The Children Act

Five

SHE MOVED ON from Newcastle after a week, judgments handed down or delayed pending reports, leaving contented or embittered parties, some of whom had the meager comfort of leave to appeal. In the case she had described to Charlie at dinner, she granted residence to the grandparents, and allowed supervised weekly contact to the mother and father separately, with a return date set for six months. By then, whoever sat in her place would have the benefit of a progress report on the children’s welfare, the parents’ promises to attend an addiction program, and the mother’s mental state. The little girl would stay at her school, a Church of England primary, where she was well known. Fiona found the conduct of the local authority’s children department in this case to be exemplary.

In the late afternoon of Friday she said her farewells to the court officials. On Saturday morning at Leadman Hall, Pauling loaded the boot of the car with documents in boxes and her robes on hangers. With their personal luggage piled on the backseat and the judge installed in front, they headed west for Carlisle by way of the Tyne Gap, across the whole width of England, Cheviots to the right, Pennines to the left. But the drama of geology and history was dulled by traffic, its volume, its routines and the road furniture that uniformly defined the British Isles.

They were slowing to walking pace through Hexham, her phone lay idle in her hand and she was thinking, as she had during various interludes all week, of the kiss. What impulsive folly, not to have pulled away. Professional and social madness. In memory, the actual contact, flesh on flesh, tended to extend in time. Then she would try to cut the moment back to a blameless peck on the lips. But that peck soon swelled again, until she no longer knew what it was or what had happened or for how long she had risked disgrace. Caradoc Ball could have stepped out into the hall at any point. Worse, one of his guests, unconstrained by tribal loyalty, might have seen her and told the world. Pauling could have turned back indoors from his conversation with the taxi driver and surprised her. Then the sensitively constructed distance between them that made her work possible would have been destroyed.

She was not prone to wild impulses and she didn’t understand her own behavior. She realized there was much more to confront in her confused mix of feelings, but for now it was the horror of what might have come about, the ludicrous and shameful transgression of professional ethics, that occupied her. The ignominy that could have been all hers. Hard to believe that no one had seen her, that she was leaving the scene of the crime unscathed. Easier to believe that the truth, hard and dark as a bitter seed, was about to reveal itself: that she had been observed and hadn’t noticed. That even now, miles behind her in London, the case was being discussed. That one day soon she’d hear on her phone the hesitant embarrassed voice of a senior colleague. Ah, Fiona, look, awfully sorry but I’m afraid I should warn you, uh, something’s come up. Then, waiting for her back at Gray’s Inn, a formal letter from the Judicial Complaints investigation officer.

She tapped two keys to summon her husband on the phone. In flight from a kiss, running scared for the cover of a married woman of some repute, some solidity. She made the call without thinking, out of habit, barely aware of the state of play between her and Jack. When she heard his tentative hello, the acoustic told her that he was in the kitchen. The radio was playing, Poulenc perhaps. On Saturday mornings they always had, always used to have, a lazy but early breakfast, a spread of papers, muted Radio Three, coffee, warmed pain aux raisins from Lamb’s Conduit Street. He would be in his paisley silk dressing gown. Unshaven, hair uncombed.

In a careful neutral tone, he asked her if she was all right. When she said “fine” it surprised her how normal she sounded. She began to improvise with facility, just as Pauling, with a satisfied sigh, remembered a shortcut and pulled free of the traffic. Plausible enough in the way of good housekeeping to remind Jack of her return date at the end of the month, and natural, or it had once been, to suggest that on the evening she came home they should go out for a meal together. A nearby restaurant they liked was often booked up in advance. Perhaps he could make a reservation now. He thought it was a good idea. She heard him suppress the surprise in his voice, steering cleanly between warmth and distance. He asked her again if she was all right. He knew her too well, and clearly, she wasn’t sounding quite so normal. With lightened emphasis she said she was absolutely fine. They exchanged a few lines about work. The call ended on his cautious good-bye that sounded almost like a question.

