The Children Act (3 page)

She thought of his proposed or actual lover, his statistician, Melanie—she had met her once—a silent young woman with heavy amber beads and a taste for the kind of stilettos that could wreck an old oak floor.
Other women cloy/The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies
. It could be just like that, a poisonous obsession, an addiction drawing him away from home, bending him out of shape, consuming all they had of past and future, as well as present. Or Melanie belonged, as Fiona herself clearly did, with “other women,” the ones who cloy, and he would be back within the fortnight, appetite sated, making plans for the family holiday.

Either way, unbearable.

Unbearable and fascinating. And irrelevant. She forced herself back to her pages, to her summary of the evidence from both parties—efficient and drily sympathetic enough. Next, her account of the court-appointed social worker’s report. A plump, well-intentioned young woman often out of breath, uncombed hair, untucked unbuttoned blouse. Chaotic, twice late for the proceedings, due to some complicated trouble with car keys and documents locked in her car and a child to collect from school. But in place of the usual please-both-parties dither, the Cafcass woman’s account was sensible, even incisive, and Fiona quoted her with approval. Next?

She looked up and saw her husband on the other side of
the room, pouring another drink, a big one, three fingers, perhaps four. And barefoot now, as he, the bohemian academic, often was indoors in summer. Hence the quiet entrance. Likely he had been lying on the bed, regarding for half an hour the lacy ceiling moldings, reflecting on her unreasonableness. The hunched tension of the shoulders, the way he returned the stopper—a smack with the heel of his thumb—suggested that he had padded in for an argument. She knew the signs.

He turned and came toward her with his undiluted drink. The Jewish girls, Rachel and Nora, must hover behind her like Christian angels and wait. Their secular god had troubles of her own. From her low perspective, she had a decent view of his toenails—nicely trimmed and squared off, bright and youthful half-moons, no sign of the fungal streaks that stained her own toes. He kept in shape with faculty tennis and a set of weights in his study, which he aimed to raise a hundred times in the course of every day. She did little more than haul her bag of documents through the Courts of Justice to her room, taking the stairs rather than the lift. He was handsome in an unruly way, lopsidedly square-jawed, a toothy game-for-anything expression that charmed his students, who didn’t expect a dissolute look in a professor of ancient history. She had never thought he laid a finger on the kids. Now, everything looked different. Perhaps, for all a lifetime’s entanglement in human weakness, she remained an innocent, mindlessly exempting herself and Jack from the general condition. His only book for
the non-academic reader, a pacy life of Julius Caesar, made him briefly almost famous in a muted, respectable fashion. Some pert little second-year minx might have irresistibly put herself in his way. There was, or there used to be, a couch in his office. And a
NE PAS DÉRANGER
sign taken from the Hôtel de Crillon at the end of their long-ago honeymoon. These were new thoughts, this was how the worm of suspicion infested the past.

He sat down in the nearest chair. “You couldn’t answer my question so I’ll tell you. It’s been seven weeks and a day. Are you honestly content with that?”

She said quietly, “Are you already having this affair?”

He knew that a difficult question was best answered by another. “You think we’re too old? Is that it?”

She said, “Because if you are I’d like you to pack a bag now and leave.”

A self-harming move, without premeditation, her rook for his knight, utter folly, and no way back. If he stayed, humiliation; if he left, the abyss.

He was settling into his chair, a studded, wood and leather piece with a look of medieval torture about it. She had never liked Victorian Gothic, and never less than now. He crossed his ankle over his knee, his head was cocked as he looked at her in tolerance or pity, and she looked away. Seven weeks and a day also had a medieval ring, like a sentence handed down from an old Court of Assize. It troubled her to think that she might have a case to answer. They’d had a decent sex life for many
years, regular and lustily uncomplicated, on weekdays in the early morning just as they woke, before the dazzling concerns of the working day penetrated the heavy bedroom curtains. At weekends in the afternoons, sometimes after tennis, social doubles in Mecklenburgh Square. Obliterating all blame for one’s partner’s fluffed shots. In fact, a deeply pleasurable love life, and functional, in that it delivered them smoothly into the rest of their existence, and beyond discussion, which was one of its joys. Not even a vocabulary for it—one reason why it pained her to hear him mention it now and why she barely noted the slow decline of ardor and frequency.

