The Children Act

Four

IT WAS HER impression, though the facts did not bear it out, that in the late summer of 2012, marital or partner breakdown and distress in Great Britain swelled like a freak spring tide, sweeping away entire households, scattering possessions and hopeful dreams, drowning those without a powerful instinct for survival. Loving promises were denied or rewritten, once easy companions became artful combatants crouching behind counsel, oblivious to the costs. Once neglected domestic items were bitterly fought for, once easy trust was replaced by carefully worded “arrangements.” In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion. And the children? Counters in a game, bargaining chips for use by mothers, objects of financial or emotional neglect by fathers; the pretext for real or fantasized or cynically invented charges of abuse, usually by mothers, sometimes by fathers; dazed children shuttling weekly between households in coparenting agreements, mislaid coats or pencil cases shrilly broadcast by one solicitor to another; children doomed to see their fathers once or twice a month, or never, as the most purposeful men vanished into the smithy of a hot new marriage to forge new offspring.

And the money? The new coinage was half-truth and special pleading. Greedy husbands versus greedy wives, maneuvering like nations at the end of a war, grabbing from the ruins what spoils they could before the final withdrawal. Men concealing their funds in foreign accounts, women demanding a life of ease, forever. Mothers preventing children from seeing their fathers, despite court orders; fathers neglecting to support their children, despite court orders. Husbands hitting wives and children, wives lying and spiteful, one party or the other or both drunk, or drug-addled, or psychotic; and children again, forced to become carers of an inadequate parent, children genuinely abused, sexually, mentally, both, their evidence relayed on-screen to the court. And beyond Fiona’s reach, in cases reserved for the criminal rather than the family courts, children tortured, starved or beaten to death, evil spirits thrashed out of them in animist rites, gruesome young stepfathers breaking toddlers’ bones while dim compliant mothers looked on, and drugs, drink, extreme household squalor, indifferent neighbors selectively deaf to the screaming and careless or hard-pressed social workers failing to intervene.

The work of the Family Division went on. It was an accident of the listings that so much marital conflict came Fiona’s way. Pure coincidence that she was in conflict herself. It was not usual in this line of work to be sending people to prison, but all the same, she thought in idle moments that she could send down all those parties wanting, at the expense of their children, a younger wife, a richer or less boring husband, a different suburb, fresh sex, fresh love, a new worldview, a nice new start before it was too late. Mere pursuit of pleasure. Moral kitsch. Her own childlessness and the situation with Jack shaped these daydreams and, of course, she was not serious. Still, she buried deep in a private mental domain, but never let it affect her decisions, a puritan contempt for the men and women who pulled their families apart and persuaded themselves they were acting selflessly for the best. In this thought experiment, she wouldn’t have spared the childless, or at least, not Jack. A cleansing spell in the Scrubs for contaminating their marriage in the cause of novelty? Why not?

For life at home in Gray’s Inn since his return was quiet and strained. There had been rows, during which she discharged some bitter feelings. Twelve hours later those feelings were renewed as ardently as wedding vows, and nothing changed, the air was not “cleared.” She remained betrayed. He spiced his apologies with old complaints that she had isolated him, that she was cold. He even said late one night that she was “no fun” and had “lost the art of play.” Of all his accusations, these bothered her most because she sensed their truth, but they did not diminish her anger.

At least he was no longer saying he loved her. Their most recent exchange, ten days ago, reiterated all they had said before, every charge, every response, every brooded-over well-turned phrase, and in a short while they fell back, weary with each other and themselves. Since then, nothing. They moved about their days, their separate business in different parts of the city, and when confined together in the apartment stepped daintily around each other, like dancers at a hoedown. They were terse and competitively polite when obliged to confer on household matters, avoided meals together, worked in separate rooms, each distracted by raw awareness through the walls of the other’s radioactive presence. Without discussing it, they ducked out of all joint invitations. Her only conciliatory move was to give him a new key.

