The Children Act

  It was done. The corrections would be typed into her final draft early tomorrow morning. She stood and stretched, then picked up the whisky glasses and went to the kitchen to wash them. The warm water flowing over her hands was soothing and held her at the sink for a blank minute or so. But she was also listening out for Jack. The rumble of the ancient plumbing would let her know if he was preparing for bed. She went back into the sitting room to turn out the lights and found herself drawn again to her position at the window.

  Down in the square, not far from the puddle that the cat had stepped around, her husband was towing a suitcase. Supported by a strap from his shoulder was the briefcase he used for work. He reached his car, their car, opened it, put his luggage on the back seat, got in and started the engine. As the headlights came on and the front wheels turned at full lock so that he could maneuver out of a tight parking space, she heard faintly the sound of the car radio. Pop music. But he hated pop music.

  He must have packed his bag earlier in the evening, well before the start of their conversation. Or conceivably, halfway, when he had retreated to the bedroom. Instead of turmoil or anger or sorrow she felt only weariness. She thought she would be practical. If she could get to bed now she could avoid taking a sleeping pill. She went back into the kitchen, telling herself that she was not looking for a note on the pine table, where they always left each other notes. There was nothing. She locked the front door and switched off the hallway lights. The bedroom looked undisturbed. She slid open his wardrobe and with a wifely eye calculated that he had taken three jackets, the newest of which was off-white linen from Gieves & Hawkes. In the bathroom she resisted opening his cabinet to estimate the contents of his washbag. She knew enough. In bed her only sensible thought was that he must have taken great care going along the hall without her hearing, and closed the front door inch by deceitful inch.

  Even that was not enough to stop her descent into sleep. But sleep was no deliverance, for within the hour she was ringed by accusers. Or they were asking for help. The faces merged and separated. The baby twin, Matthew, with the earless bloated head and heart that wouldn’t squeeze, simply stared, as he had on other nights. The sisters, Rachel and Nora, were calling to her in regretful tones, listing faults that may have been hers or their own. Jack was coming closer, pushing his newly creased forehead into her shoulder, explaining in a whining voice that her duty was to expand his choices into the future.

  When her alarm rang at six thirty she sat up suddenly and for a moment stared without comprehension at the empty side of the bed. Then she went into the bathroom and began to prepare herself for a day in court.

  Two

  SHE SET OFF on her usual route from Gray’s Inn Square to the Royal Courts of Justice and did her best not to think. In one hand she carried her briefcase, in the other an umbrella aloft. The light was gloomy green and the city air was cool against her cheeks. She went out by the main entrance, avoiding small talk by nodding briskly at John, the friendly porter. Her hope was that she didn’t look too much like a woman in crisis. She kept her mind off her situation by playing to her inner ear a piece she had learned by heart. Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach’s second partita.

  Rain had fallen most days of the summer, the city trees appeared swollen, their crests enlarged, the pavements were cleansed and smooth, the cars on High Holborn showroom clean. Last time she had looked, the Thames at high tide was also swollen and a darker brown, sullen and rebellious as it rose against the piers of the bridges, ready to take to the streets. But everyone pushed on, complaining, resolute, drenched. The jet stream was broken, bent southward by factors beyond control, blocking the summer balm from the Azores, sucking in freezing air from the north. The consequence of man-made climate change, of melting sea ice disturbing the upper air, or irregular sunspot activity that was no one’s fault, or natural variability, ancient rhythms, the planet’s lot. Or all three, or any two. But what good were explanations and theories so early in the day? Fiona and the rest of London had work to get to.

  By the time she was crossing the street to go down Chancery Lane, the rain was coming down harder, at a fair slant, driven by a sudden cold wind. Now it was darker, droplets bounced icily against her legs; crowds hurried by, silent, self-absorbed. Traffic along High Holborn poured past her, loud and vigorously undeterred, headlights gleaming on the asphalt while she listened again to the grand opening, the adagio in the Italian style, a distant promise of jazz in the slow dense chords. But there was no escape, the piece led her straight to Jack, for she had learned it as a birthday present to him last April. Dusk in the square, both just back from work, table lamps lit, a glass of champagne in his hand, her glass on the piano as she performed what she had patiently committed to memory in the previous weeks. Then his exclamations of recognition and delight and kindly overdone amazement at such a feat of recall, their long kiss at the end, her murmur of happy birthday, his moist eyes, the clink of their cut-glass flutes.

  Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn and she helplessly summoned various treats she’d arranged for him. The list was unhealthily long—surprise operas, trips to Paris and Dubrovnik, Vienna, Trieste, Keith Jarrett in Rome (Jack, knowing nothing, instructed to pack a small case and passport and meet her at the airport straight from work), tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer’s specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice.

