The Children Act

Three

THIS, FIONA DECIDED as her taxi halted in heavy traffic on Waterloo Bridge, was either about a woman on the edge of a crack-up making a sentimental error of professional judgment, or it was about a boy delivered from or into the beliefs of his sect by the intimate intervention of the secular court. She didn’t think it could be both. The question was suspended as she looked to her left, downstream toward St. Paul’s. The tide was running out fast. Wordsworth, on a nearby bridge, was right, either direction, best urban prospect in the world. Even in steady rain. At her side was Marina Greene. Beyond desultory small talk as they left the Courts of Justice, they had not spoken. Only proper, to keep a distance. And Greene, oblivious or well used to the upstream view on her right, was intent on her phone, reading, tapping, frowning in the contemporary manner.

On the South Bank side at last, they turned upriver at walking pace and took almost fifteen minutes to reach Lambeth Palace. Fiona’s phone was off, which was her only defense against the compulsion to check texts and e-mail every five minutes. She had written but not sent a message. You cannot do this! But he was doing it, and the exclamation mark said it all—she was a fool. Her emotional tone, as she sometimes referred to it and which she liked to monitor, was entirely novel. A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again. Shame was also a component. But what had she done? Lost herself to work, neglected her husband, let one long case distract her? But he had his own work, he had his various moods. She had been humiliated and didn’t want anyone to know and would pretend that all was fine. She felt tainted by secrecy. Was that it, was that the shame? Once in the know, one of her sensible friends was bound to urge her to phone him to demand an explanation. Impossible. She still recoiled from hearing the worst. Every thought she had now about the situation she’d indulged several times before, and still she went round again. Treadmill thinking, from which only sleep, medically induced, could rescue her. Sleep, or this unorthodox excursion.

At last they were on the Wandsworth Road and making twenty miles an hour, the speed of a horse at full gallop. They passed on the right an old cinema converted to squash courts where, many years ago, Jack had played to the limits of endurance to make eleventh place in an all-London tournament. And she, loyal young wife, somewhat bored, placed well back from the glass-fronted court, peeping from time to time at her notes on a rape case she was defending, and would lose. Eight years for her outraged client. Almost certainly blameless. Rightly, he never forgave her.

She had a north Londoner’s ignorance of and disdain for the boundless shabby tangle of London south of the river. Not a Tube stop to give meaning and relation to a wilderness of villages swallowed up long ago, to sad shops, to dodgy garages interspersed with dusty Edwardian houses and brutalist apartment towers, the dedicated lairs of drug gangs. The pavement crowds, adrift in alien concerns, belonged to some other, remote city, not her own. How would she have known they were passing through Clapham Junction without the faded jokey sign above a boarded-up electrical store? Why make a life here? She recognized in herself the signs of an enveloping misanthropy and made herself remember her mission. She was visiting a seriously ill boy.

She liked hospitals. When she was thirteen, a keen high-speed cyclist to school, a slotted drain cover caused her to fly over her handlebars. A brief concussion and traces of blood in her urine kept her in hospital for observation. There was no room in the pediatric ward—a coachful of schoolchildren had returned from Spain with an unidentified stomach virus. She was put in with the women and remained among them for a week of undemanding tests. This was the mid-1960s, when the spirit of the times had not yet begun to question and unpick the starchy medical hierarchies. The high-ceilinged Victorian ward was clean and orderly, the frightening ward sister protective toward her youngest patient, and the old ladies, some of whom, it was clear in retrospect, were in their thirties, adored and cared for Fiona. She never considered their ailments. She was their pet and she was lost to a new existence. Her old routines of home and school dropped away. When one or two nice ladies vanished from their beds during the night she didn’t think about it much. She was well protected from hysterectomies, cancer and death, and passed a glorious week without alarm or pain.

In the afternoons, after school, her friends would come, awed to be making a grown-up independent hospital visit. When the awe wore off, three or four girls would be round Fiona’s bed shaking and clucking with held-down laughter at nothing much at all—a nurse striding by with a frown, the over-earnest greeting of an ancient lady with no teeth, someone at the far end of the ward being raucously sick behind a screen.

Before and after lunch, Fiona would sit alone in the day room with an exercise book on her lap, planning futures for herself—a concert pianist, a vet, a journalist, a singer. She made flowcharts of possible lives. The trunk lines branched through university, heroic chunky husband, dreamy children, sheep farm, the eminent life. Back then she had not yet thought of the law.

On the day she was discharged, she went round the ward in school uniform, satchel swinging from her shoulder, watched by her mother, making tearful farewells and promises to stay in touch. In the decades that followed she was lucky in her health, and only ever in hospital during visiting hours. But she was marked for good. Whatever suffering and fear she saw in family and friends could not dislodge an improbable association of hospitals with kindness, with being noted as special and sheltered from the worst. So now, inappropriately, as the twenty-six-story Edith Cavell Wandsworth General rose above the misty oak trees on the far side of the common, she experienced a moment of pleasurable anticipation.

She and the social worker looked ahead, past the stuttering windscreen wipers, as the taxi approached a blue neon sign which announced remaining space for six hundred and fifteen cars. On a grassy rise, as on a Stone Age hill fort, stood the Japanese-designed circular tower of glass, with cladding of surgical-scrubs green, built with expensively borrowed money, back in the carefree days of New Labour. The highest floors were lost to the low-slung summer cloud.

