The Children Act

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.

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.

She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real. Too soon for sympathy or advice, too soon to hear Jack damned by loyal chums. Instead, she passed the evening in an empty state, a condition of numbness. She ate bread, cheese and olives with a glass of white wine, and passed an interminable period at the piano. First, in a spirit of defiance, she played through her Bach partita. Occasionally, she and a barrister, Mark Berner, performed songs, and she had seen that afternoon that he was listed for tomorrow to represent the hospital in the Jehovah’s Witness case. The next concert was many months ahead, just before Christmas, in the Great Hall in Gray’s Inn, and they had yet to agree on a program. But they had a few encore pieces off by heart and she played through them now, imagining the tenor’s part, lingering over Schubert’s mournful “Der Leiermann,” the hurdy-gurdy man, who is poor and wretched and ignored. Such concentration protected her from thoughts, and she had no sense of passing time. When she rose at last from the piano stool, her knees and hips were stiff. In the bathroom she bit into half of a sleeping pill, stared at the ragged remainder in her palm, then swallowed that too.

Twenty minutes later she lay in her half of the bed listening through closed eyes to the radio news, the shipping forecast, the national anthem, then the World Service. As she waited for oblivion, she heard the news again and perhaps a third time, then calm voices discussing the day’s savagery—suicide bombers in crowded public places in Pakistan and Iraq, shelling of apartment blocks in Syria, Islam’s war with itself conducted by means of twisted car frames and rubble, and body parts flung across marketplaces, and ordinary people wailing in shock and grief. Then the voices turned to discuss American drones over Waziristan, last week’s bloody assault on a wedding party. While the reasonable voices pressed on into the night, she curled up for a troubled sleep.

THE MORNING PASSED like a hundred others. Applications, submissions rapidly assimilated, argument heard, judgments delivered, orders dispensed, and Fiona moving between her room and the court, bumping into colleagues on the way, something even festive in their quick exchanges, the clerk’s weary call of “Court rise,” her minimal nod toward the opening barrister, her occasional weak joke fawningly received by counsel for both sides with little attempt to conceal their insincerity, and the litigants, if they were a divorcing couple, as they all were this Tuesday morning, seated well apart behind their representation, in no mood to smile.

And her mood? She counted herself reasonably adept at monitoring it, naming it, and she detected a significant shift. Yesterday, she now decided, she had been in shock, in an unreal state of acceptance, prepared to tell herself that she had, at worst, to endure the commiseration of family and friends and a degree of severe social inconvenience—those embossed invitations she must refuse while hoping to conceal her embarrassment. This morning, waking with a cold part of a bed to her left—a form of amputation—she felt the first conventional ache of abandonment. She thought of Jack at his best and longed for him, the hairy bony hardness of his shins, down which, half asleep, she would let the soft underside of her foot slide at the alarm clock’s first assault, when she would roll onto his outstretched arm and wait and doze beneath the duvet’s warmth, face into his chest, until the clock’s second call. That naked childlike surrender, before she rose to assume an adult’s armor, seemed first thing this morning like an essential from which she was banished. When she stood in the bathroom, when she stepped out of her pajamas, her body looked foolish in the full-length mirror. Miraculously shrunken in some parts, bloated in others. Bottom-heavy. A ridiculous package. Fragile, This Way Up. Why would anyone not leave her?

Washing, dressing, drinking coffee, leaving a note and arranging a new key for the cleaning lady brought these raw feelings under control. And so she began her morning, looked for her husband in e-mails, texts and post, found nothing, gathered her papers, her umbrella and her phone and walked to work. His silence appeared ruthless and it shocked her. She knew only that Melanie, the statistician, lived somewhere near Muswell Hill. Not impossible to track her down, or look for Jack at the university. But what humiliation then, to find him in a departmental corridor, walking toward her, arm in arm with his lover. Or to find him alone. What could she propose beyond a pointless, ignominious plea for his return? She could demand confirmation that he had left his marriage, and he would tell her what she already knew and didn’t want to hear. So she would wait until a certain book or shirt or tennis racket drew him back to the locked apartment. Then it would be his task to search her out, and when they spoke, she would be on her own ground, dignity intact, outwardly at least.

It would not have been apparent, but her spirits were heavy as she set about Tuesday’s list. The last case of the morning was prolonged by complex argument over commercial law. A divorcing husband claimed that the three million pounds he had been ordered to pay to his wife was not his to give away. It belonged to his company. It emerged, but far too slowly, that he was the sole director and only employee of an enterprise that made or did nothing—it was a fig leaf for a beneficial tax arrangement. Fiona found for the wife. The afternoon was now cleared for the hospital’s emergency application in the Jehovah’s Witness case. In her room once more, she ate a sandwich and an apple at her desk while she read through the submissions. Meanwhile, her colleagues were lunching splendidly at Lincoln’s Inn. Forty minutes later, one clarifying thought accompanied her as she made her way to courtroom eight. Here was a matter of life and death.