She inferred from his evasive but morose remarks that in the statistician’s bedroom he had not passed through the gates of paradise. Not really so reassuring. He was likely to try his luck elsewhere, was trying it already perhaps, freed this time from the dismal constraints of honesty. His “geology lectures” may have been a useful cover. She remembered her promise to leave him if he went ahead with Melanie. But Fiona didn’t have the time to set in motion such a gross disentanglement. And she was still undecided, she didn’t trust her current mood. If he had given her more time after he left, she would have reached a clear decision and worked constructively to end the marriage or rebuild it. So she abandoned herself to work in the usual way and set herself to survive a day at a time the subdued drama of her half-life with Jack.

When one of his nieces dropped off her children for the weekend, identical twin girls aged eight, matters became easier, the apartment grew larger as attention turned outward. For two nights Jack slept on the sofa in the sitting room, which the children never questioned. These were girls of a straight-backed old-fashioned sort, solemn and intimate in their manner, though not above the occasional explosive row. One or the other—they were easy to tell apart—would seek Fiona out where she was reading, and stand before her, resting a confiding hand on her knee, and release a silvery stream of anecdote, reflection, fantasy. Fiona would join in with stories of her own. Twice on this visit it happened that while she was speaking, a wave of love for the child constricted her throat and pricked her eyes. She was feeling old and foolish. It bothered her to be reminded how good Jack was with children. At the risk of putting his back out, the way he did once with Fiona’s brother’s three boys, he indulged some wild horseplay, which the girls took to with fits of inhuman shrieking. At home, their resentfully divorced mother never tossed them in the air upside down. He took them into the gardens to teach them an eccentric version of cricket he’d devised, and he read a long bedtime tale with booming comic energy and a talent for the voices.

But on Sunday evening, after the twins had been picked up, the rooms shrank back, the air was stale and Jack went out without explanation—surely a hostile act. To an assignation? she wondered as she made herself busy, tidying the spare room to keep her spirits from lowering further. Restoring the soft toys to the wicker basket where they lived, retrieving glass beads and discarded drawings from under the bed, she felt the mild enveloping sorrow, a form of instant nostalgia, that the sudden absence of children can bring on. That feeling lingered into Monday morning and swelled into a general sadness that followed her on the walk to work. It only began to fade when she sat at her desk to prepare for her first case of the week.

At some point, Nigel Pauling must have brought in the post, for the pile was suddenly there at her elbow. At the sight of an undersized pale blue envelope resting on top, she almost called her clerk back to open it. She was in no mood to read for herself one more outpouring of illiterate abuse or a threat of violence. She turned back to her work, but couldn’t concentrate. The impractical envelope, loopy hand, absent postcode, the postage stamp slightly awry—she’d seen too much of it. But when she looked again and noticed the postmark she had a sudden suspicion, weighed the letter in her hand a moment and opened it. Instantly, she saw from the salutation that she was right. She had vaguely expected it for weeks. She’d spoken to Marina Greene and learned that he was making good progress, out of hospital, catching up on schoolwork at home, and expected back in his classroom within weeks.

Three pale blue pages, with writing on five sides. The first had a circled number seven centered at the top, above the date.

The first several words of the next paragraph were scored out.

She did not reply, or rather, she did not post the note it took her almost an hour that evening to compose. In her fourth and final draft she thought she was friendly enough, glad to learn that he was home and feeling better, pleased that he had good memories of her visit. She advised him to be loving toward his parents. It was normal in one’s teenage years to question the beliefs one had grown up with, but one should do it in a respectful manner. She finished by saying, although it was not true, that she had been “tickled” by the idea of the boat trip round the world. She added that when she was young, she’d had dreams of escape just like his own. This wasn’t true either, for she had been too ambitious, even at sixteen, too hungry for good grades on her essays to think of running off. Teenage visits to her Newcastle cousins had been her only adventures. When she looked at her short letter a day later, it wasn’t the friendliness that struck her, it was the coolness, the dud advice, the threefold impersonal use of “one,” the manufactured recollection. She reread his and was touched again by its innocence and warmth. Better to send nothing at all than cast him down. If she changed her mind, she could write later.