As they walked toward the entrance a cat ran out in front of them from under a parked car and Marina Greene opened the conversation again to give a full account of her own cat, a bold British Shorthair that saw off all the dogs in the neighborhood. Fiona warmed to this solemn young woman with the thin sandy hair who lived in a council house with her three children under five and her policeman husband. Her cat was beside the point. She was not letting anything prejudicial pass between them, but was sensitively aware of the shared concern they were about to confront.

Fiona allowed herself more freedom. She said, “A cat that stands its ground. I hope you’ve told young Adam that story.”

Marina said quickly, “I have, actually,” and fell silent.

They entered a glassed-in atrium the height of the entire building. Mature native trees, rather starved, pushed hopefully upward from the concourse, from among the cheerful chairs and tables of competing coffee and sandwich concessions. Higher up, then even higher, other trees rose from concrete platforms cantilevered into the curving walls. The remotest plants were shrubs silhouetted against the glass roof three hundred feet up. The two women went across the pale parquet, past an information center and an exhibition of unwell children’s art. The long straight run of an escalator brought them to a mezzanine, where a bookshop, florist, newsagent, gift shop and business center were ranged around a fountain. New Age music, airy and unmodulating, merged with the sound of tinkling water. The model was, of course, the modern airport. With altered destinations. At this level there was little sign of illness, none of medical equipment. The patients were finely spread between visitors and staff. Here and there were people in dressing gowns, looking rakish. Fiona and Marina followed signs with motorway lettering. PEDIATRIC ONCOLOGY, NUCLEAR MEDICINE, PHLEBOTOMY. They turned down a wide polished corridor that brought them to a bank of elevators and rode up in silence to the ninth floor, where an identical corridor took them through three left turns toward Intensive Care. They passed a jolly mural of apes swinging through a forest. Now, at last, the uncirculated air tasted of hospital, of cooked food long removed, antiseptic and, fainter, something sweet. Neither fruit nor flowers.

The nurses’ station faced protectively onto a semicircular array of closed doors, each one with an observation window. The silence, broken only by an electric hum, and the lack of natural light made it feel like the small hours. The two young nurses on the desk, one Filipina, Fiona later learned, the other Caribbean, exclaimed and greeted Marina with high fives. Suddenly the social worker was a different person, an animated black woman in a white skin. She spun round to introduce the judge to the young nurses as “truly high up.” Fiona put out her hand. She could not have performed a high five without withering self-consciousness, and that seemed to be understood. Her hand was taken warmly. In a rapid exchange at the desk it was agreed that Fiona would remain outside while the social worker went in and explained things to Adam.

When Marina had gone through a door to the far right, Fiona turned to the nurses and asked about their young patient.

“He’s learning the violin,” the young Filipina woman said. “And driving us crazy!”

Her friend theatrically slapped her thigh. “He’s strangling a turkey in there.”

The nurses looked at each other and began to laugh, but quietly, out of consideration for their patients. This was clearly an old and coded joke. Fiona waited. She was feeling at home, but she knew it wouldn’t last.

Finally she said, “What about this transfusion business?”

All humor vanished. The Caribbean nurse said, “I pray for him every day. I say to Adam, ‘God don’t need you to do this, darlin’. He loves you anyway. God wants you to live.’”

Her friend said sadly, “He’s made up his mind. You got to admire him. Living for his principles, is it.”

“Dying, you mean! He knows nothing. This is one confused little puppy.”

Fiona said, “What does he say when you tell him that God wants him to live?”

“Nothing. He’s like, Why should I listen to her?”

Just then, Marina opened the door, raised a hand and went back inside.

Fiona said, “Well, thank you.”

In response to a buzzer, the Filipina nurse was hurrying toward another door.

“You go in there, ma’m,” her friend said, “and please turn him around. He’s a lovely boy.”

If Fiona’s recollection of stepping into Adam Henry’s room was confused, it was because of the disorienting contrasts. There was much to take in. The place was in semidarkness but for the focused bright light around the bed. In a corner, Marina was just settling herself into a chair with a magazine whose print she could not possibly read in such gloom. The life-support and monitoring equipment around the bed, the high stands, their feed lines and the glowing screens emanated a watchful presence, almost a silence. But there was no silence, for the boy was already talking to her as she entered, the moment was unfurling, or erupting, without her and she was left behind in a daze. He was sitting upright, supported by pillows against a metal backrest, lit as though by a single spot in a theatrical production. Spread about him on the sheets and spilling out into the shadows were books, pamphlets, a violin bow, a laptop, headphones, orange peel, sweet wrappers, a box of tissues, a sock, a notebook and many lined pages covered in writing. Ordinary teenage squalor, familiar to her from family visits.

It was a long thin face, ghoulishly pale, but beautiful, with crescents of bruised purple fading delicately to white under the eyes, and full lips that appeared purplish too in the intense light. The eyes themselves looked violet and were huge. There was a mole high on one cheek, as artificial-looking as a painted beauty spot. His build was frail; his arms protruded like poles from the hospital gown. He spoke breathlessly, earnestly, and in those first few seconds she caught nothing. Then, as the door swung closed behind her with a pneumatic sigh, she gathered he was telling her how strange it was, he had known all along that she would visit him, that he thought he had this knack, this feel for the future, that they had read a poem at school in religious studies which said that the future, present and past were all one, and this was what the Bible said too. His chemistry teacher said relativity proved that time was an illusion. And if God, poetry and science all said the same thing, it had to be true, didn’t she think?

