particular the bone marrow, thereby compromising the body’s immune system and its ability to make red and white blood cells and platelets. Consequently, it was usual to transfuse during treatment. In this case, however, the hospital was prevented from doing so. Adam and his parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and it was contrary to their faith to accept blood products into their bodies. This apart, the boy and his parents agreed to any treatment the hospital could offer.

  “And what has been offered?”

  “My Lady, in deference to the family’s wishes, only the leukemia-specific drugs have been administered. They are not considered sufficient. It’s at this point I’d like to call the consultant hematologist.”

  “Very well.”

  Mr. Rodney Carter took the stand and was sworn in. Tall, stooping, severe, thick white eyebrows from under which he glared with ferocious disdain. From the top pocket of his pale gray three-piece suit there protruded a blue silk handkerchief. He gave the impression that he considered the court procedure a nonsense and that the boy should be dragged by the scruff of his neck to an immediate transfusion.

  There followed standard questions to establish Carter’s bona fides, his length of experience and seniority. When Fiona cleared her throat softly, Berner took the hint and pressed on. He asked the doctor to summarize for the benefit of the judge the patient’s condition.