The time was approaching when she would be on circuit, visiting English cities and the old Assize towns in the company of another judge, whose field was criminal and civil law. She would hear cases that otherwise would need to travel to the law courts in London. She would stay in specially maintained lodgings, impressive townhouses of historical and architectural interest where, in certain cases, the cellars were legendary and the housekeeper was likely to be a decent cook. It was customary to be invited to a dinner given by the high sheriff. Then she and her fellow judge would return the compliment at the lodgings and invite notable or interesting types (there was a distinction) from the locality. The bedrooms were far grander than her own, the beds wider, the sheets of finer weave. In happier days, there was, for a securely married woman, guilty and sensuous pleasure in such unshared accommodation. Now, she longed to be gone from the silent and solemn pas de deux at home. And first stop was her favorite English city.

One morning in early September, a week before she began her journey, she received a second letter. Her concern was greater this time, even before she opened it, for the blue envelope lay on the doormat in the hallway at home, along with circulars and an electricity bill. No address, only her name. Easy enough for Adam Henry to wait outside in the Strand or in Carey Street and follow her at a distance.

Jack had already left for work. She took the letter into the kitchen and sat down with the remains of her breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were, she said, many other such cases listed for the week. Charlie put his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. What a mess. If he had to wade in and take a decision tomorrow morning about just one case like that, he would be up all night, chewing his fingernails and abusing the honor bar in the drawing room. She asked him why he was here. He had come from Whitehall to persuade a group of farmers on the coast to join with some local environmental organizations and allow their pastureland to be overrun by seawater in order to return it to salt marshes. This was by far the best and cheapest form of defense against coastal flooding, wonderful for wildlife, especially birds, and good for small-scale tourism too. But there was strong opposition from parts of the agricultural sector, even though the farmers would be well compensated. All day he had been shouted down in meetings. The story was going round that the scheme was compulsory. They wouldn’t believe him when he said it wasn’t. He was seen as a representative of central government, and farmers were angry about all kinds of other issues which were not his department. Afterward, he had been jostled in a corridor. A man “half my age and twice my strength” had gripped his lapel and muttered something in the local accent that he had not understood. Just as well. Tomorrow he would go back and try again. He was sure he’d get there in the end.

Well, that sounded to her like a special circle of hell and she’d settle for a psychotic mother any day. They were chuckling over this when they became aware that the other three had abandoned their conversation and were listening.

Caradoc Ball, who was an old school friend of Charlie, said, “I hope you realize just how distinguished a judge this is that you’re talking to. I’m sure you remember the Siamese twins affair.”

Everyone did, and as the plates were cleared and the boeuf en croûte and Château Latour distributed, they talked of and asked her questions about that famous case. She told them everything they wanted to know. Everyone had a view, but since it was the same view, they soon moved on to discuss the passion and competition for the story in the papers. It was a short step to a gossipy roundup of the latest performances in front of the Leveson Inquiry. They finished the beef. In prospect, according to the menu card, was bread-and-butter pudding. Soon, Fiona guessed, they would be arguing about the folly or wisdom of the West not sending its armies into Syria. Caradoc was unstoppable on the subject. And so it turned out; this theme was just being introduced by him when they became aware of voices echoing in the hall outside. Pauling and the white-faced butler came in, paused on the threshold, then approached her.

The butler stood aside, looking displeased as Pauling, after nodding an apology to the company, leaned over by her chair and said softly into her ear, “My Lady, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m afraid there’s a matter that needs your immediate attention.”

She dabbed her lips with her napkin and stood. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

Expressionless, they all rose as she preceded the two men across the room. When she was outside she said to the butler, “We’re still waiting for that fan heater.”

“I’ll fetch it now.”

There was something peremptory in his manner as he turned away, and she looked at her clerk with raised eyebrows.

But he simply said, “It’s this way.”

She followed him across the hallway and into what had once been a library. The shelves were filled with junk-shop books, the sort that hotels bought by the yard to lend atmosphere.

Pauling said, “It’s that Jehovah’s Witness lad, Adam Henry. Do you remember, from the transfusion case? He seems to have followed you here. He’s been walking through the rain, completely drenched. They wanted to turn him out, but I thought you should know first.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the kitchen. It’s warmer there.”

“Better bring him in.”

