The Children Act (14 page)

And the money? The new coinage was half-truth and special pleading. Greedy husbands versus greedy wives, maneuvering like nations at the end of a war, grabbing from the ruins what spoils they could before the final withdrawal. Men concealing their funds in foreign accounts, women demanding a life of ease, forever. Mothers preventing children from seeing their fathers, despite court orders; fathers neglecting to support their children, despite court orders. Husbands hitting wives and children, wives lying and spiteful, one party or the other or both drunk, or drug-addled, or psychotic; and children again, forced to become carers of an inadequate parent, children genuinely abused, sexually, mentally, both, their evidence relayed on-screen to the court. And beyond Fiona’s reach, in cases reserved for the criminal rather than the family courts, children tortured, starved or beaten to death, evil spirits thrashed out of them in animist rites, gruesome young stepfathers breaking toddlers’ bones while dim compliant mothers looked on, and drugs, drink, extreme household squalor, indifferent neighbors selectively deaf to the screaming and careless or hard-pressed social workers failing to intervene.

The work of the Family Division went on. It was an accident of the listings that so much marital conflict came Fiona’s way. Pure coincidence that she was in conflict herself. It was not usual in this line of work to be sending people to prison, but all the same, she thought in idle moments that she could send down all those parties wanting, at the expense of their
children, a younger wife, a richer or less boring husband, a different suburb, fresh sex, fresh love, a new worldview, a nice new start before it was too late. Mere pursuit of pleasure. Moral kitsch. Her own childlessness and the situation with Jack shaped these daydreams and, of course, she was not serious. Still, she buried deep in a private mental domain, but never let it affect her decisions, a puritan contempt for the men and women who pulled their families apart and persuaded themselves they were acting selflessly for the best. In this thought experiment, she wouldn’t have spared the childless, or at least, not Jack. A cleansing spell in the Scrubs for contaminating their marriage in the cause of novelty? Why not?

For life at home in Gray’s Inn since his return was quiet and strained. There had been rows, during which she discharged some bitter feelings. Twelve hours later those feelings were renewed as ardently as wedding vows, and nothing changed, the air was not “cleared.” She remained betrayed. He spiced his apologies with old complaints that she had isolated him, that she was cold. He even said late one night that she was “no fun” and had “lost the art of play.” Of all his accusations, these bothered her most because she sensed their truth, but they did not diminish her anger.

At least he was no longer saying he loved her. Their most recent exchange, ten days ago, reiterated all they had said before, every charge, every response, every brooded-over well-turned phrase, and in a short while they fell back, weary with
each other and themselves. Since then, nothing. They moved about their days, their separate business in different parts of the city, and when confined together in the apartment stepped daintily around each other, like dancers at a hoedown. They were terse and competitively polite when obliged to confer on household matters, avoided meals together, worked in separate rooms, each distracted by raw awareness through the walls of the other’s radioactive presence. Without discussing it, they ducked out of all joint invitations. Her only conciliatory move was to give him a new key.

She inferred from his evasive but morose remarks that in the statistician’s bedroom he had not passed through the gates of paradise. Not really so reassuring. He was likely to try his luck elsewhere, was trying it already perhaps, freed this time from the dismal constraints of honesty. His “geology lectures” may have been a useful cover. She remembered her promise to leave him if he went ahead with Melanie. But Fiona didn’t have the time to set in motion such a gross disentanglement. And she was still undecided, she didn’t trust her current mood. If he had given her more time after he left, she would have reached a clear decision and worked constructively to end the marriage or rebuild it. So she abandoned herself to work in the usual way and set herself to survive a day at a time the subdued drama of her half-life with Jack.

