The Children Act (15 page)

Immediately, she e-mailed Marina Greene to ask if she could find time, as a matter of routine follow-up, to visit the boy and report back. By the end of the day she had a reply. Marina had met Adam that afternoon at his school, where he was starting an extra term to prepare for exams before Christmas. She spent half an hour with him. He had put on weight, there was color in his cheeks. He was lively, even “funny and mischievous.” There was some trouble at home, mostly over religious differences with his parents, but she thought there was nothing unusual in that. Separately, the headmaster told
her that Adam had done well in his time after hospital to catch up with his essays. His teachers thought he was turning in excellent work. Contributing well in class, no behavioral issues. All in all, it had turned out well. Reassured, Fiona decided against writing to him.

A week later, on the Monday morning she was to leave for the northeast of England, there occurred a minuscule shift along the marital fault lines, a movement as near-imperceptible as continental drift. It was unspoken, unacknowledged. Later, when she was on the train, thinking it through, the moment appeared to straddle the borders of the real and the imagined. Could she trust her recollection? It was seven thirty when she had come into the kitchen. Jack was standing by the counter with his back to her, pouring beans into the grinder. Her suitcase was in the hall and she was preoccupied with gathering up a few last documents. As usual, she was reluctant to be in a confined space with him. She picked up a scarf from the back of a chair and left to continue her search in the sitting room.

Some minutes later she came back. He was taking a jug of milk from the microwave. They were particular about their morning coffee and over the years their tastes had converged. They liked it strong, in tall white thin-lipped cups, filtered from high-grade Colombian beans, with warmed, not hot, milk. Still with his back to her, he poured milk into his coffee, then he turned with the raised cup only slightly extended toward her. There was nothing in his expression to suggest he
was offering it to her, and she didn’t shake or nod her head. Their eyes met briefly. Then he set the cup down on the deal table and pushed it an inch or so toward her. In itself, this need not have meant much at all, for in their tense prowling around each other they remained pointedly courteous, as though each was trying to outdo the other in appearing reasonable, blamelessly above rancor. It would not have done to make a pot of coffee only large enough for oneself. But there are ways of setting down a cup on a table, from the peremptory clip of china on wood to a sensitive noiseless positing, and there are ways of accepting a cup, which she did smoothly, in slow motion, and after she had taken one sip she didn’t wander off, or not immediately, as she might have on any other morning. A few silent seconds passed, and then it seemed that this was as far as they were prepared to go, that the moment contained too much for them and to attempt more would have set them back. He turned away from her to reach a cup for himself, and she turned away from him to go and fetch something from the bedroom. They moved a little more slowly than usual, perhaps even reluctantly.

By early afternoon she was in Newcastle. A driver was at the ticket barrier to take her to the law courts on the Quayside. Nigel Pauling was waiting for her by the judges’ entrance and led her to her room. He had driven up from London that morning with court papers and her robes—the full fig, as he put it—because she would be sitting in the Queen’s Bench as
well as in the Family Division. The clerk of the court came in to make a formal welcome, then the listings officer paid a visit and together they went through the cases listed for the days ahead.

There were other minor matters and it was not until four that she was free to leave. The forecast was of a rainstorm sweeping in from the southwest in the early evening. She told her driver to wait and took a stroll on the broad pavement by the river, under the Tyne Bridge and along Sandhill, past new pavement cafés and floral displays by solid mercantile buildings with classical facades. She went up the stairs to Castle Garth and paused at the top to look back toward the river. She had a taste for this kind of exuberant tangle of muscular cast iron, of postindustrial steel and glass, of old warehouses teased out of decrepitude into a fantasy youth of coffee shops and bars. She had a history with Newcastle and felt at ease here. In her teens she had come several times during her mother’s recurrent illnesses to stay with her favorite cousins. Uncle Fred, a dentist, was the wealthiest man she had ever known. Aunt Simone taught French at a grammar school. The house was pleasingly chaotic, a liberation from her mother’s airless polished domain in Finchley. Her cousins, both girls about her age, were jolly and wild and forced her out in the evenings on terrifying missions that included drink and four dedicated musicians with waist-length hair and droopy mustaches, who looked debauched but turned out to be kind. Her parents would have been amazed
and distraught to know that their studious sixteen-year-old daughter was a familiar face in certain clubs, drank cherry brandies and rum and Cokes and had taken her first lover. And along with her cousins, she was a faithful groupie, tolerated as a novice roadie for an underequipped, unpaid blues band, helping to haul amps and drum kit into the back of a rusty van that was always breaking down. She often tuned the guitars. Her emancipation had much to do with the fact that her visits were infrequent and never longer than three weeks. If she’d stayed longer—never a possibility—she might even have been allowed to sing the blues. She might have married Keith, the lead singer and harmonica player with a withered arm, whom she shyly adored.