As soon as Pauling had left she got up and walked slowly around the room, conscious that her heart rate had increased. If she’d answered his letters she wouldn’t have been facing this now. Facing what? Unnecessary involvement with a case that was closed. And more than that. But there was no time to consider. She heard footsteps approaching.

The door swung open and Pauling ushered in the boy. She had never seen him out of bed and was surprised by how tall he was, well over six feet. He wore his school clothes, gray flannel trousers, gray sweater, white shirt, a flimsy school blazer, all soaked through, and his hair was untidy from being rubbed dry. A small backpack drooped from his hand. A pathetic touch was the Leadman’s tea towel, printed with a collage of local beauty spots, draped across his shoulders for warmth.

The clerk hovered in the doorway while the boy took a couple of steps into the room and stopped close to where she stood and said, “I’m truly sorry.”

In those first moments it was easier to conceal a confusion of feeling behind a motherly tone. “You look frozen. We’d better have them bring that heater in here.”

“I’ll bring it myself,” Pauling said, and left.

“Well,” she said after a silence. “How on earth did you find me here?”

Another evasion, to ask how rather than why, but at this stage, while his presence was still a shock, she couldn’t face knowing what he wanted from her.

His recitation was sober. “I followed you in a taxi to King’s Cross, got on your train, no idea where you’d get off so I had to buy a ticket to Edinburgh. At Newcastle, I followed you out through the station entrance, ran after your limo, then I lost it, so I took a guess and asked people where the law courts were. As soon as I got there I saw your car.”

She watched him as he spoke, taking in the transformation. No longer thin, but still slender. New strength about the shoulders and arms. Same long delicately structured face, the brown cheekbone mole nearly invisible against a complexion darkened by young health. Mere traces of the purple pouches under the eyes. Lips full and moist, eyes in this light too black for color. Even when he was trying to be apologetic, he appeared too vivid, too hungry for the minutiae of his own explanation. As he looked away from her to order in his thoughts the sequence of events, she wondered if this was what her mother would have called an old-fashioned face. A meaningless idea. Everyone’s notion of the face of a Romantic poet, a cousin of Keats or Shelley.

“I waited a really long time, then you came out and I followed you through the town and back down toward the river and watched you get in the car. It took me more than an hour, but eventually I found a site on my phone that mentioned where the judges stay, so I hitched a lift, got dropped off on the main road, climbed over the wall to avoid going past that gatehouse and walked up the drive in the storm. I waited round the back by the old stables for ages, wondering what to do, and then someone saw me. I really am sorry. I…”

Pauling, flushed and irritable, came in with the heater. He may have needed to wrench it from the butler’s possession. They watched as the clerk went down on all fours with a grunt, and partly disappeared under a side table to get to a socket. After he had reversed out and stood, he placed his hands on the young man’s shoulders and steered him into the flow of warm air. Before he left he said to Fiona, “I’ll be right outside.”

When they were alone she said, “Shouldn’t I think there’s something spooky about you following me home, and then here?”

“Oh no! Please don’t think that. It’s not like that.” He cast around with an impatient movement, as though an explanation were written somewhere in the room. “Look, you saved my life. And it’s not only that. My dad tried to keep it from me, but I read your judgment. You said you wanted to protect me from my religion. Well, you have. I’m saved!”

He laughed at his own joke and she said, “I didn’t save you so that you could stalk me the length of the country.”

Just then a fixed component of the fan heater must have expanded into the orbit of a moving part, for a regular clunking sound filled the room. It grew louder, then diminished, then steadied. She felt a rush of irritation with the whole establishment. A fake. A dump. How had she not noticed before?

The moment passed and she said, “Do your parents know where you are?”

“I’m eighteen. I can be where I like.”

“I don’t care how old you are. They’ll be worried.”

He gave a gasp of adolescent exasperation and set his backpack down on the floor. “Look, My Lady—”

“Enough of that. It’s Fiona.” As long as she could keep him in his place she felt better.

“I wasn’t meaning to be sarcastic or anything.”

“Fine. What about your parents?”