But it had worked. She was lifted from paranoid reveries into the actuality of an arrangement, a date, an improving relationship. She felt better defended and altogether more sensible. If there had been a complaint against her, she would have heard it by now. It was good to have phoned and moved matters on from that indefinable breakfast moment. Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it. An hour later, as the car began the slow crawl along the congested A69 into Carlisle, she was absorbed in court papers.

And so it was, two weeks later, her circuit complete and yet more justice dispensed across four northern cities, she faced her husband across a quiet corner table in a Clerkenwell restaurant. A bottle of wine stood between them, but they drank it warily. There was to be no sudden rush to intimacy. They kept away from the subject that might have destroyed them. He spoke to her with an awkward delicacy, as though she were some kind of unusual bomb that might go off mid-sentence. She asked about work, about his Virgil book, an introduction and selection, a “worldwide” textbook for schools and universities which, he touchingly believed, would make his fortune. Nervously, she posed one question after another, aware that she was sounding like an interviewer. She hoped to observe him as though for the first time, see the strangeness in him, as she had many years before, when she fell in love with him. Not easy. His voice, his features were as familiar as her own. His face had a rugged, haunted look. Attractive, of course, but not to her just then. His hands, resting on the table by his glass, were not, she hoped, about to take one of hers.

Toward the end of the meal, when they had exhausted the safer topics, there came a threatening silence. Their appetites were gone, their desserts and half the wine were untouched. Unspoken mutual recrimination troubled them. Still on her mind, his brazen excursion; on his, she presumed, her overblown sense of injury. In a forced tone, he began telling her about a geology lecture he’d been to the night before. It described how the sequence of sedimentary rock strata could be read like a book of the earth’s history. To finish, the lecturer allowed himself some speculation. A hundred million years into the future, when much of the oceans had sunk into the earth’s mantle and there wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sustain plants and the surface of the world was lifeless rocky desert, what evidence would a visiting extraterrestrial geologist find of our civilization? A few feet below the ground a thick dark line in the rock would mark us off from all that had gone before. Condensed into that six-inch sooty layer would be our cities, vehicles, roads, bridges, weapons. Also, all sorts of chemical compounds not found in the previous geological record. Concrete and brick would weather down as easily as limestone. Our finest steel would become a crumbling ferrous stain. A more detailed microscopic examination might reveal a preponderance of pollen from the monotonous grasslands we had made to feed a giant population of livestock. With luck, the geologist might find fossilized bones, even ours. But wild creatures, including all the fish, would barely make up a tenth of the weight of all the sheep and cows. He was bound to conclude that he was looking at the beginning of a mass extinction in which life’s variety had started to narrow.

Jack had been speaking for five minutes. He was oppressing her with the weight of meaningless time. The unimaginable desert of years, the inevitable end, animated him. But not her. Bleakness was settling around her. She felt the weight of it on her shoulders and down through her legs. Taking her napkin from her lap, she placed it on the table, a gesture of surrender, and then stood.

He was saying, as though in wonder, “This is how we’re signing our names in the geological record.”

She said, “I think we should get the bill,” and walked quickly across the restaurant to the ladies’, where she stood in front of the mirror, eyes closed, comb in hand in case someone came in, and drew a few slow deep breaths.

The thaw was neither quick nor linear. At first it was a relief, not to be self-consciously avoiding each other around the flat, not to be coldly competing in politeness in that stifling way they had. They ate meals together, began to accept invitations to supper with friends, had conversations—about work mostly. But he still slept in the spare room, and when a nineteen-year-old nephew came to stay, he moved onto the sitting-room couch again.

Late October. The clocks went back, marking the final stretch of an exhausted year, and the darkness closed in. For a few weeks, a new stasis developed between her and Jack and seemed almost as suffocating as before. But she was busy, and too tired in the evenings to begin the demanding conversations that might move them to a new stage. In addition to the usual caseload in the Strand, she was chairing a committee on new court procedures, and sat on another to respond to a white paper on family-law reform. If she had the energy after supper, she practiced alone at the piano, in preparation for her rehearsals with Mark Berner. Jack was busy too, filling in for a sick colleague at the university, and at home absorbed in writing the long introduction to his Virgil selection.

