The Children Act (6 page)

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.

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 trace 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.