She entered, the court rose, she sat and watched the parties below her settle. At her elbow was a slim pile of creamy white paper beside which she laid down her pen. It was only then, at the sight of these clean sheets, that the last traces, the stain, of her own situation vanished completely. She no longer had a private life, she was ready to be absorbed.

Ranged before her were the three parties. For the hospital, her friend Mark Berner QC and two instructing solicitors. For Adam Henry and his guardian, the Cafcass officer, was an elderly barrister, John Tovey, not known to Fiona, and his instructing solicitor. For the parents, another silk, Leslie Grieve QC, and two solicitors. Sitting by them were Mr. and Mrs. Henry. He was a wiry, tanned man in a well-cut suit and tie in which he himself could have passed for a successful member of the judiciary. Mrs. Henry was big-boned and wore outsized glasses with red frames that shrank her eyes to points. She sat upright, with tightly folded arms. Neither parent looked particularly cowed. Outside in the corridors, Fiona assumed, journalists would soon be assembling to wait until she allowed them in to hear her decision.

She began. “You’re all aware that we are here on a matter of extreme urgency. Time is of the essence. Everyone please bear this in mind and speak briefly and to the point. Mr. Berner.”

She inclined her head toward him and he stood. He was smoothly bald, bulky, but with dainty feet—size five, it was rumored—for which he was mocked behind his back. His voice was a decent rich tenor and together their greatest moment had been last year when they performed Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig” at a Gray’s Inn dinner for a retiring law lord with a passion for Goethe.

“I shall indeed be brief, My Lady, for, as you indicate, the situation is pressing. The applicant in the matter is the Edith Cavell General, Wandsworth, which is seeking the leave of this court to treat a boy, named A in the papers, who will be eighteen in less than three months. He experienced sharp stomach pains on the fourteenth of May when he was putting on his pads to open the batting for his school cricket team. During the following two days these pains became severe, unbearable even. The GP, despite great expertise and experience, was at a loss and referred—”

“I’ve read the papers, Mr. Berner.”

The barrister moved on. “Then, My Lady, I believe it is accepted by all parties that Adam is suffering from leukemia. The hospital wishes to treat him in the usual manner with four drugs, a therapeutic procedure universally recognized and practiced by hematologists, as I can show—”

“No need, Mr. Berner.”

“Thank you, My Lady.”

Berner advanced quickly to outline the conventional course of treatment and this time Fiona did not intervene. Two of the four drugs targeted the leukemia cells directly, whereas the other two poisoned much in their path, in particular the bone marrow, thereby compromising the body’s immune system and its ability to make red and white blood cells and platelets. Consequently, it was usual to transfuse during treatment. In this case, however, the hospital was prevented from doing so. Adam and his parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and it was contrary to their faith to accept blood products into their bodies. This apart, the boy and his parents agreed to any treatment the hospital could offer.

“And what has been offered?”

“My Lady, in deference to the family’s wishes, only the leukemia-specific drugs have been administered. They are not considered sufficient. It’s at this point I’d like to call the consultant hematologist.”

“Very well.”

Mr. Rodney Carter took the stand and was sworn in. Tall, stooping, severe, thick white eyebrows from under which he glared with ferocious disdain. From the top pocket of his pale gray three-piece suit there protruded a blue silk handkerchief. He gave the impression that he considered the court procedure a nonsense and that the boy should be dragged by the scruff of his neck to an immediate transfusion.

There followed standard questions to establish Carter’s bona fides, his length of experience and seniority. When Fiona cleared her throat softly, Berner took the hint and pressed on. He asked the doctor to summarize for the benefit of the judge the patient’s condition.

“Not at all good.”

He was asked to elaborate.

Carter drew breath and looked about him, saw the parents and looked away. His patient was weak, he said, and, as expected, showing the first signs of breathlessness. If he, Carter, had had a free hand in treatment, he would have expected an eighty to ninety percent chance of a full remission. With the current course, the chances were much reduced.

Berner asked for specific data concerning Adam’s blood.

When the boy was admitted, Carter said, the hemoglobin count was 8.3 grams per deciliter. The norm being around 12.5. It had declined steadily. Three days ago it had been 6.4. This morning it was at 4.5. If it dropped further to 3, the situation would be extremely dangerous.