She and Berner had been told by the barrister organizing the Christmas Revels in the Great Hall that they had been chosen to open the concert. They were to perform for no more than twenty minutes, allowing five minutes maximum for an encore. Enough time for their selection from Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and a song by Mahler, one of the Rückert-Lieder, “I am lost to the world.” The Gray’s Inn choir would sing some Monteverdi and Bach, followed by a string quartet performing Haydn. A large minority of Gray’s Inn benchers spent many evenings a year listening in frowning concentration to chamber music over in Marylebone, at Wigmore Hall. They knew the repertoire. It was said they knew a bad note before it was played. Here, even though there would be wine beforehand and the general atmosphere, at least outwardly, would be forgiving, standards were punitively high for an amateur affair. Sometimes Fiona woke before dawn and wondered if she was up to it this time, whether there was some way she could excuse herself. She thought she lacked the concentration, and the Mahler was difficult. So languorously slow and poised. It would expose her. And the Germanic yearning for oblivion made her uncomfortable. But Mark was burning to perform. Two years before, his marriage had broken up. Now, according to Sherwood Runcie, there was a woman in his life. Fiona guessed that she would be in the audience and Mark was keen to impress her. He had even asked Fiona to learn the pieces by heart, but that, she told him, was beyond her. Only their three or four little encores were committed to memory.

At the end of October she found in the morning post at the Courts of Justice a familiar blue envelope. Pauling was in the room at the time. To conceal her feelings, a mix of excitement and vague fear, she took the letter to the window and pretended an interest in the courtyard below. When Pauling had left, she took from the envelope a single sheet of paper, folded in four, torn across the bottom, on which was an unfinished poem. Its title was in block capitals, underlined twice. “THE BALLAD OF ADAM HENRY.” The writing was small; the poem was long and ran over the page. No accompanying letter. She glanced at the first verse, failed to take it in and put it aside. She had a difficult case beginning in half an hour, a set of complicated marital claims and counterclaims that were set to absorb two weeks of her life. Both parties intended to remain exceedingly rich at the expense of the other. This was not the moment for poetry.

Two days passed before she opened the envelope again. It was ten in the evening. Jack was at another lecture on sedimentary layers, or so he said, and she preferred to believe him. She lay on her couch and spread the torn sheet on her lap. It looked to her like doggerel of the birthday card variety. Then she forced herself into a more accepting state of mind. It was a ballad, after all, and he was only eighteen.

May he what? The last words of the final verse were lost to a skein of spidery lines that looped around second thoughts, to words deleted and reinstated and to other variants with question marks. Rather than attempt to decipher the mess, she read the poem again, then lay back with eyes closed. She minded that he was angry with her, casting her as Satan, and began to daydream a letter to him, knowing that she would never post it, or even write it. Her impulse was to appease him as well as justify herself. She summoned flat ready-made phrases. I had to send you away. It was in your own best interests. You have your own young life to lead. Then, more coherently, Even if we had the room, you could not be our lodger. Such a thing is simply not possible for a judge. She added, Adam, I’m not Judas. An old trout perhaps… This last to lighten a fierce self-justifying intent.

Her “sweetest kiss” had been reckless and she hadn’t got away with it, not where he was concerned. But it was only kindness not to send him a letter. He’d write by return, he’d be at her door and she’d have to turn him away again. She folded the sheet back into its envelope, took it to her bedroom and stored it in the drawer of her bedside table. He would soon move on. Either he had drifted back into religion, or Judas, Jesus and the rest were poetic devices to dramatize her awful behavior, kissing him, then packing him off in a taxi. Whichever it was, Adam Henry was likely to succeed brilliantly at his postponed exams and go to a good university. She would fade in his thoughts, become a minor figure in the progress of his sentimental education.