But she had always loved him, was always affectionate, loyal, attentive, only last year had nursed him tenderly when he broke his leg and wrist in Méribel during a ridiculous downhill ski race against old school friends. She pleasured him, sat astride him, now she remembered, while he lay grinning amid the chalky splendor of his plaster of Paris. She did not know how to refer to such things in her own defense, and besides, these were not the grounds on which she was being attacked. It was not devotion she lacked but passion.

Then there was age. Not the full withering, not just yet, but its early promise was shining through, just as one might catch in a certain light a glimpse of the adult in a ten-year-old’s face. If Jack, sprawled across from her, seemed absurd in this conversation, then how much more so must she appear to him. His white chest hair, of which he remained proud, curled out
over his shirt’s top button only to declare that it was no longer black; the head hair, thinning monkishly in the familiar pattern, he had grown long in unconvincing compensation; shanks less muscular, not quite filling out his jeans, the eyes holding a gentle hint of future vacancy, with a matching hollowness about the cheeks. So what then of her ankles thickening in coquettish reply, her backside swelling like summer cumulus, her waist waxing stout as her gums receded? All this still in paranoid millimeters. Far worse, the special insult the years reserved for certain women, as the corners of her mouth began their downward turn in pursuit of a look of constant reproach. Fair enough in a bewigged judge frowning at counsel from her throne. But in a lover?

And here they were, like teenagers, shaping up to discuss themselves in the cause of Eros.

Tactically astute, he ignored her ultimatum. Instead he said, “I don’t think we should give up, do you?”

“You’re the one who’s walking away.”

“I think you have a part in this too.”

“I’m not the one about to wreck our marriage.”

“So you say.”

He said it reasonably, projecting the three words deep into the cave of her self-doubt, shaping them to her inclination to believe that in any conflict as embarrassing as this, she was likely to be wrong.

He took a careful sip of his drink. He was not going to get
drunk in order to assert his needs. He would be grave and rational when she would have preferred him loudly in the wrong.

Holding her gaze he said, “You know I love you.”

“But you’d like someone younger.”

“I’d like a sex life.”

Her cue to make warm promises, draw him back to her, apologize for being busy or tired or unavailable. But she looked away and said nothing. She was not going to dedicate herself under pressure to revive a sensual life she had at that moment no taste for. Especially when she suspected the affair had already begun. He had not troubled himself to deny it, and she was not going to ask again. It was not only pride. She still dreaded his reply.

“Well,” he said after their long pause. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Not with this gun to my head.”

“Meaning?”

“I shape up or you go to Melanie.”

She assumed he had understood her meaning well enough but had wanted to hear her say the woman’s name, which she had never spoken out loud before. It evinced a tremor or a tightening in his face, a helpless little tic of arousal. Or it was the naked phrasing, the “go to.” Had she lost him already? She felt suddenly dizzy, as though her blood pressure had dipped, then soared. She pushed herself upright on the chaise longue, and set down on the carpet the page of the judgment still in her hand.

“That’s not how it is,” he was saying. “Look, turn this around. Suppose you were in my place and I was in yours. What would you do?”

“I wouldn’t go and find myself a man and then open negotiations with you.”

“What, then?”

“I’d find out what was troubling you.” Her voice sounded prim in her ears.

He gestured toward her grandly with both hands. “Fine!” The Socratic method, as used, no doubt, on his students. “So what is troubling you?”

For all the stupidity and dishonesty of the exchange, it was the only question and she’d invited it, but she felt irritated by him, condescended to, and for the moment she didn’t reply and instead looked past him down the room to the piano, barely played in two weeks, and the silver-framed photos it supported in country-house style. Both sets of parents from wedding day to dotage, his three sisters, her two brothers, their wives and husbands present and past (disloyally, they struck no one off), eleven nephews and nieces, then the thirteen children they in turn had made. Life accelerating to people a small village clustered on a baby grand. She and Jack had contributed nothing, no one, beyond family reunions, near-weekly birthday presents, multigenerational holidays in the cheaper sort of castle. In their apartment, they hosted much family. At the end of the hallway was a walk-in cupboard filled with folded-up cot, high
chair and playpen, and three wicker baskets of chewed and fading toys in readiness for the next addition. And this summer’s castle, ten miles north of Ullapool, awaited their decision. According to the ill-printed brochure, a moat, a working drawbridge and a dungeon with hooks and iron rings in the wall. Yesterday’s torture was now a thrill for the under-twelves. She thought again of the medieval sentence, seven weeks and a day, a period that began with the final stages of the Siamese twins case.