He fell back against the pillows to catch his breath. She had been standing at the foot of his bed. Now she approached the side where there was a plastic chair and said her name and put out her hand. His was cold and damp. She sat down and waited for him to say more. But his head was tilted back and he was looking at the ceiling, still recovering and, she realized, expecting an answer. She became aware of the hiss of one of the machines at her back, as well as a muted rapid bleeping, at the audible threshold, or at least hers. The heart monitor, turned down for the patient’s comfort, was betraying his excitement.

She leaned forward and said she thought he was right. In her experience in court, if different witnesses who had never spoken to each other all said the same thing about an event, it was more likely to be true.

Then she added, “But it’s not always. There can be group delusions. People who don’t know each other can be gripped by the same false idea. That certainly happens in courts of law.”

“Like when?”

He was still catching his breath, and even these two words were an effort. His gaze remained upward, away from her, while she thought of an example.

“Some years ago in this country children were taken away from their parents by the authorities, and the parents were prosecuted for what was called satanic abuse, for doing terrible things to their children in secret devil-worshipping rituals. Everyone piled in against the parents. Police, social workers, prosecutors, newspapers, even judges. But it turned out there was nothing. No secret rituals, no Satan, no abuse. Nothing had happened. It was a fantasy. All these experts and important people were sharing a delusion, a dream. Eventually, they all came to their senses and were very ashamed, or they should have been. And very slowly, the children were returned to their homes.”

Fiona talked as though she herself was in a dream. She felt pleasantly tranquil, even as she guessed that Marina, monitoring the conversation, would be baffled by her remarks. What was the judge doing, talking to the boy about child abuse, within minutes of meeting him? Was she wanting to suggest that religion, his religion, was a group delusion? Marina would have expected the significant opening remark, after some gentle small talk, to be along the lines of, I’m sure you know why I’m here. Instead, Fiona was free-associating, as though to a colleague, about a forgotten institutional scandal of the 1980s. But what Marina thought did not really trouble her. She would do this her own way.

Adam lay still, taking in what she had said. At last, he turned his head on the pillow and his eyes met hers. She had squandered enough gravitas already and was determined not to look away. His breathing was more or less under control; his look was dark and solemn, impossible to read. That didn’t matter, for she was feeling calmer than she had all day. No great claim. If not calm, then unhurried. The pressure of a waiting court, the necessity of a rapid decision, the consultant’s urgent prognosis were temporarily suspended in the penumbral air-sealed room as she watched the boy and waited for him to speak. She was right to have come.

To hold his gaze for longer than half a minute or so would have been improper, but she had time to imagine, in the condensing way of thought, what he saw in the chair by his bedside, another grown-up with a view, a grown-up further diminished by the special irrelevance that haunts an elderly lady.

He looked away just before saying, “The thing about Satan is that he’s amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people’s minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn’t exist after all, and then he’s free to do his worst.”

Another feature of her unorthodox opening—she had strayed onto his ground. Satan was a lively character in the Witness construction of the world. He had come down to earth, so she had read in her skim through the background material, in October 1914 in preparation for the end days and was working his evil through governments, the Catholic Church and especially the United Nations, encouraging it to sow concord among nations just when they should be readying themselves for Armageddon.

“He’s free to try and kill you with leukemia?”

She wondered if she had spoken too directly, but he had an adolescent’s affected resilience. Toughing it out. “Yes. That sort of thing.”

“And you’re going to let him?”

He pushed himself against the backrest to sit up, then stroked his chin thoughtfully, in parody of a pompous professor or TV pundit. He was mocking her.

“Well, since you ask, I intend to crush him by obeying God’s commandments.”

“Is that a yes?”

He ignored this, waited a moment, then said, “Have you come to change my mind, straighten me out?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Oh yes! I think so!” He was suddenly the mischievous provoking child, hugging his knees through the bedcovers, though feebly, and he was excited again, working up a sardonic voice. “Please, miss, set me on the path of righteousness.”

“I’ll tell you why I’m here, Adam. I want to be sure you know what you’re doing. Some people think you’re too young to be taking a decision like this and that you’ve been influenced by your parents and the elders. And others think you’re extremely clever and capable and we should just let you get on with it.”

In the harsh light he rose so vividly before her, the untidy black hair curling over the neckline of his gown, the large dark eyes scanning her face in restless saccades, alert for any deception or false notes. From the bedclothes she caught the scent of talcum powder or soap, and on his breath something thin and metallic. His diet of drugs.

“Well,” he said eagerly. “What’s your impression so far? How am I doing?”

He was playing her, all right, drawing her back onto other ground, to a wilder space where he could dance round her, tempt her to say something inappropriate and interesting again. It occurred to her that this intellectually precocious young fellow was simply bored, understimulated, and that by threatening his own life he had set in motion a fascinating drama in which he starred in every scene, and which had brought to his bedside a parade of important and importuning adults. If this was so, she liked him all the more. Serious illness could not smother his vitality.

So, how was he doing? “Pretty well, so far,” she said, aware she was taking a risk. “You give the impression of someone who knows his own mind.”

“Thank you,” he said in a voice derisively sweet.

“But it might just be an impression.”

“I like to make a good impression.”

His manner, his humor, had an element of the silliness that can accompany high intelligence. And it was self-protective. He was surely very frightened. It was time to talk him down.

“And if you know your own mind, you won’t object to discussing practicalities.”

“Fire away.”

“The consultant says that if he could transfuse you and raise your blood count he could add two very effective drugs to your treatment and you’d have a good chance of a complete and fairly quick recovery.”

“Yes.”

“And without a transfusion you could die. You understand that.”

“Yup.”