When one of his nieces dropped off her children for the weekend, identical twin girls aged eight, matters became easier,
the apartment grew larger as attention turned outward. For two nights Jack slept on the sofa in the sitting room, which the children never questioned. These were girls of a straight-backed old-fashioned sort, solemn and intimate in their manner, though not above the occasional explosive row. One or the other—they were easy to tell apart—would seek Fiona out where she was reading, and stand before her, resting a confiding hand on her knee, and release a silvery stream of anecdote, reflection, fantasy. Fiona would join in with stories of her own. Twice on this visit it happened that while she was speaking, a wave of love for the child constricted her throat and pricked her eyes. She was feeling old and foolish. It bothered her to be reminded how good Jack was with children. At the risk of putting his back out, the way he did once with Fiona’s brother’s three boys, he indulged some wild horseplay, which the girls took to with fits of inhuman shrieking. At home, their resentfully divorced mother never tossed them in the air upside down. He took them into the gardens to teach them an eccentric version of cricket he’d devised, and he read a long bedtime tale with booming comic energy and a talent for the voices.

But on Sunday evening, after the twins had been picked up, the rooms shrank back, the air was stale and Jack went out without explanation—surely a hostile act. To an assignation? she wondered as she made herself busy, tidying the spare room to keep her spirits from lowering further. Restoring the
soft toys to the wicker basket where they lived, retrieving glass beads and discarded drawings from under the bed, she felt the mild enveloping sorrow, a form of instant nostalgia, that the sudden absence of children can bring on. That feeling lingered into Monday morning and swelled into a general sadness that followed her on the walk to work. It only began to fade when she sat at her desk to prepare for her first case of the week.

At some point, Nigel Pauling must have brought in the post, for the pile was suddenly there at her elbow. At the sight of an undersized pale blue envelope resting on top, she almost called her clerk back to open it. She was in no mood to read for herself one more outpouring of illiterate abuse or a threat of violence. She turned back to her work, but couldn’t concentrate. The impractical envelope, loopy hand, absent postcode, the postage stamp slightly awry—she’d seen too much of it. But when she looked again and noticed the postmark she had a sudden suspicion, weighed the letter in her hand a moment and opened it. Instantly, she saw from the salutation that she was right. She had vaguely expected it for weeks. She’d spoken to Marina Greene and learned that he was making good progress, out of hospital, catching up on schoolwork at home, and expected back in his classroom within weeks.

Three pale blue pages, with writing on five sides. The first had a circled number seven centered at the top, above the date.

The first several words of the next paragraph were scored out.

She did not reply, or rather, she did not post the note it took her almost an hour that evening to compose. In her fourth and
final draft she thought she was friendly enough, glad to learn that he was home and feeling better, pleased that he had good memories of her visit. She advised him to be loving toward his parents. It was normal in one’s teenage years to question the beliefs one had grown up with, but one should do it in a respectful manner. She finished by saying, although it was not true, that she had been “tickled” by the idea of the boat trip round the world. She added that when she was young, she’d had dreams of escape just like his own. This wasn’t true either, for she had been too ambitious, even at sixteen, too hungry for good grades on her essays to think of running off. Teenage visits to her Newcastle cousins had been her only adventures. When she looked at her short letter a day later, it wasn’t the friendliness that struck her, it was the coolness, the dud advice, the threefold impersonal use of “one,” the manufactured recollection. She reread his and was touched again by its innocence and warmth. Better to send nothing at all than cast him down. If she changed her mind, she could write later.

The time was approaching when she would be on circuit, visiting English cities and the old Assize towns in the company of another judge, whose field was criminal and civil law. She would hear cases that otherwise would need to travel to the law courts in London. She would stay in specially maintained lodgings, impressive townhouses of historical and architectural interest where, in certain cases, the cellars were legendary and the housekeeper was likely to be a decent cook. It was customary
to be invited to a dinner given by the high sheriff. Then she and her fellow judge would return the compliment at the lodgings and invite notable or interesting types (there was a distinction) from the locality. The bedrooms were far grander than her own, the beds wider, the sheets of finer weave. In happier days, there was, for a securely married woman, guilty and sensuous pleasure in such unshared accommodation. Now, she longed to be gone from the silent and solemn pas de deux at home. And first stop was her favorite English city.

One morning in early September, a week before she began her journey, she received a second letter. Her concern was greater this time, even before she opened it, for the blue envelope lay on the doormat in the hallway at home, along with circulars and an electricity bill. No address, only her name. Easy enough for Adam Henry to wait outside in the Strand or in Carey Street and follow her at a distance.

Jack had already left for work. She took the letter into the kitchen and sat down with the remains of her breakfast.