  Sorrow and the mounting details of grievances, while her true anger lay ahead. An abandoned fifty-nine-year-old woman, in the infancy of old age, just learning to crawl. She forced herself back to her partita as she turned off Chancery Lane down the narrow passage that led her into Lincoln’s Inn and its tangle of architectural splendor. Over the drumming of raindrops on her umbrella, she heard the lilting andante, walking pace, a rare marking in Bach, a beautiful carefree air over a strolling bass, her own steps falling in with the unearthly lighthearted melody as she went by Great Hall. The notes strained at some clear human meaning, but they meant nothing at all. Just loveliness, purified. Or love in its vaguest, largest form, for all people, indiscriminately. For children perhaps. Johann Sebastian had twenty by two marriages. He didn’t let his work prevent him loving and teaching, caring and composing for those who survived. Children. The inevitable thought recurred as she moved on to the demanding fugue she had mastered, for love of her husband, and played at full tilt without fumbling, without failing to separate the voices.

  Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight—this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist—a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term. How she arrived at her state was a slow-patterned counterpoint played out with Jack over two decades, dissonances appearing, then retreating, always reintroduced by her in moments of alarm, even horror, as the fertile years slipped by until they were gone, and she was almost too busy to notice.

  A story best told at speed. After finals, more exams, then the call to the bar, pupillage, a lucky invitation to prestigious chambers, some early success defending hopeless cases—how sensible it had seemed, to delay a child until her early thirties. And when those years came, they brought complex worthwhile cases, more success. Jack was also hesitant, arguing for holding back another year or two. Mid-thirties then, when he was teaching in Pittsburgh and she worked a fourteen-hour day, drifting deeper into family law as the idea of her own family receded, despite the visits of nephews and nieces. In the following years, the first rumors that she might be elected precociously to the bench and required to be on circuit. But the call didn’t come, not yet. And in her forties, the
re sprang up anxieties about elderly gravids and autism. Soon after, more young visitors to Gray’s Inn Square, noisy demanding great-nephews, great-nieces, reminded her how hard it would be to squeeze an infant into her kind of life. Then rueful thoughts of adoption, some tentative inquiries—and throughout the accelerating years that followed, occasional agonies of doubt, firm late-night decisions concerning surrogate mothers undone in the early-morning rush to work. And when at last, at nine thirty one morning at the Royal Courts of Justice, she was sworn in by the Lord Chief Justice and took her oath of allegiance and her Judicial Oath before two hundred of her bewigged colleagues, and she stood proudly before them in her robes, the subject of a witty speech, she knew the game was up; she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ.

  She crossed New Square and approached Wildy’s bookshop. The music in her head had faded, but now came another old theme: self-blame. She was selfish, crabbed, drily ambitious. Pursuing her own ends, pretending to herself that her career was not in essence self-gratification, denying an existence to two or three warm and talented individuals. Had her children lived, it would have been shocking to think they might not have. And so here was her punishment, to face this disaster alone, without sensible grown-up children, concerned and phoning, downing tools and rallying round for urgent kitchen-table conferences, talking sense to their stupid father, bringing him back. But would she take him in? They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations.

  She walked along the passage past Wildy’s, untempted by the law books in the window display, crossed Carey Street and went in the rear entrance of the Courts of Justice. Down one vaulted corridor, down another, up a flight of stairs, past some courtrooms, down again, across a courtyard, pausing at the foot of a staircase to shake out her umbrella. The air always reminded her of school, of the smell or feel of cold damp stone and a faint thrill of fear and excitement. She took the stairs rather than the lift, heavy-footed on the red carpet as she turned right toward her broad landing onto which the doors of many High Court judges faced—like an advent calendar, she sometimes thought. In each broad and bookish room, her colleagues would lose themselves daily in their cases, their trials, in a labyrinth of detail and dissent against which only a certain style of banter and irony offered some protection. Most of the judges she knew cultivated an elaborate sense of humor, but this morning there was no one around wanting to amuse her and she was glad. She was probably first in. Nothing like a domestic storm to toss you from your bed.

  She paused in her doorway. Nigel Pauling, correct and hesitant, was stooped over her desk, setting out documents. There followed, as always on a Monday, the ritual exchange of inquiries into each other’s weekends. Hers was “quiet,” and saying that word she handed him the corrected draft of the Bernstein judgment.

  The day’s business. In the Moroccan case, listed for ten o’clock, it was confirmed that the little girl had been removed from the jurisdiction to Rabat by the father, despite his assurances to the court, and no word of her whereabouts, no word from the father, and his counsel at a loss. The mother was receiving psychiatric help, but would be in court. The intention was to apply through the Hague Convention, Morocco, by good fortune, being the one Islamic state to have signed up. All this was spoken in an apologetic hurry by Pauling, running a nervous hand through his hair, as though he were the abductor’s brother. That poor pale woman, an underweight university don, who trembled while she sat in court, specialist in the sagas of Bhutan, devoted to her only child. And the father devoted too in his devious fashion, delivering his daughter from the evils of the unfaithful West. The papers were waiting on her desk.

  The rest of the day’s business was already clear in her mind. As she went to her desk she asked after the Jehovah’s Witness case. The parents would be making an emergency application for legal aid and a certificate would be issued in the afternoon. The boy, the clerk told her, was suffering from a rare form of leukemia.