“And there’s another possibility. I need to be sure you’ve considered it. Not death, Adam, but a partial recovery. You could lose your sight, you could suffer brain damage or your kidneys could go. Would it please God to have you blind or stupid and on dialysis for the rest of your life?”

Her question overstepped the mark, the legal mark. She glanced across to where Marina sat in her shadowy corner. She was using the magazine to support a notebook and was writing by feel alone. She did not look up.

Adam was staring at a space over Fiona’s head. With a wet clicking sound he moistened his lips with a white-coated tongue. Now there was sulkiness in his tone.

“If you don’t believe in God you shouldn’t be talking about what does or doesn’t please him.”

“I haven’t said I don’t believe. I’d like to know whether you’ve considered this carefully, that you may be ill and disabled, mentally, physically or both, for the rest of your life.”

“I’d hate it, I’d hate it.” He turned from her quickly in the attempt to conceal the tears that had suddenly formed. “But if that’s what happens I have to accept it.”

He was upset, holding his gaze well away from her, ashamed that she could see how easy it had been to deflate his bumptiousness. His elbow, slightly crooked, looked pointed and fragile. Irrelevantly, she thought of recipes, roast chicken with butter, tarragon and lemon, aubergines baked with tomatoes and garlic, potatoes lightly roasted in olive oil. Take this boy home and feed him up.

They had made useful progress, reached a new stage, and she was about to follow up with another question when the Caribbean nurse came in and held the door wide open. Outside, as though summoned by her fantasy cuisine, was a young man in a brown cotton jacket, barely older than Adam, standing by a trolley of brushed steel containers.

“I can send your dinner away,” the nurse said. “But only for half an hour.”

“If you can bear it,” Fiona said to Adam.

“I can bear it.”

She got up from her chair to allow the nurse to make her routine check on her patient and the monitors. She must have registered his emotional state and seen the wetness around his eyes, for she wiped his cheek with her hand just before she left and whispered loudly, “You listen carefully to what this lady has to say.”

The interruption had altered the mood in the room. When Fiona was back in her chair she didn’t return to her intended question. Instead she nodded toward the sheets of paper among the debris on the bed. “I hear you’ve been writing poetry.”

She had expected him to reject the prompt as intrusive or condescending, but he seemed relieved to be diverted and she thought his manner was sincere, completely undefended. She also noted how quickly his mood shifted.

“I’ve just finished something. I could read it if you want. It’s really short. But wait a minute.” He rolled onto his side to face her directly. Before speaking he wetted his dried lips. Again, the creamy white tongue. In another context it might have been beautiful, a cosmetic novelty.

He said confidingly, “What do they call you in court? Is it ‘Your Honor’?”

“Usually it’s ‘My Lady.’”

“My Lady? That’s fantastic! Am I allowed to call you that?”

“Fiona will do.”

“But I want to call you My Lady. Please let me.”

“All right. What about this poem?”

He leaned back against the pillows to get his breath back and she waited. Reaching forward at last for a sheet of paper near his knee brought on a round of enfeebled coughing. When that was done his voice was thin and husky. She heard no irony in the way he now addressed her.

“The weird thing, My Lady, is that I didn’t start writing my best poetry until I got ill. Why do you think that is?”

“You tell me.”

He shrugged. “I like writing in the middle of the night. The whole building shuts down and all you can hear is this strange deep hum. You can’t hear it in the day. Listen.”

They listened. Outside, there were still another four hours of light and rush hour was peaking. In here it was the dead of night, but she could hear no hum. She was coming to realize that his defining quality was innocence, a fresh and excitable innocence, a childlike openness that may have had something to do with the enclosed nature of the sect. The congregation, so she had read, was encouraged to keep their children apart as far as was possible from outsiders. Rather like the ultra-Orthodox Jews. Her own teenage relatives, girls as well as boys, had all too soon protected themselves with a sheen of knowing toughness. Their overstated cool was charming in its way, a necessary bridge to adulthood. Adam’s unworldliness made him endearing, but vulnerable. She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears. She decided that he was probably much loved at home.

He glanced at her, drew breath and began.

She waited in case there was more but he put the page down, leaned back and looked at the ceiling as he spoke.

“I wrote it after one of the elders, Mr. Crosby, told me that if the worst was to happen, it would have a fantastic effect on everyone.”

Fiona murmured, “He said that?”

“It would fill our church with love.”

She summed up for him. “So Satan comes to beat you with his hammer, and without meaning to he flattens your soul into a sheet of gold that reflects God’s love on everyone and for this you’re saved and it doesn’t matter so much that you’re dead.”

“My Lady, you’ve got it exactly,” the boy almost shouted in his excitement. Then he had to stop to recover his breath again. “I don’t think the nurses understood it, except for Donna, the one who was in here just now. Mr. Crosby’s going to try and get it published in The Watchtower.”

“That would be marvelous. You may have a future as a poet.”

He saw through this and smiled.

“What do your parents think of your poems?”

“My mum loves them, my dad thinks they’re okay but they use up the strength I need to get better.” He rolled onto his side again to face her. “But what does My Lady think? It’s called ‘The Hammer.’”

He had such a hunger in his look, such longing for her approval, that she hesitated. Then she said, “I think it shows a touch, a very small touch, mind, of real poetic genius.”

He continued to gaze at her, expression unchanged, wanting more. She had thought she knew what she was doing, but just then her mind emptied. She didn’t want to disappoint him and she was not used to talking about poetry.

He said, “What makes you say that?”