Mark Berner was about to ask another question but Carter spoke over him.

“The white cell count is usually somewhere between 5 and 9. It’s now 1.7. As for the platelets—”

Fiona interrupted. “Would you kindly remind me of their function?”

“Necessary for clotting, My Lady.”

The norm, the consultant told the court, was 250. The boy’s count was 34. Below 20 one would expect spontaneous bleeding to occur. At this point, Mr. Carter turned his head a little away from the barrister so that he seemed to address the parents. “The latest analysis,” he said gravely, “shows us that no new blood is being produced. A healthy adolescent might be expected to produce five hundred billion blood cells a day.”

“And if, Mr. Carter, you could transfuse?”

“The boy would stand a decent chance. Though not as good as it would have been if we’d transfused from the start.”

Berner paused briefly, and when he spoke again, he lowered his voice, as though to dramatize the possibility of Adam Henry overhearing him. “Have you discussed with your patient what will happen to him if he is not transfused?”

“Only in the broadest terms. He knows he could die.”

“He has no idea of the manner of his death. Would you care to give the court an outline?”

“If you want.”

Berner and Carter appeared to be colluding in the grisly facts for the benefit of the parents. It was a reasonable line of approach and Fiona did not intervene.

Carter said slowly, “It will be distressing, not only for himself but for the medical team treating him. Some of the staff are angry. They routinely hang blood, as the Americans put it, all day long. They simply can’t understand why they should risk losing this patient. One feature of his decline will be his fight to breathe, a fight he will find frightening and is bound to lose. The sensation will be one of drowning slowly. Before that he may suffer internal bleeding. Renal failure is a possibility. Some patients lose their sight. Or he may suffer a stroke, with any number of neurological consequences. Cases differ. The only sure thing is that it would be a horrible death.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carter.”

Leslie Grieve for the parents rose to cross-examine. Fiona knew Grieve a little by reputation, but at that moment couldn’t recall whether he had ever appeared before her. She had seen him about the law courts—somewhat foppish, with silver, center-parted hair, high cheekbones, long thin nose, haughtily flared. There was a looseness or freedom of limb that was in agreeable contrast to the reined-in movements of his graver colleagues. The entire grand and gay effect was complicated by a problem he had with his vision, a squint of some sort, for he never appeared to be looking at what he was seeing. This disability added to his allure. It sometimes disoriented witnesses in cross-examination and it may have caused the doctor’s tetchiness now.

Grieve said, “You accept, do you not, Mr. Carter, that the freedom of choice of medical treatment is a fundamental human right in adults?”

“I do.”

“And treatment without consent would constitute a trespass of the person, or indeed an assault of that person.”

“I agree.”

“And Adam is close to being an adult, as the law defines it in such instances.”

Carter said, “If his eighteenth birthday was tomorrow morning, he would not yet have attained his majority today.”

This was said with vehemence. Grieve was unruffled. “Adam is very nearly an adult. Is it not the case that he has expressed his view to treatment intelligently and articulately?”

At this point, the consultant’s stoop vanished and he grew another inch. “His views are those of his parents. They’re not his own. His objection to being transfused is based on the doctrines of a religious cult for which he may well become a pointless martyr.”

“Cult is a strong word, Mr. Carter,” Grieve said quietly. “Do you yourself have any religious belief?”

“I’m an Anglican.”

“Is the Church of England a cult?”

Fiona looked up from her note-taking. Grieve acknowledged her by pursing his lips and pausing on a long intake of breath. The doctor looked as if he was set to leave the stand, but the barrister had not finished with him.

“Are you aware, Mr. Carter, that the World Health Organization estimates that between fifteen and twenty percent of new AIDS cases are caused by blood transfusions?”

“No such cases have occurred in my hospital.”

“The hemophiliac communities of various countries have suffered the tragedy of AIDS infection on a massive scale, have they not?”

“That was a good while ago and no longer happens.”

“And other infections are possible via transfusion, are they not? Hepatitis, Lyme disease, malaria, syphilis, Chagas disease, graft-versus-host disease, transfusion-related lung disease. And, of course, variant CJD.”

“All exceedingly rare.”

“But known to occur. And then there are hemolytic reactions due to mismatched blood groups.”

“Also rare.”

“Really? Let me quote to you, Mr. Carter, from the highly respected Manual for Blood Conservation: ‘There are at least twenty-seven stages between taking a blood sample and the recipient receiving their transfusion and there is potential for error at each stage of the process.’”

