The Children Act (5 page)

Above all, the duty of the court was to enable the children to come to adulthood and make their own decisions about the sort of life they wanted to lead. The girls might opt for their father’s or their mother’s version of religion, or they might find satisfaction in life elsewhere. Past eighteen they would be beyond the reach of parents and court. In parting, Fiona lightly rapped the paternal knuckles when she observed that Mr. Bernstein had availed himself of female counsel and solicitor, and benefited from the experience of the court-appointed social worker, the astute and disorganized Cafcass lady. And he was implicitly bound to the order of a female judge. He should ask himself why he would deny his daughters the opportunity of a profession.

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, there 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.