Uncle Fred moved his practice south when she was eighteen, and the affair with Keith ended in tears and some love poems she didn’t send. This was an encounter with risk and riotous fun she was never to experience again, and it remained inseparable from her idea of Newcastle. It could not have been replicated in London, the seat of her professional ambitions. Over many years she had been back to the northeast on various pretexts, and four occasions on circuit. It always lifted her spirits to approach the city within sight of Stephenson’s High Level Bridge over the Tyne, and to arrive like her excited teenage self, stepping off the train at Newcastle Central under the three great curved arches of John Dobson’s creation, and to come out by way of Thomas Prosser’s extravagant neoclassical
porte cochere. It was her dentist uncle, rolling up to greet her in his green Jaguar with her impatient cousins on board, who had taught her to appreciate the station and the town’s architectural treasures. She had never lost the impression of having come abroad to find herself in a Baltic city-state of curious optimism and pride. The air was keener, the light a spacious luminescent gray, the natives friendly but with sharper edges, self-conscious, or self-ironic like actors in a comedy. Alongside theirs, her southern accent sounded constricted and contrived. If, as Jack insisted, geology shaped the variety of British character and destinies, then the locals were granite, she was crumbly limestone brash. But in her girlish infatuation with the city, her cousins, the band and her first boyfriend, she believed she could change, become truer, more real, become a Geordie. Years later, the memory of that ambition could still make her smile. But it continued to haunt her whenever she returned, a hazy notion of renewal, of undiscovered potential in another life, even as her sixtieth birthday approached.

THE CAR SHE
reclined in was a 1960s Bentley, her destination Leadman Hall, set a mile inside its park, which she was entering now by the lodge-house gates. Soon she passed a cricket ground, then an avenue of beeches, already agitating in a strengthening breeze, then a lake choked with greenery. The hall, in the Palladian style, recently painted a too brilliant
white, had twelve bedrooms and nine staff to accommodate and serve two High Court judges on circuit. Pevsner had mildly approved of the orangery, and nothing else. Only a bureaucratic anomaly had preserved Leadman’s from the cost-cutter’s blade, but the game was almost up; this was its final year as far as the judiciary was concerned. The hall, rented a few weeks a year from a local family with historic coal-mining interests, served mostly as a conference center and wedding venue. Its golf course, tennis courts and heated outdoor pool were, it was now realized, unnecessary luxuries for hardworking judges passing through. From next year, a local taxi firm would be supplying a roomy Vauxhall to replace the Bentley. Accommodation would be in a central Newcastle hotel. Judges on circuit for the Criminal Division, who occasionally sent down for long periods local men with fearsome relatives, rather preferred the seclusion of a grand house. But no one could make the case for Leadman’s without sounding self-interested.

Pauling was waiting with the housekeeper on the gravel by the main door. For this final visit he wanted to create a sense of occasion. He stepped up to the car’s rear door with an ironic flourish and a click of heels. As usual the housekeeper was new. This one was Polish, a young woman barely in her twenties, Fiona thought, but her gaze was level and cool and she took the judge’s largest piece of luggage in a firm grip before Pauling could get to it. Side by side, clerk and housekeeper led the way to the room on the first floor Fiona considered hers. It
was at the front of the house, with three tall windows facing toward the beech avenue and part of the weedy lake. Beyond the thirty-foot bedroom was a sitting room with writing desk. The bathroom, however, was along a corridor and down three carpeted steps. The last time Leadman’s was modernized, the general proliferation of lavatories and showers had yet to begin.

The storm arrived as she returned from her bath. She stood at the center window in a dressing gown watching squalls of rain, tall ghostly shapes, hurrying across the fields, which for seconds were lost to view. She saw the topmost branch of one of the nearer beeches snap and begin to fall, upend itself and swing as it was held by lower branches, then plunge again, become entangled, then, freed by the wind, hit the drive with a crack. Almost as loud as the rain hissing against the gravel was the moaning tumult in the guttering. She turned on the lights and began to dress. She was already ten minutes late for sherry in the drawing room.