“Our staff are highly trained. They take great care. I don’t recall a single hemolytic reaction in years.”

“If we added all these dangers up, wouldn’t you say there was enough to give a rational person pause, Mr. Carter, without that person being a member of what you call a cult?”

“These days, blood products are tested to the highest standards.”

“Nevertheless, it would not be wholly irrational to hesitate before accepting to be transfused.”

Carter thought for a moment. “Hesitate, perhaps, at a stretch. But to refuse in a case like Adam’s would be irrational.”

“You accept that hesitation is in order. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable, surely, given all the possibilities of infection and error, for the patient to insist that his consent be sought.”

The consultant made a show of self-control. “You’re playing with words. If I’m not permitted to transfuse this patient, he may not recover. At the very least he could lose his sight.”

Grieve said, “Isn’t there something like an ill-considered fashion in your profession for transfusion, given the risks? It’s not evidence-based, is it, Mr. Carter? It’s rather like bloodletting in the old days, except, of course, in reverse. Patients who lose a third of a pint of blood during surgery are routinely transfused, no? And yet a donor gives up a whole pint and goes straight back to work afterward, and no harm done.”

“I can’t comment on the clinical judgment of others. The general view, I suppose, is that a patient weakened by surgery should have all the blood that God allotted.”

“Isn’t it the case that Jehovah’s Witness patients are regularly treated now by what’s called bloodless surgery? No transfusions are necessary. Allow me to quote to you from the American Journal of Otolaryngology: ‘Bloodless surgery has come to represent good practice, and in the future it may well be the accepted standard of care.’”

The consultant was dismissive. “We’re not talking of surgery here. This patient needs blood because his treatment prevents him from making his own. It’s as simple as that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carter.”

Grieve sat down and John Tovey, who appeared to depend on a cane with a silver head and who was counsel for Adam Henry, breathily got to his feet to cross-examine the consultant.

“You’ve clearly spent time alone in conversation with Adam.”

“I have.”

“Have you formed an impression as to his intelligence?”

“Extremely intelligent.”

“Is he articulate?”

“Yes.”

“Is his judgment, his cognition, clouded by his medical condition?”

“Not as yet.”

“Have you suggested to him that he needs a transfusion?”

“I have.”

“And what has been his response?”

“He firmly refuses it on the grounds of his religion.”

“Are you aware of his exact age in years and months?”

“He’s seventeen years and nine months.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carter.”

Berner rose to reexamine.

“Mr. Carter, will you remind me again how long you’ve specialized in hematology?”

“Twenty-seven years.”

“What are the risks of an adverse reaction to a blood transfusion?”

“Very low. Nothing compared to the certain damage that will be done in this case by failing to transfuse.”

Berner indicated that he had nothing more to ask.

Fiona said, “In your opinion, Mr. Carter, how much time do we have to resolve this matter?”

“If I can’t give blood to this boy by tomorrow morning we’ll be in very dangerous territory.”

Berner sat. Fiona thanked the doctor, who left with a curt, possibly resentful nod toward the bench. Grieve got to his feet and said he would call the father straightaway. When Mr. Henry came to the stand, he asked if he might swear on the New World Translation. The clerk told him there was only the King James. Mr. Henry nodded and swore on it, then settled his gaze patiently on Grieve.

Kevin Henry stood around five foot six and looked as lithe and strong as a trapeze artist. He may have been adept with a mechanical digger, but he looked equally at home in his well-cut gray suit and pale green silk tie. The drift of Leslie Grieve’s questions was to draw from him a picture of early struggle, then the blossoming of a loving, stable and happy family. Who could doubt it? The Henrys had married young, at nineteen, seventeen years ago. The early years, when Kevin was employed as a laborer, were hard. He was “a bit of a wild man,” drank too much, was abusive to his wife, Naomi, though he never hit her. He was eventually sacked for being too often late for work. The rent was overdue, the baby cried through the night, the couple rowed, the neighbors complained. The Henrys were threatened with eviction from their one-bedroom flat in Streatham.

Deliverance came in the form of two polite young men from America who doorstepped Naomi one afternoon. They came back the next day and spoke to Kevin, who was hostile at first. Finally, a visit to the nearest Kingdom Hall, a kindly welcome and then, slowly, through meeting some nice people who soon became friends, and helpful talks with wise elders of the congregation, and then Bible study, which they found hard at first—slowly, order and peace came into their lives. Kevin and Naomi began to live in the truth. They learned of the future that God had in store for mankind and they fulfilled their duty by working to spread the word. They discovered that there would be a paradise on earth and they could be a part of it by belonging to that privileged group known to the Witnesses as “other sheep.”