THEY WERE IN a small bare basement room below Mark Berner’s chambers. No one could remember how a Grotrian-Steinweg upright came to be there, no one had claimed it in twenty-five years, no one was minded to move it. There were scratches and cigarette burns on the lid, but the action was good, the tone velvety. Outside it was below freezing, with the season’s first inch of snow settling picturesquely on Gray’s Inn Square. Here, in what they called the rehearsal room, there was no radiator, but certain downpipes among an array of early Victorian plumbing fixed against one wall gave off a feeble constant heat that happened to keep the instrument in tune. The floor covering, dating from the 1960s, was strips of coffee-stained needlecord that had once been glued down on cement. Now the edges rose rebelliously. It was easy to trip. Lighting was from a dazzling 150-watt bare bulb screwed into the low ceiling. For some while Mark had mentioned getting a shade. Apart from a music stand and piano stool, the only other furniture was a frail kitchen chair, on which their coats and scarves were piled.

Fiona was sitting at the keyboard, hands clasped for warmth on her lap, gazing at the score in front of her, Les nuits d’été in an arrangement for piano and tenor voice. Somewhere in her sitting room there was an old recording on vinyl by Kiri Te Kanawa. She hadn’t seen it in years. And it wouldn’t help them now. They urgently needed to be working on it, because they’d had only two rehearsals so far. But Mark had been in court the day before and was still angry and needed to tell her why. And what he intended to do with his future, for he was leaving the law. He’d had enough. Too sad, too stupid, too wasteful of young lives. An old and empty threat, but as she sat shivering, she felt obliged to hear him out. Even so, she could not stop herself staring at the opening, the “Villanelle,” at the softly repeating chords, pulsing staccato quavers, or imagining the sweet melody, or forming her own prosaic translation of Gautier’s first line—

When the new season comes, when the cold has disappeared…

Berner’s case concerned four young men fighting outside a pub near Tower Bridge with four other young men they happened to meet. All eight had been drinking. Only the first four were arrested and charged. The jury had found them guilty of grievous bodily harm with intent and had accepted the prosecution’s argument that the men should be treated on the basis of joint enterprise, that regardless of what each one had done, they should be dealt with equally. They were all in it together. After the verdict, which was a week before sentencing, the judge at Southwark, Christopher Cranham, had advised the men that they should expect serious custodial sentences. At this stage Mark Berner was brought in by anxious relatives of one of the four, Wayne Gallagher. They’d had a whip-round among family and friends and with some clever online crowd-sourcing raised the necessary twenty thousand pounds. The hope was that a QC of repute might speak effectively in mitigation before Gallagher was sentenced. Perfectly competent legal-aid counsel was dismissed, though the instructing solicitor was kept on.

Berner’s client was a twenty-three-year-old from Dalston, a somewhat dreamy young man whose chief fault was a degree of passivity. And a failure to keep appointments. His mother was a drunk and a drug addict; the father, with similar problems, was mostly absent from Wayne’s childhood, which was one of chaos and neglect. He loved his mother and, he insisted, she loved him. She never hit him. Much of his adolescence was spent being his mother’s main carer and he missed a lot of school. He left at sixteen, worked at low-level jobs—in a chicken-plucking factory, as a laborer, in a warehouse, stuffing junk mail through letter boxes. He had never claimed unemployment or housing benefit. Five years earlier, at the age of eighteen, he was maliciously accused of rape by a girl, was held in a young offenders’ prison for a couple of weeks, then tagged and put under strict curfew conditions for six months. There was good mobile phone text evidence to prove the sex was consensual, but the police declined to investigate. They had targets to meet in rape cases. Gallagher was just their sort of man. First day of the trial, damning evidence from the accuser’s best friend caused the case to collapse. The supposed victim had been hoping for money from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. She was keen on buying a new Xbox. She had texted her intentions to her friend. Prosecuting counsel was seen to hurl his wig to the floor and mutter “Stupid girl.”

“Another blot on his record,” Berner said, “was that back when Gallagher was fifteen he knocked a policeman’s helmet off. An idiotic prank. But down on the record as ‘assaulting a police officer.’”

Spring has come, my precious. It’s the blessed month of lovers.

The barrister was by her left elbow, in front of the music stand. In tight black jeans and black polo-neck sweater he reminded her of an old-fashioned beatnik. An impression only modified by the reading glasses suspended by a cord around his neck.

“D’you know, when Cranham told these lads what to expect, two of them said they wanted to start serving their time immediately. Meek as lambs, turkeys queuing for the oven. So Wayne Gallagher had to go with them, even though he wanted to be with his partner for one last week. She’d just had their baby. So I had to travel all the way out beyond east London to this dump to see him. Thamesmead.”