“Yesterday I had this huge row with my dad. We’ve had a few since I came out of hospital, but this one was really big, both shouting, and I told him everything I thought about his stupid religion, not that he was listening. In the end I walked out. I went up to my room and packed my bag, got my savings and said good-bye to my mum. Then I left.”

“You must phone her now.”

“No need. I texted her last night from where I was staying.”

“Text her again.”

He looked at her, both surprised and disappointed.

“Come on. Tell her you’re safe and happy in Newcastle and you’ll write again tomorrow. Then we’ll talk.”

She stood a few paces off and watched as his long thumbs danced across a virtual keyboard. In seconds the phone was back in his pocket.

“There,” he said, looking at her expectantly, as though she were the one who was to give an account of herself.

She crossed her arms. “Adam, why are you here?”

His gaze slid away and he hesitated. He was not going to tell her, or not directly.

“Look, I’m not the same person. When you came to see me I really was ready to die. It’s amazing that people like you could waste your time on me. I was such an idiot!”

She gestured toward two wooden chairs by an oval walnut table and they sat facing each other across it. The ceiling light, a factory-stressed rustic wheel of stained wood bearing four energy-conserving lamps, cast down from one side a ghastly white glow. It heightened the contours of his cheekbones and lips, and picked out the fine twin ridges of his philtrum. It was a beautiful face.

“I didn’t think you were an idiot.”

“But I was. Whenever the doctors and nurses tried to talk me round, I felt sort of noble and heroic telling them to leave me alone. I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was. I was really pumped up. I liked it that my parents and the elders were proud. At night when no one was around I rehearsed making a video, like suicide bombers do. I was going to do it on my phone. I wanted it on the television news and at my funeral. I made myself cry in the dark, imagining them carrying my coffin past my parents, past my school friends and teachers, the whole congregation, the flowers, the wreaths, the sad music, everyone weeping, everyone proud of me and loving me. Honestly, I was an idiot.”

“And where was God?”

“Behind everything. These were his instructions I was obeying. But it was mostly about the delicious adventure I was on, how I would die beautifully and be adored. This girl I know at school had anorexia three years ago, when she was fifteen. Her dream was of wasting away to nothing—like a dried leaf in the wind, was what she said, just fading gently into death and everyone pitying her and blaming themselves afterward for not understanding her. Same sort of thing.”

Now he was sitting she remembered him in hospital, leaning against the pillows among the teenage debris. It wasn’t his sickliness that came back to her, it was the eagerness, the vulnerable innocence. Even the word “anorexia” on his lips sounded like a hopeful jaunt. He had taken from his pocket a narrow strip of green cloth, something torn from a lining perhaps, which he rolled and rubbed between forefinger and thumb like worry beads.

“So this wasn’t so much about your religion, then. More about your feelings.”

He raised both hands. “My feelings came out of my religion. I was doing God’s will, and you and all the rest were plain wrong. How could I have got into such a mess without being a Witness?”

“Sounds like your anorexic friend managed it.”

“Yeah, well, actually, anorexia’s a bit like religion.”

When she looked skeptical he improvised. “Oh, you know, wanting to suffer, loving the pain and sacrifice, thinking that everyone’s watching and caring and that the whole universe is all about you. And your weight!”

She couldn’t help herself, she laughed at the po-faced self-ironic afterthought. He grinned at his unexpected success in amusing her.

They heard voices and footsteps in the hallway as the guests left the dining room and crossed to the sitting room for coffee. Then a staccato bark of laughter close to the library door. The boy tensed at the possibility of an interruption and they sat in conspiratorial silence, waiting for the sounds to recede. Adam was staring down at his clasped hands on the polished grain of the table. She wondered at all the hours of his childhood and teenage years, of praying, hymns, sermons, and various constraints that she could never know about, at the tight and loving community that had sustained him until it had almost killed him.

“Adam, I’m asking you again. Why are you here?”

“To thank you.”

“There are easier ways.”

He sighed impatiently as he replaced the strip of cloth in his pocket. For a moment she thought he was getting ready to leave.

“Your visit was one of the best things that ever happened.” Then, quickly, “My parents’ religion was a poison and you were the antidote.”