They began to understand the preciousness of life. As they became better parents, their son became calmer. Kevin went on a government-sponsored course to learn how to operate heavyweight machinery. Not long after he qualified he was offered a job. On their way to Kingdom Hall with Adam to give thanks, the couple told each other they had fallen in love all over again. They held hands in the street, something they had never done before. Since that time years ago, they had lived in the truth and raised Adam in the truth within the close, supportive network of their Witness friends. Five years ago, Kevin started his own company. He owned a few diggers, dumpers and a crane and employed nine men. Now God had visited leukemia on their son and Kevin and Naomi confronted the ultimate test of faith.

To each of the barrister’s prompting questions, Mr. Henry gave a considered reply. He was respectful, but not in awe of the court the way many people were. He spoke plainly about his early failures, seemed unembarrassed to recall the handholding moment, didn’t hesitate in this setting to use the word “love.” Frequently, he turned from Grieve’s question to address Fiona directly and held her gaze. Automatically, she tried to place his accent. A touch of cockney, a fainter trace of West Country—the confident voice of a man who took his own competence for granted, well used to giving orders. Certain British jazzmen spoke this way, a tennis coach she knew, and noncommissioned officers, senior policemen, paramedics, an oil-rig foreman who had once come before her. Not men who ran the world, but who made it run.

Grieve paused to mark the end of this five-minute history, then asked softly, “Mr. Henry, will you tell the court why Adam is refusing a blood transfusion?”

Mr. Henry hesitated, as if to consider the question for the first time. He turned from Grieve to direct his answer at Fiona. “You have to understand,” he said, “that blood is the essence of what’s human. It’s the soul, it’s life itself. And just as life is sacred, so is blood.” He seemed to have finished, but then he added quickly, “Blood stands for the gift of life that every living soul should be grateful for.” He delivered these sentences not as cherished beliefs but as statements of fact, like an engineer describing the construction of a bridge.

Grieve waited, conveying by his silence that his question had not been answered. But Kevin Henry was done and looked directly ahead.

Grieve prompted, “So, if blood’s a gift, why would your son refuse it from the doctors?”

“Mixing your own blood with the blood of an animal or another human being is pollution, contamination. It’s a rejection of the Creator’s wonderful gift. That’s why God specifically forbids it in Genesis and Leviticus and Acts.”

Grieve was nodding. Mr. Henry added simply, “The Bible is the word of God. Adam knows it must be obeyed.”

“Do you and your wife love your son, Mr. Henry?”

“Yes. We love him.” He said it quietly and looked at Fiona with defiance.

“And if refusing a blood transfusion should cause his death?”

Again, Kevin Henry stared ahead at the wood-paneled wall. When he spoke his voice was tight. “He’ll take his place in the kingdom of heaven on earth that’s to come.”

“And you and your wife. How will you feel?”

Naomi Henry still sat firmly upright, her expression behind her glasses impossible to read. She had turned to face the barrister rather than her husband in the witness stand. From where Fiona sat it was not clear if Mrs. Henry’s eyes, shrunken behind their lenses, were open.

Kevin Henry said, “He’ll have done what is right and true, what the Lord commanded.”

Once more, Grieve waited, then he said in a falling tone, “You’ll be grief-stricken, won’t you, Mr. Henry?”

At this point the contrived kindness in the counsel’s tone caused the father’s voice to fail. He could only nod. Fiona saw a ripple of muscle around his throat as he regained control.

The barrister said, “Is this refusal Adam’s decision, or is it really your own?”

“We couldn’t turn him from it, even if we wanted to.”

For several minutes Grieve pursued this line of questioning, looking to establish that the boy was not unduly influenced. Two elders had visited the bedside on occasion. Mr. Henry was not invited to be present. But afterward, in a hospital corridor, the elders had told him that they had been impressed and moved by the boy’s grasp of his situation and his knowledge of the scriptures. They were satisfied that he knew his own mind and that he was living, as he was prepared to die, in the truth.

Fiona sensed Berner was about to object. But he knew she would not waste time in discounting hearsay evidence.

A final set of questions from Leslie Grieve were prompts to allow Mr. Henry to expound on the emotional maturity of his son. He did so proudly, nothing in his tone now to suggest that he thought he was about to lose him.

It was not until three thirty that Mark Berner rose to cross-examine. He began by expressing sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. Henry for the illness of their son and hopes for a complete recovery—a sure sign, to Fiona at least, that the barrister was about to cut up rough. Kevin Henry inclined his head.