She didn’t know, not immediately. She would have appreciated Donna returning to bustle around the machines and her patient, while she herself went to the unopenable window and looked out across Wandsworth Common and decided what to say. But the nurse was not due for another fifteen minutes. Fiona hoped that by starting to speak she would discover what she thought. It was like being at school. Back then she had mostly got away with it.

“The shape, the form of it, and those two short lines balancing things out, you’re low, then you’re saved, the second overcoming the first, I liked that. And I liked the blacksmith’s strokes…”

“Long and slow.”

“Mm. Long and slow is good. And it’s very condensed, the way some of the best short poems are.” She felt some confidence returning. “I suppose it’s telling us that out of adversity, out of a terrible time, something good can come. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“And I don’t think you have to believe in God to understand or like this poem.”

He thought for a moment and said, “I think you do.”

She said, “Do you think you have to suffer to be a good poet?”

“I think all great poets must suffer.”

“I see.”

By pretending to adjust her sleeve she exposed her wristwatch and glanced down at it on her lap without seeming to. She must soon return to the waiting court and give her judgment.

But he had seen her. “Don’t go yet,” he said in a whisper. “Wait till my supper comes.”

“All right. Adam, tell me, what do your parents think?”

“My mum is better at dealing with it. She accepts things, you know? Submission to God. And she’s very practical, making all the arrangements, talking to the doctors, getting me this room, larger than the others, finding me a violin. But my dad is sort of tearing himself apart. He’s used to being in charge of earthmovers and stuff and making things work.”

“And refusing a transfusion?”

“What about it?”

“What do your parents say to you?”

“There isn’t much to say. We know what’s right.”

As he said this, looking at her directly, with no particular challenge in his voice, she believed him completely; he and his parents, the congregation and the elders knew what was right for them. She felt unpleasantly light-headed, emptied out, all meaning gone. The blasphemous notion came to her that it didn’t much matter either way whether the boy lived or died. Everything would be much the same. Profound sorrow, bitter regret perhaps, fond memories, then life would plunge on and all three would mean less and less as those who loved him aged and died, until they meant nothing at all. Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?

She shook her head to dispel the thought. Waiting in reserve was the question she had been about to ask before Donna came in. As soon as she started to pose it, she felt better.

“Your father explained some of the religious arguments, but I want to hear it in your own words. Why exactly won’t you have a blood transfusion?”

“Because it’s wrong.”

“Go on.”

“And God has told us it’s wrong.”

“Why is it wrong?”

“Why is anything wrong? Because we know it. Torture, murder, lying, stealing. Even if we get good information out of bad people by torturing them, we know it’s wrong. We know it because God has instructed us. Even if—”

“Is transfusion the same as torture?”

Marina stirred in her corner. Adam, speaking in breathy snatches, set out on his exposition. Transfusion and torture were only similar in that they were both wrong. We knew it in our hearts. He quoted Leviticus and Acts, he talked about blood as the essence, about the literal word of God, about pollution, he held forth like a clever sixth-former, the star pupil in the school debate. His violet-black eyes shone as his own words moved him. Fiona recognized certain phrases from the father. But Adam spoke them like the discoverer of elementary facts, the formulator of doctrine rather than its recipient. It was a sermon she was hearing, faithfully and passionately reproduced. He presented himself as a spokesman for his sect when he said that he and his congregation just wanted to be left alone to live by what they knew to be self-evident truths.

Fiona was attentive, she held the boy’s gaze, nodded occasionally, and when at last there was a natural pause, she stood and said, “Just to be clear, Adam. You do realize that it’s for me alone to decide what’s in your best interests. If I were to rule that the hospital may legally transfuse you against your wishes, what will you think?”

He was sitting up, breathing hard, and seemed to sag a little at the question, but he smiled. “I’d think My Lady was an interfering busybody.”

It was such an unexpected change of register, so absurdly understated, and her own surprise so obvious to him, that they both began to laugh. Marina, just then gathering up her handbag and notebook, seemed puzzled.

Fiona looked at her watch, openly this time. She said, “I think you’ve made it pretty clear that you know your own mind, as much as any of us ever can.”

He said with proper solemnity, “Thank you. I’ll tell my parents tonight. But don’t go. My supper isn’t here yet. What about another poem?”

“Adam, I have to get back to court.” But she was keen all the same to turn the conversation away from his condition. She saw the bow lying on his bed, partly in shadow.

“Quickly, before I go, show me your violin.”

The case was on the floor by a locker, under the bed. She lifted it up and placed it on his lap.

“It’s only a school violin for beginners.” But he brought it out with extreme care and showed it to her and together they admired the contoured nut-brown wood edged with black and the delicate scrolls.

She laid her hand on the lacquered surface and he put his close to hers. She said, “They’re beautiful instruments. I always think there’s something so human about the shape.”

He was reaching for his beginners’ violin tutor from the locker. She hadn’t intended for him to play, but she couldn’t stop him. His illness, his innocent eagerness made him impregnable.

“I’ve been learning for four weeks exactly and I can play ten tunes.” His boast too made it impossible to deflect him. He was turning the pages impatiently. Fiona looked over at Marina and shrugged.

“But this one is the hardest yet. Two sharps. D major.”

Fiona was looking at the music upside down. She said, “It might just be B minor.”

