The Decision (104 page)

‘Oh,’ she said, and delight flooded her again, delight and relief. ‘Oh, God. Is it too late for me to – just kiss you again. I’ll lock the door.’

‘I really would rather you didn’t,’ he said, and she felt crushed and foolish, and then she saw that he was smiling, ‘because if you did, various sequences might be set in motion and it would be getting late for the seven o’clock breakfast Mr Douglas’s auntie has promised us before driving us into Marlow and I would feel bound to repeat all my warnings, and—’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ she said, ‘we can be quick, very, very quick. Please, Toby. Please.’

And Mr Douglas’s auntie, downstairs preparing the English breakfast for which she was famous in the area, complete with black pudding, looked up at the ceiling and shook her head at the noise of the bed creaking and thought how she really must replace it and how nice it was to find a married couple who were so clearly in love with one another …

And meanwhile in London, in her chic, minimalist flat, Louise was also awake, staring at the bright morning sky, and thinking about Matt and his rather obvious alarm at her invitation back to her flat and the rather feeble excuse he had made about getting home and sorting out a few final details of his case.

Matt was also awake, afraid that he had overstepped the mark and belaboured poor Louise just one too many times with his misery and his remorse and thinking she really was the only person who had ever managed to distract him from it, and what a long way they did indeed go back, and how much he valued her friendship and that he really should not trade on it so heavily. When the case was over, he would make a great effort to leave her alone. And let her get on with her own life. Until then, he seemed to rather need her.

And Georgina Barker, angry beyond anything, was counting down the hours until nine o’clock which she felt was the earliest time she could decently ring Philip Gordon, Eliza’s solicitor, who had given her his home number, to tell him that she was prepared after all to appear as a witness.

‘All rise.’

Mr Justice Rogers walked more quickly into the court than most judges. He was, while deeply respectful of its processes and traditions, its power and its frequent glory, impatient of its pomp. His alma mater, Plymouth Grammar rather than the Winchester or Eton of so many of his peers, and his university, Nottingham, not Oxford or Cambridge, had left him perhaps less arrogant than they, but more self-opinionated. He had succeeded, he felt, where most of his ilk would have failed; doors had not automatically opened to him as he left university, the old-boy network had not been available to him, his pupillage had been hard won, and his father, a widowed head teacher from Devon, had had to sell much of his beloved dead wife’s jewellery to keep him in it. Cases had been equally elusive for a good while, as the soft burr that still clung to his voice charmed but did not inspire confidence in clients; and even as his reputation gained an increasing momentum, won in the first instance by his brilliant defence of a young woman accused of the murder of her offspring – it was perhaps one of the first recorded cases of what would one day be called ‘cot death’ – the ultimate prize of a seat on the bench took him a decade longer to win than it did most of his peers.

Along the way, he had lost both his wife and two young sons in a messy divorce; she had grown weary of his long absences as a circuit judge – which had been hard on her, Clifford Rogers would have been the first to accept – and taken up with the dashing young GP who had called so frequently late at night when one or other of the boys was ill.

She had been granted both custody and care and control; the boys were only five and three and she and the doctor could provide a model home. The boys were now fifteen and thirteen and Clifford Rogers had probably spent only a year in their company in total.

He was, not surprisingly, something of a misogynist, deeply suspicious of the feminist movement and almost equally so of the working mother.

His sympathies in the case of Shaw vs Shaw, from his initial very careful reading of the documents, tended towards the father.

From what he had read he was self-made, hard-working, successful and a devoted father; the mother, a fashion editor, and with an undefended adultery to her name, and some history of mental illness, did not present a very satisfactory picture. However, it was a complex case and an interesting one; he had found himself looking forward to it during the course of a rather long and particularly lonely weekend. He found the way many judges came to the court ill-prepared quite shocking and more so if it was necessary to adjourn proceedings for several hours so that they could study the documents more carefully. For Clifford Rogers, the weekend before a big case was the start of his working week.