“I don’t remember talking against your parents’ faith.”

“You didn’t. You were calm, you listened, you asked questions, you made some comments. That was the point. It’s this thing you have. It added up to something. You didn’t have to say it. A way of thinking and talking. If you don’t know what I mean, go and listen to the elders. And when we did our song…”

She said briskly, “Are you still playing the violin?”

He nodded.

“And the poetry?”

“Yes, lots. But I hate the stuff I was writing before.”

“Well, you’re good. I know you’ll write something wonderful.”

She saw the dismay in his eyes. She was distancing herself, playing the solicitous aunt. She went a couple of steps back through the conversation, wondering why she was so anxious not to disappoint him.

“But your teachers must have been very different from the elders.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He added by way of explanation, “The school was enormous.”

“And what is this thing I’m supposed to have?” She said it gravely, allowing no hint of irony.

The question didn’t embarrass him. “When I saw my parents crying like that, really crying, crying and sort of hooting for joy, everything collapsed. But this is the point. It collapsed into the truth. Of course they didn’t want me to die! They love me. Why didn’t they say that, instead of going on about the joys of heaven? That’s when I saw it as an ordinary human thing. Ordinary and good. It wasn’t about God at all. That was just silly. It was like a grown-up had come into a room full of kids who are making each other miserable and said, Come on, stop all the nonsense, it’s teatime! You were the grown-up. You knew all along but you didn’t say. You just asked questions and listened. All of life and love that lie ahead of him—that’s what you wrote. That was your ‘thing.’ And my revelation. From ‘The Salley Gardens’ onward.”

Still grave in her manner, she said, “The top of your head has exploded.”

He laughed with delight at being quoted in turn. “Fiona, I can almost get through this piece by Bach without a mistake. I can do the theme from Coronation Street. I’ve been reading Berryman’s Dream Songs. I’m going to be in a play, and I’ve got to do all my exams before Christmas. And thanks to you I’m full of Yeats!”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

He leaned forward on his elbows, dark eyes gleaming in the awful light, his whole face appearing to tremble with anticipation, with unbearable appetite.

She considered for a moment, then said in a whisper, “Wait here.”

She stood up, hesitated, and seemed about to change her mind and sit down. But she turned away from him, crossed the room, stepped out into the hall. Pauling was standing a few paces off, pretending to be interested in the pages of the visitors’ book resting on a marble-topped table. In a low voice she gave rapid instructions, returned to the library and closed the door behind her.

Adam had pulled the tea towel away from his shoulders and was examining the collage of local attractions. As she returned to her seat he said, “I’ve never heard of any of these places.”

“There’s lots to discover.”

When the effects of the interruption had dissipated she said, “So you’ve lost your faith.”

He seemed to squirm. “Yes, perhaps. I don’t know. I think I’m frightened of saying it out loud. I don’t know where I am, really. I mean, the thing is, once you take a step back from the Witnesses, you might as well go all the way. Why replace one tooth fairy with another?”

“Perhaps everyone needs tooth fairies.”

He smiled forgivingly. “I don’t think you mean that.”

She succumbed to her habit of summarizing the views of others. “You saw your parents crying and you’re confused because you suspect their love for you is greater than their belief in God or the afterlife. You need to get away. Perfectly natural in someone your age. Perhaps you’ll go to university. That will help. But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here. And more to the point, what you’re about to do now. Where are you going to go?”

This second question troubled him more. “I’ve got an aunt in Birmingham. My mother’s sister. She’ll have me for a week or two.”

“She’s expecting you?”

“Sort of.”

She was about to make him send another text when he extended his hand across the table, and just as quickly she withdrew hers onto her lap.

He couldn’t bear to look at her or be looked at as he spoke. He put his hands to his forehead, shading his eyes. “This is my question. When you hear it you’ll think it’s so stupid. But please don’t just reject it. Please say you’ll think about it.”

“Well?”

He spoke to the table’s surface. “I want to come and live with you.”

She waited for more. She could never have anticipated such a request. But now, it seemed obvious.