He didn’t hear her. He was already sitting up, with the violin tucked under his chin, and without pausing to tune the strings, he began to play. She knew it well, this sad and lovely melody, a traditional Irish air. She had accompanied Mark Berner in Benjamin Britten’s setting of the Yeats poem “Down by the Salley Gardens.” It was one of their encores. Adam played it scratchily, without vibrato, of course, but the pitch of the notes was true even though two or three were wrong. The melancholy tune and the manner in which it was played, so hopeful, so raw, expressed everything she was beginning to understand about the boy. She knew by heart the poet’s words of regret. But I, being young and foolish… Hearing Adam play stirred her, even as it baffled her. To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future.

When he finished she and Marina applauded, and from his bed Adam made an awkward bow.

“Stupendous!”

“Fantastic!”

“And only four weeks!”

Fiona, in order to contain the emotion she felt, added a technical point. “Remember that in this key the C is sharp.”

“Oh yes. So many things to think of at once.”

Then she made a proposal that was far removed from anything she would have expected of herself, and which risked undermining her authority. The situation, and the room itself, sealed off from the world, in perpetual dusk, may have encouraged a mood of abandon, but above all, it was Adam’s performance, his look of straining dedication, the scratchy inexpert sounds he made, so expressive of guileless longing, that moved her profoundly and prompted her impulsive suggestion.

“So play it again, and this time I’ll sing along with you.”

Marina got to her feet, frowning, perhaps wondering whether she should intervene.

Adam said, “I didn’t know there were words.”

“Oh yes, two beautiful verses.”

With touching solemnity, he raised the violin to his chin and looked up at her. When he began to play she was pleased to hear herself find the higher notes easily. She had always been secretly proud of her voice, and never had much chance to use it outside the Gray’s Inn choir, back when she was still a member. This time the violinist remembered his C sharp. On the first verse they were tentative, almost apologetic, but on the second, their eyes met and, forgetting all about Marina, who was now standing by the door, looking on amazed, Fiona sang louder and Adam’s clumsy bowing grew bolder, and they swelled into the mournful spirit of the backward-looking lament.

As they finished, the lad in the brown jacket was rolling his trolley into the room and the brushed-steel plate-covers made a cheerful tinkling sound. Marina had gone out to the nurses’ station.

Adam said, “‘On my leaning shoulder’ is good, isn’t it? Let’s do it again.”

Fiona shook her head as she took the violin from him and laid it in its case. “‘She bid me take life easy,’” she quoted to him.

“Stay just a tiny bit longer. Please.”

“Adam, I really do have to go now.”

“Then let me have your e-mail.”

“Mrs. Justice Maye, Royal Courts of Justice, the Strand. That’ll find me.”

She rested her hand briefly on his narrow cold wrist, then, not wanting to hear another protest or plea from him, she went toward the door without looking back, and ignored the question he called weakly after her.

“Are you coming back?”

THE RETURN JOURNEY to central London was quicker and during it the two women did not speak. While Marina made a long phone call to her husband and children, Fiona wrote notes toward her judgment. She entered the Courts of Justice by the main entrance and went immediately to her room, where Nigel Pauling was waiting. He confirmed that all the arrangements were in place for the Court of Appeal to sit tomorrow, if necessary at an hour’s notice. Also, tonight the hearing had been moved to a court large enough to accommodate all the press.

When she entered and the court rose it was just after nine fifteen. As the room settled she sensed impatience among the journalists. For the newspapers, this was not a convenient time. At best, if the judge was succinct, the story might make the late editions. Immediately in front of her, the various legal representatives and Marina Greene were arranged as before, within a wider space, but Mr. Henry was alone behind his counsel, without his wife.

As soon as she sat, Fiona began her routine introductory remarks.

“A hospital authority urgently requires the permission of the court to treat against his wishes a teenage boy, A, with conventional procedures they deem medically appropriate, which in this case includes blood transfusions. They’re looking for this relief under a Specific Issue Order. The application, made forty-eight hours ago, was on an ex parte basis. As duty judge, I granted it, subject to their assurances. I have just returned from visiting A in hospital, accompanied by Mrs. Marina Greene for Cafcass. I sat with him for an hour. That he’s extremely ill is plain to see. However, his intellect is in no way impaired and he was able to make his wishes known to me with great clarity. The treating consultant has told this court that by tomorrow A’s situation will have become a matter of life and death, which is why I give judgment so late on a Tuesday evening.”

Fiona named and thanked the various counsel, their solicitors, Marina Greene and the hospital for helping her come to a decision in a difficult case that had to be speedily resolved.

“The parents oppose the application on the basis of their religious faith, which is calmly expressed and profoundly held. Their son also objects and has a good understanding of the religious principles and is possessed of considerable maturity and articulacy for his age.”

She then set out the medical history, the leukemia, the recognized treatment which generally had good outcomes. But two of the drugs conventionally administered caused anemia, which needed to be countered by blood transfusion. She summarized the consultant’s evidence, noting in particular the declining hemoglobin count and the dire prognosis if it was not reversed. She could personally confirm that A’s breathlessness was now apparent.

The opposition to the application rested on three principal arguments. That A was three months short of his eighteenth birthday, was highly intelligent, understood the consequences of his decision and should be treated as being Gillick competent. In other words, as worthy of recognition for his decisions as any adult. That refusing medical treatment was a fundamental human right and a court should therefore be reluctant to intervene. And third, that A’s religious faith was genuine and should be respected.

Fiona addressed these in turn. She thanked counsel for A’s parents for bringing to her attention the relevant Section 8 of the Family Law Reform Act of 1969: the consent of a sixteen-year-old to treatment “shall be as effective as it would be if he were of full age.” She set out the conditions of Gillick competence, quoting Scarman along the way. She recognized a distinction between a competent child under sixteen consenting to treatment, possibly against the wishes of its parents, and a child under eighteen refusing life-saving treatment. From what she had gathered that evening, did she find A to have a complete grasp of the implications of having his and his parents’ wishes granted?