“Just to start by clearing up a simple matter, Mr. Henry. The books of the Bible you mention, Genesis, Leviticus and Acts, forbid you to eat blood or, in one case, exhort you to abstain from it. In the New World Translation of Genesis, for example, it says, ‘Only flesh with its soul—its blood—you must not eat.’”

“That’s correct.”

“Nothing about transfusion, then.”

Mr. Henry said patiently, “I think you’ll find that in the Greek and the Hebrew the original has the meaning of ‘take into the body.’”

“Very well. But at the time of these Iron Age texts, transfusion didn’t exist. How could it be forbidden?”

Kevin Henry shook his head. There was pity or generous tolerance in his voice. “It certainly existed in the mind of God. You need to understand that these books are his word. He inspired his chosen prophets to write down his will. It doesn’t matter what age it was, Stone, Bronze or whatever.”

“That may well be, Mr. Henry. But many Jehovah’s Witnesses query this idea about transfusion on exactly these terms. They’re prepared to accept blood products, or certain blood products, without rejecting their faith. Isn’t it the case that other options are open to young Adam and you could play your part in persuading him to take them and save his life?”

Henry turned back toward Fiona. “There are a very few who depart from the teachings of the Governing Body. I don’t know anyone in our congregation, and our elders are quite clear about it.”

The overhead lights gleamed brilliantly on Berner’s polished scalp. In virtual parody of the hectoring cross-examiner, he held the lapel of his jacket in his right hand. “These strict elders have been visiting your son every day, have they not? They’re keen to make sure he doesn’t change his mind.”

The first hint of irritation afflicted Kevin Henry. He squared up to Berner, gripping the edge of the witness stand, leaning slightly forward, as though only an invisible leash restrained him. His tone, however, remained level. “These are kind and decent men. Other churches have their priests going around the wards. My son gets advice and comfort from the elders. If he didn’t he’d let me know.”

“Isn’t it true that if he agreed to be transfused he’d be what you call disfellowshipped? In other words, cast out of the community?”

“Disassociated. But it isn’t going to happen. He isn’t going to change his mind.”

“He’s technically still a child, Mr. Henry, in your care. So it’s your mind I want to change. He’s frightened of being shunned, isn’t that the term you use? Shunned for not doing what you and the elders want. The only world he knows would turn its back on him for preferring life to a terrible death. Is that a free choice for a young lad?”

Kevin Henry paused to think. For the first time he looked back at his wife. “If you spent five minutes in his company you’d realize he’s someone who knows what he’s about and is able to make a decision according to his faith.”

“I rather think we’d find a terrified and seriously ill boy desperate for the approval of his parents. Mr. Henry, have you told Adam that he’s free to have a transfusion if he so wishes? And that you’d still love him?”

“I’ve told him that I love him.”

“Only that?”

“It’s enough.”

“Do you know when Jehovah’s Witnesses were commanded to refuse blood transfusions?”

“It’s set down in Genesis. It dates from the Creation.”

“It dates from 1945, Mr. Henry. Before then it was perfectly acceptable. Are you happy with a situation in which in modern times a committee in Brooklyn has decided your son’s fate?”

Kevin Henry lowered his voice, out of respect for the subject matter perhaps, or in the face of a difficult matter. Again he included Fiona in his answer, and there was warmth in his voice. “The Holy Spirit guides the anointed representatives—we call them the slaves, Your Honor—it helps them toward deep truths that weren’t previously understood.” He turned back to Berner and said matter-of-factly, “The Governing Body is Jehovah’s channel of communication to us. It’s his voice. If there are changes in the teaching it’s because God only gradually reveals his purpose.”

“This voice doesn’t tolerate much dissent. It says here in this copy of The Watchtower that independent thinking was promoted by Satan at the beginning of his rebellion in October 1914 and such thinking should be avoided by followers. Is this what you’re telling Adam, Mr. Henry? That he must watch out for Satan’s influence?”

“We like to avoid dissent and quarrels and keep ourselves unified.” Mr. Henry’s confidence was growing. He appeared to address the barrister privately. “You probably have no idea what it is to submit to a higher authority. You need to understand that we do so of our own free will.”

There was a trace of a lopsided smile on Mark Berner’s face. Admiration for his adversary, perhaps. “You’ve just told my learned colleague that in your twenties your life was a mess. You said you were a bit of a wild man. Hardly likely, is it, Mr. Henry, that several years earlier, when you were Adam’s age, you knew your own mind.”

“He’s lived his whole life in the truth. I didn’t have that privilege.”

“And then, as I recall, you said you discovered that life was precious. Did you mean other people’s lives or just your own?”