And it was an impression of impatience, of an eagerness to get on with the matter that he carried with him as he strode into the court.

Ivor Lewis admired Clifford Rogers greatly; he could not believe in their luck in getting him as their judge. He had once heard him speak on the iniquities of privilege in general and public-school education in particular; the likes of Jeremy Northcott therefore, Lewis reckoned, and the upper-class riff-raff from his agency, and even the upmarket tones of Eliza Shaw, must surely struggle to find favour. He watched Rogers now as he settled on the bench, pulling out files, looking round the court with his brooding, restless gaze, and wondered if they could possibly have had anyone more suitable … and the other lot hadn’t even got a QC. It really was going to be like taking candy from a baby – an appropriate analogy indeed, he said to himself, looking round.

‘Yes, Mr Hayward, do please begin.’

Oh, God, thought Eliza, it’s started; oh, Christ, thought Matt, this is it; and terror united them, as surely as love once had, terror at what they had done and what was to come, and their eyes met across the court, and both of them would have given all they had to be safely back in the past, with none of it begun.

And then Bruce Hayward rose to his feet and looked around the court; there was a silence, while he appeared to be waiting for absolute attention. He always did that, Philip Gordon knew, for as long as he dared. Which wouldn’t be so very long today, Hayward was a wily old gannet and he knew that Clifford Rogers didn’t really like theatricals.

Finally then: ‘My lord, we are here today to consider the case of Shaw versus Shaw, and the matter of custody of Emmeline Shaw, aged six. This is necessitated by the ending of the marriage due to the admitted adultery of her mother Elizabeth Shaw … her father, Matthew Shaw, seeks custody on the grounds that Mrs Shaw is not a fit person to have care of her daughter … moreover I intend to show that Mrs Shaw has a history of mental instability and is quite possibly not competent to take care of so young a child … that Mrs Shaw took Emmeline on trips abroad without Mr Shaw, where she was not properly supervised … and that moreover while Emmeline was still extremely young Mrs Shaw returned to work in the advertising industry, pursuing her career specifically against the expressed wishes of Mr Shaw … and quite frequently asked the nanny to bring the child to her office late in the evening, if she was delayed in a meeting … it was during this time that Mrs Shaw went on what she describes as a photographic session to Scotland, leaving the child at home with a nanny, specifically against Mr Shaw’s expressed wishes, and that the adultery, with the creative director employed by the agency, took place …

‘… It should also be noticed that Mrs Shaw sought to diminish Mr Shaw’s public reputation, and that far from being a supportive wife she was a destructive element in his career, even engineering an article in a newspaper critical of his work and methods … a career that had of course guaranteed her a very high standard of living and moreover had enabled Mr Shaw to purchase a property which had been in Mrs Shaw’s family for many generations but was going to rack and ruin, as there were not the funds to maintain it. And beyond even that, your honour, he had allowed Mrs Shaw’s mother, a widow, to remain living in the property, a substantial house in Wiltshire, when she would normally have been forced to move into very inferior accommodation …’

Well, Eliza thought, they might as well all go home straight away. There wasn’t a hope in hell of getting Emmie, not a judge in Christendom who would have passed her into the hands of so neglectful, so selfish, so manipulative a mother.

‘… there was also a very unfortunate incident in Milan, Italy—’

‘I know where Milan is, Mr Hayward.’

He was irritating the judge, Toby thought; that was a piece of luck, they hadn’t considered that as a possibility, that foxy old Hayward with his flashy gestures and smooth voice might prove rather too theatrical for the more basic approach of Clifford Rogers.

‘Of course, my lord. Mrs Shaw presented this trip as a distraction from her depression after her baby was born, a depression for which she sought psychiatric help.’

‘Yes, yes, and I would like to read those reports. Is there some reason they are not included in the papers?’

‘My lord,’ said Toby Gilmour, standing up, ‘Mrs Miller, the psychotherapist, has refused to disclose the reports in advance on grounds of patient confidentiality.’