“He is without doubt an exceptional child. I might even say, as one of the nurses did this evening, that he is a lovely boy, and I’m sure his parents would agree. He possesses exceptional insight for a seventeen-year-old. But I find that he has little concept of the ordeal that would face him, of the fear that would overwhelm him as his suffering and helplessness increased. In fact, he has a romantic notion of what it is to suffer. However…”

She let the word hang, and the silence in the room tightened as she glanced down at her notes.

“However, I am not ultimately influenced by whether he has or doesn’t have a full comprehension of his situation. I am guided instead by the decision of Mr. Justice Ward, as he then was, in Re E (a minor), a judgment also concerning a Jehovah’s Witness teenager. In the course of which he notes, ‘The welfare of the child therefore dominates my decision, and I must decide what E’s welfare dictates.’ That observation was crystallized in the clear injunction of the Children Act of 1989, which declares in its opening lines for the primacy of the child’s welfare. I take ‘welfare’ to encompass ‘well-being’ and ‘interests.’ I’m also bound to take into account A’s wishes. As I’ve already noted, he has expressed them clearly to me, as has his father to this court. In accordance with the doctrines of his religion derived from a particular interpretation of three passages in the Bible, A refuses the blood transfusion that will likely save his life.

“It is a fundamental right in adults to refuse medical treatment. To treat an adult against his will is to commit the criminal offense of assault. A is close to the age when he may make the decision for himself. That he is prepared to die for his religious beliefs demonstrates how deep they are. That his parents are prepared to sacrifice a dearly loved child for their faith reveals the power of the creed to which Jehovah’s Witnesses adhere.”

Again she stopped and the public gallery waited.

“It is precisely this power that gives me pause, for A, at seventeen, has sampled little else in the turbulent realm of religious and philosophical ideas. It is not part of the methods of this Christian sect to encourage open debate and dissent among the congregation at large, which is referred to by them, aptly some might say, as ‘the other sheep.’ I do not believe that A’s mind, his opinions, are entirely his own. His childhood has been an uninterrupted monochrome exposure to a forceful view of the world and he cannot fail to have been conditioned by it. It will not promote his welfare to suffer an agonizing unnecessary death, and so become a martyr to his faith. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, like other religions, have a clear notion of what awaits us after death, and their predictions of the end days, their eschatology, are also firm and very detailed. This court takes no view on the afterlife, which in any event A will discover, or fail to discover, for himself one day. Meanwhile, assuming a good recovery, his welfare is better served by his love of poetry, by his newly found passion for the violin, by the exercise of his lively intelligence and the expressions of a playful, affectionate nature, and by all of life and love that lie ahead of him. In short, I find that A, his parents and the elders of the church have made a decision which is hostile to A’s welfare, which is this court’s paramount consideration. He must be protected from such a decision. He must be protected from his religion and from himself.

“This has been no easy matter to resolve. I have given due weight to A’s age, to the respect due to faith and to the dignity of the individual embedded in the right to refuse treatment. In my judgment, his life is more precious than his dignity.

“Consequently, I overrule the wishes of A and his parents. My direction and declaration are as follows: that the agreement to blood transfusion of the first and second respondents, who are the parents, and the agreement to blood transfusion of the third respondent, who is A himself, are set aside. Therefore it will be lawful for the applicant hospital to pursue the medical treatments of A they regard necessary, on the understanding that these may entail the administration of blood and its products by transfusion.”

IT WAS ALMOST eleven o’clock when Fiona set off to walk home from the Courts of Justice. At this hour, the gates were locked and it wasn’t possible to cut through Lincoln’s Inn. Before turning up Chancery Lane she went a short way along Fleet Street to an all-night convenience store to buy a ready-made meal. The night before, it would have been a bleak mission, but she was feeling almost carefree, perhaps because she hadn’t eaten properly in two days. In the cramped, over-lit shop, the garish packaged goods, the explosive reds and purples and starburst yellows, throbbed on the shelves to the beat of her pulse. She bought a frozen fish pie and weighed up various fruits in her hand before deciding. At the checkout she fumbled with her money, spilling coins onto the floor. The nimble Asian lad working at the till trapped them neatly with his foot, and smiled protectively at her as he put the money in her palm. She imagined herself through his eyes as he took in her exhausted look, ignoring or unable to read the tailored cut of her jacket, seeing clearly one of those harmless biddies who lived and ate alone, no longer quite capable, out in the world far too late at night.

She was humming “The Salley Gardens” as she went along High Holborn. The fruit and the dense hard package of her supper swinging in its carrier bag against her leg were a comfort. The pie could cook in the microwave while she prepared for bed, she would eat in her dressing gown in front of a rolling-news channel, and then nothing would stand between her and sleep. No chemical prompt. Tomorrow was a high-end divorce, a famous guitarist, an almost-famous wife, a torch singer with an excellent solicitor, wanting some large portion of his twenty-seven million. Candyfloss compared to today, but the press interest would be just as intense, the law just as solemn.

She turned into Gray’s Inn, her familiar sanctuary. It always pleased her, the way the city’s traffic rumble died away as she went deeper in. A gated community of a historical sort, a fortress of barristers and judges who were also musicians, wine fanciers, would-be writers, fly fishermen and raconteurs. A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon. She loved it here and never wanted to leave.