Fiona turned the page of her score. “I’ve been there,” she said. “Better than most.”

So come onto this mossy bank and let’s talk about our wondrous love…

“Get this,” Berner said. “Four London lads. Gallagher, Quinn, O’Rourke, Kelly. Third- or fourth-generation Irish. London accents. All went to the same school. A not-bad comprehensive. The arresting officer saw the names and decided they were tinkers. That’s why he didn’t bother going after the other four. That’s why the CPS went for joint enterprise. They use it for gangs. Very tidy. Nice clean lazy sweep.”

“Mark,” she murmured. “We should get to work.”

“I’m almost done.”

As it happened, the brawl took place in full view of two CCTV cameras.

“The angles were perfect. You could see everyone. And in muted colors. Pin bloody sharp. Martin Scorsese couldn’t have done it better.”

Berner had four days to get his mind around the case, to play and replay the DVD and memorize the shifting movements of an eight-minute brawl caught from two camera positions, to learn by rote every step of his client and the other seven. He watched the men’s first contact, on the wide pavement between a shuttered shop and a phone box, an angry verbal exchange, a little pushing, puffed chests, male swagger, the amorphous crowd swaying this way and that, spilling at one point over the curb, onto the road. A hand gripped a forearm, the heel of another hand shoved a shoulder. Then Wayne Gallagher, who was at the back of the group, raised an arm and, unfortunately for him, struck the first blow, and then another. But his fist was too high, he was too far back, his movements were impeded by the beer can in his other hand. His blows were ineffectual and the man he hit barely noticed. Now the group split untidily in two. At this point, Gallagher, still on the edges, threw his beer can. It was an underarm toss. The intended target brushed away some spots of beer from his lapel. In retribution, one of the other four stepped round and whacked Gallagher hard in the face, splitting his lip and terminating his involvement. He stood still, dazed, then moved away from the fighting, out of the cameras’ view.

The fight continued without him. One of the school friends, O’Rourke, stepped in and, with a single blow, floored the one who hit Gallagher. As soon as the man was down, another friend, Kelly, kicked him and fractured his jaw. Half a minute later, a second man went down, and this time it was Quinn who kicked him, breaking his cheek. When the police arrived, the fellow who hit Gallagher got to his feet and ran off to hide in his girlfriend’s flat. He was concerned about being arrested and losing his job.

Fiona looked at her watch. “Mark…”

“Almost done, My Lady. The point is, my guy just stood there waiting for the police. Face covered in blood. As much sinned against, et cetera. Bones were broken, so it’s GBH. The police charged all four on various counts. But in court the prosecution pushed for joint enterprise and sentence at level 2 GBH on the guidelines, which are five to nine years. Same old story. My client played no part in that violence. He was about to be sentenced for crimes that others committed and with which he wasn’t even charged. He’d pleaded not guilty. He should have owned up to an affray, but I wasn’t there to advise. Legal aid should have showed the jury the police photo of his bloodied face. In any case, the chap with the fractured jaw refused to file a victim statement. Came to court as a prosecution witness. Said he didn’t understand the fuss. Told the judge he hadn’t needed treatment, went on holiday to Spain two days after the fight. First couple of days he had to sip his vodka through a straw. End of story—his very words. It’s in the court transcript.”

Continuing to listen, she spread her fingers over a chord but did not play it. Let’s head for home, laden with wild strawberries.

“Obviously, nothing I could do about the jury’s verdict. I spoke for seventy-five minutes, trying to detach Wayne from the rest, trying to get the GBH down to level 3. Guidelines are three to five years. Also, made a solid case that the law owed him six months’ liberty on the groundless rape charge. Then he would have been within reach of a suspended sentence, which was all this stupidity was worth. The other three legal-aid counsels spoke for ten minutes each for their clients. Cranham summed up. Lazy bastard. Okay, level 3, thank God, but he wouldn’t let go of joint enterprise, and completely forgot to address what I’d said about the time the law owed my client. Gave them all two and a half years. Lazy and perverse. But in the gallery the parents of the others were sobbing with relief. They’d been looking at a minimum five years. I’d done them all a favor, I suppose.”