‘Has she indeed? Then she must be informed I need to read them. Given the age of the child, and their importance to the case.’

‘Yes, my lord. But—’

‘No buts, Mr Gilmour. I shall find her in contempt of court if she refuses further.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

That was it then, Eliza thought. It would all come out, there was no hope left.

‘Do continue, Mr Hayward.’

Mr Hayward continued with a graphic description of Emmie, lost in Milan by one of the Crespis’ maids, ‘after dark, at the busiest time of the year, in a foreign city, a small child of just five. She was finally found in a department store. Imagine her distress, her panic, indeed.’

‘I think I can manage that, Mr Hayward. And possibly of the mother as well.’

‘Indeed. Moreover this incident was kept from Mr Shaw and only emerged when Emmeline mentioned it much later. The next night a party of the Crespis’ guests was going to the opera. I should have said the Crespis lived on the shores of Lake Como, and Milan was an hour’s drive away. Emmeline was left with this same incompetent maid. Although there had been talk of a thick fog coming in, a well-known occurrence in Milan, Mrs Shaw decided to go. And as a result was trapped in Milan that night and again the child was alone in a strange, large house, with a group of servants she hardly knew for company …’

It all sounded so terrible, Eliza thought. So, so terrible. Careless, reckless behaviour towards her daughter; and – it had been terrible, how had she been persuaded to do that, how, how?’

‘… a further incident, deeply distressing for Mr Shaw, indicative I would propose of Mrs Shaw’s general irresponsibility, occurred when she organised the appearance of the extremely derogatory article in the
Daily News
which named her husband and some of the properties he owned … there was no attempt to allow him to explain the situation, or to warn him. It was a humiliation and a betrayal that Mr Shaw again found indicative of Mrs Shaw’s lack of loyalty towards him and responsibility for the family he was working so hard to support.

‘We now come to the night which Mr Shaw describes as being the last of his marriage. Mrs Shaw was in Scotland, working, for three days, Emmeline was left in the care of the nanny and her maternal grandmother. Mr Shaw arrived home to find the child unwell; she became dramatically worse, the doctor was called and he advised she be taken to Casualty. She was crying for her mother, crying to speak to her, Mr Shaw phoned the hotel where his wife was staying and was put through to her room; a man answered the phone. The man with whom she was committing adultery. It was at that point, Mr Shaw said, that he lost faith finally in Mrs Shaw not only as a wife, but a mother.

‘I would submit therefore, Your Honour, that Mrs Shaw is clearly an unfit person to have charge of her child, and that sole custody be granted to Mr Shaw.’

This was horrible. How could she bear it, how was she going to get through a week of this, of hearing these lies and innuendoes and distortions of the facts? Toby had tried to warn her but nothing could have prepared her for this … she looked at him across the court, sitting very still, very calm, studying papers, making notes, listening to Bruce Hayward with great attention, and felt a rush of rage that he could do that, not leap to his feet and her defence, saying that is not so, not how it was, this is not true, most assuredly not true. Well, he had warned her; but he seemed a very different creature from the man who had made love to her only three days before …

‘… Your Honour, I would now like to call Mr Shaw …’

He looked very nervous, Eliza thought; she knew that expression, the one of fake bravado, the slightly cocky tapping of his fingers on the witness box, the inability to make eye contact … he was really scared. Well – good.

‘Mr Shaw, perhaps you would like to tell us, in your own words, why you think you should have care, and indeed custody of your daughter. You are, after all, a very busy man, you work long hours, why do you think she would be better off with you than her mother? Take your time.’

Matt cleared his throat.

‘I have worked very long hours in the past, it’s true. But if I was to gain custody of Emmie – of my daughter, I would make sure that didn’t happen. I have a large company now, with many employees, and I am very well able to delegate all but the most complex tasks. I am already looking at adjusting my schedules to allow for me to be home very shortly after Emmie is back from school …’