“All life is the gift of the Lord. And his to take away.”

“Easy to say, Mr. Henry, when it’s not your life.”

“Harder to say when it’s your own son.”

“Adam writes poetry. Do you approve of that?”

“I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to his life.”

“You’ve rowed with him about it, haven’t you?”

“We’ve had serious conversations.”

“Is masturbation a sin, Mr. Henry?”

“Yes.”

“And abortion? Homosexuality?”

“Yes.”

“And this is what Adam has been taught to believe?”

“It’s what he knows to be true.”

“Thank you, Mr. Henry.”

John Tovey rose and, somewhat breathlessly, told Fiona that given the hour he had no questions to ask of Mr. Henry, but he would call the social worker, the Cafcass officer. Marina Greene was slight, sandy-haired and spoke in short precise sentences. Helpful, at this stage of the afternoon. Adam, she said, was highly intelligent. He knew his Bible. He knew the arguments. He said he was prepared to die for his faith.

He had said the following—and here, with the judge’s permission, Marina Greene read from her notebook. “I’m my own man. I’m separate from my parents. Whatever my parents’ ideas are, I’m deciding for myself.”

Fiona asked what action Mrs. Greene thought the court should take. She said her view was simple, and she apologized for not knowing every turn of the law. The lad was clever and articulate, but still very young. “A child shouldn’t go killing himself for the sake of religion.”

Both Berner and Grieve declined to cross-examine.

BEFORE HEARING CLOSING submissions Fiona allowed a short break. The court rose and she went quickly to her room, drank a glass of water at her desk and checked her e-mails and texts. Plenty of both, but nothing from Jack. She searched again. It wasn’t sadness or anger she felt now, but a dark hollowing-out, an emptiness falling away behind her, threatening to annihilate her past. Another phase. It didn’t seem possible that the person she knew most intimately could be so cruel.

It was a relief, several minutes later, to be back in court. When Berner rose it was inevitable that he should move the argument to “Gillick competence”—a point of reference in both family law and pediatrics. Lord Scarman had provided the formulation, and the barrister quoted him now. A child, that is, a person under sixteen, may consent to his or her own medical treatment “if and when the child achieves sufficient understanding and intelligence to understand fully what is proposed.” If Berner, in advancing the hospital’s case to treat Adam Henry against his wishes, was invoking Gillick now, it was to preempt Grieve from doing so on behalf of the parents. Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor’s voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe’s tragic poem.

It was a given, Berner said, that not transfusing was of itself a form of treatment. None of the staff looking after Adam doubted his cleverness, his extraordinary way with words, his curiosity and passion for reading. He had won a poetry competition run by a serious national newspaper. He could recite a long part of an ode by Horace. He was truly an exceptional child. The court had heard the consultant confirm that here was an intelligent and articulate boy. Crucially, however, the doctor had just confirmed that Adam had only the vaguest notion of what would happen if he did not receive blood. He had a general, somewhat romantic idea of the death that awaited him. Therefore he could not be said to fulfill the terms as set out by Lord Scarman. Adam most certainly did not “understand fully what is proposed.” Quite rightly, the medical staff would not want to explain it to him. The senior health professional was in the best position to judge, and his conclusion was clear. Adam was not Gillick competent. Second, even if he was, and therefore had the right to assent to treatment, this was very different from the right to refuse life-saving treatment. On this the law was clear. He had no autonomy in the matter until he was eighteen.

Third, it was plain, Berner continued, that the risks of infection following transfusion were minimal. Whereas the consequences of not transfusing were certain and horrific, probably fatal. And fourth, it was no coincidence that Adam happened to have the same particular faith as his parents. He was a loving and devoted son who had grown up in the atmosphere of their sincere and strongly held beliefs. His highly unconventional views concerning blood products, as the doctor had forcefully suggested, were not his own. All of us, surely, had beliefs at the age of seventeen that would embarrass us now.

Berner summarized at speed. Adam was not eighteen, did not understand the ordeal that lay ahead of him if he was not transfused, had been unduly influenced by the particular sect he had grown up in and was aware of the negative consequences should he defect. The views of Jehovah’s Witnesses lay far outside those of a modern, reasonable parent.

As Mark Berner turned to sit down, Leslie Grieve was already on his feet. In his opening remarks, which he addressed a few feet to Fiona’s left, he too wished to direct her attention to a pronouncement of Lord Scarman’s. “The existence of the patient’s right to make his own decision may be seen as a basic human right, protected by the common law.” This court should therefore be extremely reluctant to interfere in a decision regarding medical treatment made by a person of evident intelligence and insight. It was plainly not enough to take shelter behind the two or three months that separated Adam from his eighteenth birthday. In a matter so gravely affecting an individual’s basic human right, it was inappropriate to resort to number magic. This patient, who had repeatedly and consistently made his wishes clear, was far, far closer to being an eighteen-year-old than he was to being seventeen.