He still could not meet her eye. He spoke quickly, as though embarrassed by his own voice. He had thought it all out. “I could do odd jobs for you, housework, errands. And you could give me reading lists, you know, everything you think I should know about…”

He had stalked her through the country, through the streets, walked through a storm to ask her. It was a logical extension of his fantasy of a long sea voyage with her, of their talking all day as they paced the rolling deck. Logical and insane. And innocent. The silence wound itself around them and bound them. Even the clunking of the fan heater appeared to recede, and there were no sounds from beyond the room. He continued to protect his face from her. She stared at the whorls of his healthy young dark brown hair, now completely dry and shining.

She said gently, “You know that isn’t possible.”

“I wouldn’t get in the way, I mean, with you and your husband.” Finally, he removed his hands and looked at her. “You know, like a sort of lodger. When I’ve finished my exams I could get a job and pay you some rent.”

She saw the spare room and its twin single beds, the teddies and other animals in the wicker basket, the toy cupboard so crammed that one door would not close. She coughed abruptly and stood, and went the length of the room to the window and made a show of looking out into the dark. At last, without turning, she said, “We only have one spare room and a lot of nephews and nieces.”

“You mean that’s your only objection?”

There was a tap on the door and Pauling came in. “Here in two minutes, My Lady,” he said, and left.

She came away from the window and went back toward Adam and stooped to pick up his backpack from the floor.

“My clerk will go with you in a taxi, first to the station to buy you a ticket to Birmingham tomorrow morning and then to a hotel close by.”

After a pause he got slowly to his feet and took the bag from her. Despite his height, he looked like a small child in shock.

“Is that it, then?”

“I’d like you to promise me you’ll contact your mother again before you get on the train. Tell her where you’ll be.”

He didn’t reply. She handed him toward the door and they went out into the hall. No one in sight. Caradoc Ball and his guests were settled in the drawing room behind closed doors. She left Adam waiting by the library while she went to her room to get money from her handbag. On her way back, she saw the whole scene from her elevated position at the top of the grand staircase. The front door was open and the butler was talking to the driver. Behind him, below the portico steps, was the taxi, door open to release the cheery swooping sounds of Arabic orchestral music. Her clerk was crossing the hall at a pace, presumably to prevent the butler from creating a problem. As for Adam Henry, he was still by the library entrance, pressing the bag in his arms against his chest. By the time she reached him, the butler, the driver and the clerk were outside on the gravel by the car discussing, she hoped, a suitable hotel.

The boy started to say, “But we haven’t even—” and she raised a hand to shush him.

“You must go.”

Lightly, she took the lapel of his thin jacket between her fingers and drew him toward her. Her intention was to kiss him on the cheek, but as she reached up and he stooped a little and their faces came close, he turned his head and their lips met. She could have drawn back, she could have stepped right away from him. Instead, she lingered, defenseless before the moment. The sensation of skin on skin obliterated any possibility of choice. If it was possible to kiss chastely full on the lips, this was what she did. A fleeting contact, but more than the idea of a kiss, more than a mother might give her grown-up son. Over in two seconds, perhaps three. Time enough to feel in the softness of his lips that overlay their suppleness all the years, all the life, that separated her from him. As they withdrew, a slight adhesion of skin might have drawn them back together. But there were approaching footsteps on the gravel and on the stone steps outside. She let go of his lapel and said again, “You must go.”

He picked up his backpack, which he had dropped to the floor, and followed her across the hall and out into the fresh night air. At the foot of the steps the driver gave a friendly salute and opened the taxi’s rear door. The music had been turned off. She had intended to give the cash to Adam, but in a sudden pointless change of mind, she handed it to Pauling instead. He nodded and grimaced as he took the thin roll of notes. With a brusque movement of his shoulders, Adam seemed to shake himself free of all of them and ducked into the backseat and sat with the bag on his lap, staring straight ahead. Already beginning to regret what she had set in train, she moved around the car in order to exchange a last look with him. He was surely aware of her, but he turned his head away. Pauling got in the front beside the driver. The butler closed Adam’s door with a dismissive backhand flourish. Shoulders hunched, Fiona hurried up the cracked stone steps as the taxi drew away.