Four men in dark suits and ties, each holding a gin and tonic, ceased talking and rose from their armchairs as she entered. A waiter in a stiff white jacket mixed her drink while her colleague, Caradoc Ball from the Queen’s Bench, doing the criminal list, introduced her to the others, a professor of jurisprudence, a man whose business was in fiber optics and someone working for the government in coastline conservation. All were connected with Ball in some way. She had not invited guests for the first evening. There followed some obligatory
conversation about the violent weather. Then, a digression on how people over fifty and all Americans still inhabited a Fahrenheit world. Next, on how British newspapers, for maximum impact, reported cold weather in Celsius, hot in Fahrenheit. All the while, she was wondering why the young man bending low over a trolley in the corner of the room was taking so long. He brought her drink just as the long-ago transition to decimal currency was being recalled.

She already knew from Ball that he was in Newcastle for the retrial of a murder case in which a man was alleged to have bludgeoned his mother to death at her home because of her ill-treatment of her youngest child, the half sister of the accused. No murder weapon was found and the DNA evidence was inconclusive. The defense’s case was that the woman had been killed by an intruder. The trial had collapsed when it was discovered that one juror had revealed to the others information he had got from the Internet through his phone. He had found a five-year-old tabloid story about the accused man’s previous conviction for violent assault. In the new age of digital access, something had to be done to “clarify” matters for juries. The professor of jurisprudence had lately been making a submission to the Law Commission, and this must have been the conversation that Fiona interrupted when she came into the room. Now it resumed. The fiber-optic man was asking how one could ever prevent juries from looking things up in the privacy of their homes, or from getting a family member to do it for them.
Relatively simple, was the professor’s point. Juries would police themselves. They would be obliged, under threat of a custodial sentence, to report anyone discussing matters not presented in court. Two years maximum for doing so, six months maximum for failing to report a breach. The commission would deliver its conclusions next year.

Just then the butler came in to invite them to the dinner table. Though he could hardly have been out of his thirties, his face was deadly pale, as though dusted in powder. As white as an aspirin, she had once heard a rural French lady say. But he didn’t seem to be ill, for his presentation was impersonal and assured. While he stood to one side, attentively stooped, they finished their drinks and followed Fiona through a set of double doors to the dining room. The table, which could have seated thirty guests, was set for five at one lonely end. The room was lined with wood panels, painted over in near-fluorescent orange with evenly spaced stenciled flamingos. The diners were now on the north side of the house, where the wind blew and the three sash windows shook and rumbled. The air was chilly and damp. There was a dusty bouquet of dried flowers in the fireplace. The butler explained that it had been blocked up many years ago, but he would bring in an electric fan heater. They considered the placement and after a hiatus of polite dithering, it was agreed that, for the sake of symmetry, Fiona should sit at the head.

So far she had barely spoken. The pale butler went round
with a white wine. Two waiters brought in kipper pâté and thin toast. Immediately to her left was the conservation expert, Charlie, fiftyish, plump, genially bald. While the other three continued to talk about juries, he politely asked about her work. Resigned to a round of necessary small talk, she spoke in general terms about the Family Division. But Charlie wanted detail. What sort of thing would she rule on tomorrow? She felt happier talking of a particular case. A local authority wanted to take two children, a boy of two and girl of four, into care. The mother was an alcoholic, also addicted to amphetamines. She suffered psychotic episodes during which she believed herself to be spied on by lightbulbs. She was no longer able to look after herself or her children. The estranged father had been absent and now had turned up to claim that he and his girlfriend could do the caring. He too had drug problems, as well as a criminal record, but he had rights. A social worker would give evidence in court tomorrow on his suitability as a parent. The grandparents on the mother’s side loved the children, were competent and wanted to take them on, but they had no rights. The local authority, whose children service had been criticized in an official report, opposed the grandparents for reasons that were not yet clear. The three parties, mother, father and grandparents, were bitterly divided among themselves. Another complication was that there were contradictory views of the four-year-old. One pediatric expert said that she had special needs; another, brought in by the grandparents, believed that, though she was disturbed by her mother’s behavior
and underweight because of irregular meals, her development was normal.