In an effort of memory, Grieve closed his eyes and quoted from Section 8 of the Family Law Reform Act of 1969. “The consent of a minor who has attained the age of sixteen years to any surgical, medical or dental treatment which, in the absence of consent, would constitute a trespass to his person, shall be as effective as it would be if he were of full age.”

All those who met him, Grieve said, were struck by Adam’s precocity and maturity. “My Lady would be interested to know that he has read aloud some of his poems to the nursing staff. To great effect.” He was far more thoughtful than most seventeen-year-olds. It was necessary for the court to have regard to the position had he been born a few months earlier, when his fundamental right would have been secure. With the full support of his loving parents, he had made clear his objection to treatment and he had articulated in detail the religious principles on which his refusal rested.

Grieve paused, as if to reflect, then gestured toward the door through which the consultant had exited the courtroom. It was perfectly understandable for Mr. Carter to despise the idea of withholding treatment. This merely demonstrated the professional devotion one would expect of so eminent a figure. But his professionalism clouded his judgment as to Adam’s Gillick competence. Ultimately, this matter was not medical. It was legal and moral. It concerned a young man’s inalienable right. He understood perfectly well where his decision could take him. To an early death. He had made himself clear many times. That he did not know the precise manner of his dying was beside the point. No one judged to be Gillick competent could be in full possession of that kind of knowledge. Indeed, nobody was. We all knew we would die one day. None of us knew how. And Mr. Carter had already conceded that the team treating Adam would not wish to impart to him such an understanding. The young man’s Gillick competence rested elsewhere, in his manifest grasp of the fact that refusing treatment could lead to his death. And Gillick, of course, rendered otiose the issue of his age.

So far, the judge had made three crowded pages of notes. One of these, on a separate line, was “poetry?” Rising from the stream of argument was one bright image—supported by pillows, a teenage boy reading his verses to a tired nurse, who knew she was needed elsewhere but was too kind to say so.

Fiona had written poetry when she was Adam Henry’s age, though she had never presumed to read it aloud, not even to herself. She remembered quatrains daringly unrhymed. There was even one about death by drowning, of sinking deliciously backward among the river weeds, an improbable fantasy inspired by the Millais painting of Ophelia, before which she’d stood enraptured during a school visit to the Tate. This daring poem in a crumbling notebook, on whose cover were doodles in purple ink of desirable hairstyles. As far as she knew, it lay at the bottom of a cardboard box, somewhere at the far end of the windowless spare room at home. If she could still call it home.

Grieve concluded that Adam was so near to eighteen as to make no difference. He satisfied the conditions articulated by Scarman, and was Gillick competent. The barrister quoted Balcombe LJ. “As children approach the age of majority they are increasingly able to take their own decisions concerning their medical treatment. It will normally be in the best interests of a child of sufficient age and understanding to make an informed decision that the court should respect.” The court must take no view on a particular religion, save to respect expressions of faith. Nor should the court be tempted onto the dangerous ground of undermining an individual’s basic right to refuse treatment.

Finally it was Tovey’s turn and he was brief. With the help of his cane he pushed himself to a standing position. He represented both the boy and Marina Greene, the boy’s guardian, and his tone was studiously neutral. The arguments for both sides had been well put by his colleagues and all relevant points in law had been covered. Adam’s intelligence was not in question. His grasp of scripture as understood and propagated by his sect was thorough. It was important to consider that he was almost eighteen, but the fact remained, he was still a minor. It was therefore entirely for Her Ladyship to decide the weight she should apportion to the boy’s wishes.

When the barrister sat down there was silence as Fiona glared at her notes, ordering her thoughts. Tovey had helpfully narrowed them to a decision. Addressing him, she said, “Given the unique circumstances of this case, I’ve decided that I would like to hear from Adam Henry himself. It’s not his knowledge of scripture that interests me so much as his understanding of his situation, and of what he confronts should I rule against the hospital. Also, he should know that he is not in the hands of an impersonal bureaucracy. I shall explain to him that I am the one who will be making the decision in his best interests.”

She went on to say that she would travel now with Mrs. Greene to the hospital in Wandsworth and, in her presence, would sit at Adam Henry’s bedside. Proceedings were therefore suspended until Fiona’s return, when she would give judgment in open court.