  “Let’s give him a name.” She said it crisply and her tone surprised her.

  When under pressure from her Pauling was always smoother, even a touch satirical. Now he gave her more information than she needed.

  “Of course, My Lady. Adam. Adam Henry, an only child. The parents are Kevin and Naomi. Mr. Henry runs a small company. Groundwork, land drainage, that sort of thing. Apparently a virtuoso with the mechanical digger.”

  After twenty minutes at her desk she went back across the landing, along a corridor to an alcove housing the coffee machine, with a glass image of hyper-real roasted beans spilling from a beaker, lit from the inside, brown and cream, as vivid in the gloom of the recess as an illuminated manuscript. A cappuccino with an extra shot, perhaps two. Better to start drinking it right here, where, undisturbed, she could nauseously picture Jack rising about now from an unfamiliar bed to prepare for work, the form beside him half asleep, well served in the small hours, stirring between sticky sheets, murmuring his name, calling him back. On a furious impulse, she pulled out her phone, scrolled through the numbers to their locksmith on the Gray’s Inn Road, gave her four-digit PIN, then instructions for a change of lock. Of course, madam, right away. They held details of the existing lock. New keys to be delivered to the Strand today and nowhere else. Then, proceeding rapidly, hot plastic cup in her free hand, fearful of changing her mind, she called the deputy director of estates, a gruff good-natured fellow, to let him know to expect a locksmith. So, she was bad, and feeling good about being bad. There must be a price for leaving her and here it was, to be in exile, a supplicant to his previous life. She would not permit him the luxury of two addresses.

  Coming back along the corridor with her cup, she was already wondering at her ridiculous transgression, obstructing her husband from rightful access, one of the clichés of marital breakdown, one that an instructing solicitor would advise a client—generally the wife—against in the absence of a court order. A professional life spent above the affray, advising, then judging, loftily commenting in private on the viciousness and absurdity of divorcing couples, and now she was down there with the rest, swimming with the desolate tide.

  These thoughts were suddenly interrupted. As she turned onto the wide landing she saw Mr. Justice Sherwood Runcie framed in his doorway, waiting for her, grinning, rubbing his hands in parody of a stage villain to indicate he had something for her. He was a connoisseur of the latest word around the courts, which was usually accurate, and he took pleasure in passing it on. He was one of the few, perhaps the only colleague, she preferred to avoid, and not because he was unlikeable. He was, in fact, a charming man, who gave all his spare hours to a charity he had founded long ago in Ethiopia. But for Fiona he was an embarrassment by association. He had tried a murder case four years back, still awful to contemplate, and painful to remain silent about, as she must. And this in a brave little world, a village, where they routinely forgave each other their mistakes, where all suffered from time to time a judgment rudely overturned in the Court of Appeal, wrists slapped on points of law. But here was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in modern times. And Sherwood! So untypically gullible in the presence of a mathematically ignorant expert witness, then, to widespread disbelief and horror, sending down an innocent bereaved mother for the killing of her children, to be bullied and assaulted by fellow inmates, demonized by the tabloids and have her first appeal rejected. And when at last released, as she surely had to be, to fall victim to drink, of which she died.

  The strange logic that drove this tragedy could still keep Fiona awake at night. The chances of a child dying from sudden infant death syndrome were said in court to be nine thousand to one. Therefore, the prosecution’s expert pronounced, the chances
of two siblings dying was this figure multiplied by itself. One in eighty-one million. Almost impossible, and so the mother must have had a hand in the deaths. The world beyond the court was astonished. If the cause of the syndrome was genetic, the children shared a cause. If it was environmental, they shared that too. If it was both, they shared both. And what, by comparison, were the chances of two babies from a stable middle-class family being murdered by their mother? But outraged probability theorists, statisticians and epidemiologists were powerless to intervene.

  In moments of disillusion with due process, she only needed to summon the case of Martha Longman and Runcie’s lapse to confirm a passing sense that the law, however much Fiona loved it, was at its worst not an ass but a snake, a poisonous snake. Unhelpfully, Jack took an interest in the case and when it suited him, when things weren’t well between them, loudly loathed her profession and her implication in it, as if she herself had written the judgment.

  But who could defend the judiciary once Longman’s first appeal was rejected? The case was a sham from its inception. The pathologist, so it turned out, unaccountably withheld crucial evidence about an aggressive bacterial infection in the second child. The police and Crown Prosecution Service were illogically keen for a conviction, the medical profession was dishonored by the evidence of its representative, and the entire system, this careless mob of professionals, drove a kindly woman, a well-regarded architect, toward persecution, despair and death. In the face of conflicting evidence from several expert medical witnesses about the causes of the infants’ deaths, the law stupidly preferred a guilty verdict over skepticism and uncertainty. Runcie was, everyone agreed, an extremely nice fellow, and, the record showed, a good hardworking judge. But when Fiona heard that both the pathologist and the doctor were back at work, she couldn’t help herself. The case turned her stomach.