She entered her building, noted that the time switch for the lights was on, walked up toward the second floor, heard the usual jagged creak on the fourth and seventh stairs and on the final run to her landing saw everything and immediately understood. Her husband was there, just getting to his feet, a book in his hand, and behind him against the wall, his suitcase had been a kind of seat, and his jacket was on the floor beside his briefcase, which was open, with papers spilling out. Locked out, working while waiting. And why not? He looked rumpled and irritated. Locked out and waiting a very long time. Clearly not back for fresh shirts and books, not with his suitcase there. Her immediate thought, a gloomy and selfish one, was that now she would have to share her single-portion supper. And then she thought she wouldn’t. She’d rather not eat.

She came up the last few stairs onto the landing, saying nothing as she reached for her keys, the new keys, from her bag, stepped around him and went to the door. It was for him to speak first.

His tone was querulous. “I’ve been phoning you all evening.”

She unlocked the door and walked in without looking back and went into the kitchen, dumped her stuff on the table and paused there. Her heart was beating far too hard. She heard his bad-tempered breathing as he brought in his luggage. If there was to be a confrontation, which she didn’t want, not now, the kitchen was too confined a space. She took her briefcase and went quickly into the sitting room, to her usual place on the chaise longue. Spreading a few papers around where she sat was a form of protection. Without them she would not know what to do with herself.

The rumble of Jack towing his suitcase further along the hall and into their bedroom seemed to her like an opening move. And an insult. By force of habit, she pulled off her shoes, then took up a document at random. The guitarist had a pleasantly appointed villa in Marbella. The torch singer rather fancied it for herself. But he had acquired it before the marriage, from his previous wife, in return for vacating the family home in central London. And that previous wife had come by it in a divorce settlement with her first husband. Irrelevant, Fiona couldn’t help herself ruling.

At a creak of a floorboard she glanced up. Jack paused in the doorway before heading for the drinks. He wore jeans and a white shirt unbuttoned to his chest. Did he imagine he was desirable? She noticed he hadn’t shaved. Even from across the room, his bristles showed white and gray. Pathetic, they were both pathetic. He poured himself a Scotch and raised the bottle in her direction. She shook her head. He shrugged and crossed the room to his chair. She was a spoilsport, no sense of occasion. He sat down with a homely sigh. His chair, her chair, married life again. She looked at the paper in her hand, the wife’s narrative of the guitarist’s desirable world, impossible to take in. There was silence while he drank and she stared across the room at nothing in particular.

Then he said, “Look, Fiona, I love you.”

After several seconds she said, “I’d rather you slept in the spare room.”

He lowered his head in assent. “I’ll move my case.”

He did not get up. They both knew the vitality of the unsaid, whose invisible spirits danced around them now. She had not told him to keep out of the flat, she had tacitly agreed he could sleep there. He had not told her yet whether his statistician had thrown him out or he had changed his mind or indulged sufficient ecstatic experience to see him to his grave. The change of locks had not been touched on. He was probably suspicious of her being out so late. She could barely stand the sight of him. What was required now was a row, one with several chapters stretching over time. There might be some rancorous digressions, his contrition might come wrapped in complaints, it might be months before she would allow him in her bed, the ghost of the other woman might linger between them forever. But they would likely find a way of being back, more or less, with what they once had.

Contemplating the mighty effort involved, the predictability of the process, wearied her further. And yet she was bound to it. As to a contract she must fulfill to write a boring, necessary legal manual. She thought she would like a drink after all, but that might have looked too much like a celebration. She was a long way from being reconciled. Above all, she could not bear to hear again that he loved her. She wanted to be in bed alone, on her back in the dark, biting into some fruit, letting the remains drop to the floor, then passing out. What was to stop her? She stood and began to gather up her papers, and it was then that he began to speak.

It was a torrent, part apology, part self-justification, some of which she had heard before. His mortality, his years of complete fidelity, his overwhelming curiosity about how it would be, and almost as soon as he left that night, as soon as he arrived at Melanie’s place, he realized his mistake. She was a stranger, he didn’t understand her. And when they went into her bedroom…

Fiona raised a warning hand. She didn’t want to hear about the bedroom. He paused, considered, and continued. He was a fool, he realized, to be driven by sexual need and he should have turned on his heel that night, when she opened her door to him, but he was embarrassed and felt bound to continue.

Clutching her briefcase against her stomach, Fiona stood in the center of the room, watching him, wondering how to stop him. It amazed her that even now, with the high marital drama in its opening scene, the Irish song continued to turn in her mind, quickening to the rhythm of Jack’s speech, and sounding both mechanical and festive, as though cranked out by a street organ grinder. Her feelings were in confusion, blurred by fatigue and hard to define as long as her husband’s plaintive words swept over her. She felt something less than fury or bitter resentment, and yet it was more than mere resignation.

Yes, Jack said, once he arrived at Melanie’s flat he felt stupidly obliged to go on with what he had started. “And the more trapped I felt, the more I realized what an idiot I was to risk everything we have, everything we’ve made together, this love that—”

“I’ve had a long day,” she said as she crossed the room. “I’ll put your suitcase in the hall.”

She stopped by the kitchen to take an apple and a banana from her shopping on the table. Having them in her hand as she went toward the bedroom brought back her relatively happy walk home from work. She had felt the beginnings of some ease. Hard to recapture now. She pushed open the door and saw his suitcase standing upright and prim on its wheels by the bed. Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack’s return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.