Fiona said, “The judge used his discretion to go below the guidelines. Count yourself lucky.”

“Not the point, Fiona.”

“Let’s start. We’ve got less than an hour.”

“Hear me out. This is my resignation speech. All these guys were in employment. They’re taxpayers, for heaven’s sake! My man caused no harm. Against the odds, given his background, he was turning out to be a hands-on dad. Kelly was running a youth football team in his spare time. O’Rourke worked at weekends for a cystic fibrosis charity. This wasn’t an attack on innocent passersby. It was a scuffle outside a pub.”

She looked up from the score. “A broken cheek?”

“All right. A brawl. Between consenting adults. What’s the point of stuffing the prisons with these guys? Gallagher swung two harmless punches and tossed a near-empty beer can. Two and a half years. GBH on his record forever for offenses he wasn’t charged with. They’re sending him to Isis, that young offenders’ place, you know, inside the walls of Belmarsh. I’ve been out there a few times. The website says they have a ‘learning academy.’ Total crap! I’ve had clients there in the cells twenty-three hours a day. The courses get canceled every week. Understaffed, they say. Cranham with his put-on weariness, pretending to be too irritable to listen to anyone. What does he care what happens to these kids? Poured into these dumps, turning sour, learning to be criminals. D’you know what my biggest mistake was?”

“What?”

“I tried to make the point that this was a case of drink and high spirits. The violence was consensual. ‘If these four gentlemen had been members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford they wouldn’t be before you now, Your Honor.’ On a horrible hunch, when I got home, I looked Cranham up in Who’s Who. Guess what?”

“Oh God. Mark, you need a holiday.”

“Face it, Fiona. It’s bloody class warfare.”

“And in the Family Division it’s all champagne and fraises des bois.”

Without waiting, she began to play the ten bars of introduction, the softly insistent chords. From the corner of her eye, she saw him putting on his reading glasses. Then the fine tenor voice, obedient to the composer’s marking of dolce, swelled sweetly.

For fifty-five minutes they forgot about the law.

IN DECEMBER, ON the day of the concert, she was home from court by six and in a hurry to shower and change. She heard Jack in the kitchen and called a hello to him as she passed on her way to her bedroom. He was bending over by the fridge and grunted in return. Forty minutes later she emerged into the hallway in a black silk dress and high-heeled shoes of black patent leather. They gave her good leverage with the pedals. Around her neck she wore a simple silver band. Her perfume was Rive Gauche. From the sitting room’s rarely touched hi-fi came the sound of piano music, of an old Keith Jarrett record, Facing You. The first track. She paused outside her bedroom door to listen. It had been a long time since she’d heard that hesitant partly realized melody. She’d forgotten how smoothly it gathered confidence and leaped into life as the left hand plunged into a strangely altered boogie which became an unstoppable force, like an accelerating steam locomotive. Only a classically trained musician could set his hands free of each other the way Jarrett did. That, at least, was her partial judgment.

Jack was sending her a message, for this was an album, one of three or four, that formed the sound track of their long-ago courtship. Those days, post-finals, after the all-women Antony and Cleopatra, when he persuaded her to spend first one, then dozens of nights in the room under the eaves with the east-facing porthole. When she understood that sexual ecstasy was more than an overinflated term. When, for the first time since she was seven years old, she screamed in pleasure. She had tumbled backward into a remote unpeopled space, and later, lying side by side in bed, sheets to their waists like postcoital movie stars, they laughed at the din she had made. No one in the flat below, fortunately. He, cool long-haired Jack, told her it was the greatest compliment he’d ever received. She told him she could not imagine regaining the strength, in her spine, in her bones, to go back there again. Not if she was to return alive. But she did, often. She was young.