All the horror and pity, and the dilemma itself, were in the photograph, shown to the judge and no one else. Infant sons of Jamaican and Scottish parents lay top-and-tailed amid a tangle of life-support systems on a pediatric intensive-care bed, joined at the pelvis and sharing a single torso, their splayed legs at right angles to their spines, in resemblance of a many-pointed starfish. A measure fixed along the side of the incubator showed this helpless, all-too-human ensemble to be sixty centimeters in length. Their spinal cords and the base of their spines were fused, their eyes closed, four arms raised in surrender to the court’s decision. Their apostolic names, Matthew and Mark, had not encouraged clear thinking in some quarters. Matthew’s head was swollen, his ears mere indentations in roseate skin. Mark’s head, beneath the neonatal woolen cap, was normal. They shared only one organ, their bladder, which was mostly in Mark’s abdomen and which, a consultant noted, “emptied spontaneously and freely through two separate urethras.” Matthew’s heart was large but “it barely squeezed.”
Mark’s aorta fed into Matthew’s and it was Mark’s heart that sustained them both. Matthew’s brain was severely malformed and not compatible with normal development; his chest cavity lacked functional lung tissue. He had, one of the nursing staff said, “not the lungs to cry with.”

Mark was sucking normally, feeding and breathing for both, doing “all the work” and therefore abnormally thin. Matthew, with nothing to do, was gaining weight. Left alone, Mark’s heart would sooner or later fail from the effort, and both must die. Matthew was unlikely to live more than six months. When he died, he would take his brother with him. A London hospital was urgently looking for permission to separate the twins to save Mark, who had the potential to be a normal healthy child. To do so, surgeons would have to clamp, then sever the shared aorta, so killing Matthew. And then begin a complicated set of reconstructive procedures on Mark. The loving parents, devout Catholics living in a village on Jamaica’s north coast, calm in their belief, refused to sanction murder. God gave life and only God could take it away.

In part, her memory was of a prolonged and awful din assaulting her concentration, a thousand car alarms, a thousand witches in a frenzy, giving substance to the cliché: the screaming headline. Doctors, priests, television and radio hosts, newspaper columnists, colleagues, relations, taxi drivers, the nation at large had a view. The narrative ingredients were compelling: tragic babies, kindhearted, solemn and eloquent parents in love with each other as well as their children, life, love, death and a
race against time. Masked surgeons pitched against supernatural belief. As for the spectrum of positions, at one end were those of secular utilitarian persuasion, impatient of legal detail, blessed by an easy moral equation: one child saved better than two dead. At the other stood those of not only firm knowledge of God’s existence but an understanding of his will. Quoting Lord Justice Ward, Fiona reminded all parties in the opening lines of her judgment, “This court is a court of law, not of morals, and our task has been to find, and our duty is then to apply, the relevant principles of law to the situation before us—a situation which is unique.”

In this dire contest there was only one desirable or less undesirable outcome, but a lawful route to it was not easy. Under pressure of time, with a noisy world waiting, she found, in just under a week and thirteen thousand words, a plausible way. Or at least the Court of Appeal, working to an even harsher deadline on the day after she delivered her judgment, seemed to suggest she had. However, there could be no presumption that one life was worth more than another. Separating the twins would be to kill Matthew. Not separating them would, by omission, kill both. The legal and moral space was tight and the matter had to be set as a choice of the lesser evil. Still, the judge was obliged to consider what was in Matthew’s best interests. Clearly not death. But nor was life an option. He had a rudimentary brain, no lungs, a useless heart, was probably in pain and condemned to die, and soon.