It was during this time, when they weren’t in bed together, that he thought he might further seduce her with jazz. He admired her playing but wanted to prise her loose from the tyranny of strict notation and long-dead genius. He played her Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” and bought her the sheet music. It wasn’t difficult to play. But her version, smooth and unaccented, sounded like an unremarkable piece by Debussy. That was fine, Jack told her. The great jazz masters adored and learned from him. She listened again, she persisted, she played what was in front of her, but she could not play jazz. No pulse, no instinct for syncopation, no freedom, her fingers numbly obedient to the time signature and notes as written. That was why she was studying law, she told her lover. Respect for the rules.

She gave up, but she did learn to listen, and it was Jarrett she came to admire above all others. She took Jack to hear him at the Colosseum in Rome. The technical facility, the effortless outpouring of lyrical invention as copious as Mozart’s, and here it was again after so many years, still holding her to the spot, reminding her of who she and Jack once playfully were. The music was artfully chosen.

She went along the hall and paused again at the entrance to the sitting room. He had been busy. A couple of lamps with long-expired bulbs at last lit. Several candles around the room. The curtains drawn against the winter evening’s light rain and, for the first time in more than a year, a well-established fire in the grate, logs as well as coal. Jack was standing by it with a bottle of champagne in his hand. In front of him, on a low table, a plate of prosciutto, olives and cheese.

He was wearing a black suit, white shirt without a tie. Still sleek. He came over, put in her hand a champagne flute and filled it, then poured his own. His expression was severe as they raised and touched glasses.

“We don’t have much time.”

She took him to mean that soon they should be leaving to walk over to the Great Hall. It was madness to be drinking before a concert, but she didn’t care. She took a second mouthful and followed him to the fire. He offered her the plate, she took a lump of Parmesan, and they stood on each side of the fireplace, leaning against the mantelpiece. Like giant ornaments, she thought.

He said, “Who knows how much. Not many years. Either we start living again, really living, or we give up and accept it’s misery from here to the end.”

An old theme of his. Carpe diem. She raised her glass and said solemnly, “To living again.”

She saw the slight shift in his expression. Relief and, beyond it, something more intense.

He refilled her glass. “Concerning which, the dress is fabulous. You look beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

They held each other’s gaze until there was nothing to do but go toward each other and kiss. They kissed again. His hand was lightly on the small of her back and he did not move it down across her thigh as he used to do. He was taking this in stages, and his delicacy touched her. If a grand musical and social obligation had not been laid upon them, she did not doubt where this release would have led them. But her sheet music was behind her on the couch and their duty was to stay fully dressed. So they drew together tightly and kissed once more, then separated, picked up their glasses, touched them in silence and drank.

He sealed up the champagne with a cunning springed device she had given him many Christmases ago. “For later,” he said, and they laughed.

They fetched their coats and went out. To steady herself on her heels, she walked to the hall on her husband’s arm, under his umbrella, which he gallantly held above her head and not his own.

“You’re the performer,” he said. “You’re the one with the silk dress.”

A roar of small talk and laughter announced a crowd of a hundred and fifty or so, standing about with glasses of wine. The chairs were set out but no one was sitting yet; the Fazioli and a music stand were in position onstage. Members of Gray’s, benchers, most of her professional and social life gathered in one place. For more than thirty years she had worked with and against dozens of people she could see. Various eminences, many from outside, from Lincoln’s or Inner or Middle Temple—the Lord Chief Justice himself, some from the Court of Appeal, two Supreme Court justices, the attorney general, a score of well-known barristers. The executives of the law, who settled fates and deprived citizens of their liberty, had a developed sense of humor and a passion for shoptalk. The sound was deafening. Within minutes, she and Jack had lost sight of each other. Someone came up and wanted help from him with some Latin. She was drawn into a circle of gossip about an eccentric friend of the Master of the Rolls. She hardly needed to move from where she stood. Friends came up to embrace her and wish her luck, others shook her hand. It had been a masterstroke of Pension, the Gray’s Inn benchers’ committee, to allow the concerts to be preceded by a party. Wine, Fiona hoped, might soften the critical faculties of the Wigmore Hall faction.

When a waiter with a silver tray came by, she was feeling too well to refuse. As she took a glass, Mark Berner appeared in her line of sight, some fifty feet and a hundred people away, wagging a forbidding finger. He was right, of course. She raised her glass to him and took a sip. A friend, a stalwart of the Queen’s Bench, steered her over to meet a “brilliant” barrister who happened to be his nephew. Watched over by the proud uncle, she asked solicitous questions of a thin young man with a pitiful stutter. She was beginning to long for livelier company when an old girlfriend from Middle Temple barged in, hugged her and stole her away to a circle of mutinous young women barristers who told her, though in humorous terms, that they weren’t getting the quality work. It was going to the men.

Ushers were passing through the crowd announcing that the concert was about to begin. People moved with reluctance toward the chairs. It was difficult at first to exchange good wine and gossip for solemn music. But the glasses were being collected and the din was subsiding. She was making her way to the steps by the right-hand corner of the stage when she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder and turned. It was Sherwood Runcie of the Martha Longman case. For some reason, in black tie. The uniform gave men of a certain age with bulging stomachs a trapped and pathetic air. He put his hand on her arm, wanting to impart an item of interest to her that had been kept out of the newspapers. She leaned in to catch his words. Her mind was already on the concert, her heartbeat already tightening, and she found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, though she thought she had grasped it. Just as she was asking the judge to repeat himself, she became aware of Mark ahead of her, turning back to make impatient signs. She straightened, thanked Runcie and followed her tenor toward the stage.

While they stood at the foot of the steps waiting for their audience to settle and for their signal to go on, he said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Why?”

“You look pale.”

“Mm.”

Automatically, she touched her hair with the fingertips of one hand. In the other was her music. She gripped it tighter. Did she look deranged? She reckoned up what she had drunk. No more than three sips of the white wine Mark had warned her off. About two glasses in all. She would be fine. He handed her toward the steps and as they went up to stand by the piano and dipped their heads by way of a bow, they met the sort of applause reserved for a home team. This was, after all, their fifth Christmas concert in the Great Hall.

When she sat down, arranged the music before her and made an adjustment to the piano stool, she drew a deep breath and softly exhaled to purge herself of the last scraps of recent conversation, of the stuttering barrister, the cheerful work-deprived young women. And Runcie. No. No time to think. Mark nodded at her to show he was ready, and immediately her fingers were summoning from the colossal instrument the gently rocking chords and her mind seemed to follow behind. The tenor’s entry was perfect, and within a few bars they were locked into a unity of purpose they had rarely touched in rehearsal, no longer concentrating on simply getting things right, but able to dissolve into the music without effort. It crossed her mind that she had drunk just the right quantity of wine. The smooth deep power of the Fazioli lifted her. It was as if she and Mark were being borne easily downstream on a current of notes. His voice sounded warmer to her ears, bang on the note, free of the tuneless vibrato he sometimes deployed, free to search out all the delight in Berlioz’s setting of the “Villanelle,” and then, later, in the “Lament,” all the sorrow of the steeply falling line, Ah! Sans amour s’en aller sur la mer! Her own playing looked after itself. As her fingers touched the keys, she heard herself as though she were sitting at the back of the audience, as if all that was required of her was to be present. Together, she and Mark entered the horizonless hyperspace of music-making, beyond time and purpose. She was only faintly aware that something waited for her return, for it lay far below her, an alien speck on a familiar landscape. Perhaps it wasn’t there, perhaps it wasn’t true.

They emerged as from a dream and stood side by side to face their audience again. The applause was loud, but it always was. In the spirit of Great Hall seasonal generosity, it was often louder for the ropier performances. It was only when she met Mark’s glance and saw the shine in his eyes that she was certain that they had broken through the usual confines of amateur playing. They had actually brought something to the piece. If there was a woman in the audience he’d been wanting to impress, then she had been wooed in old-fashioned style and she surely must fall for him.

The silence fell abruptly as they took their places for the Mahler. Now she was on her own. The long introduction gave an impression of being invented by the pianist as it unfolded. With infinite patience, two notes tentatively sounded, then repeated and another added, then those three repeated, and only with the fourth did the line at last stretch luxuriantly upward into one of the loveliest melodies the composer ever devised. She didn’t feel unhappily exposed. She even managed to achieve what was second nature to first-rate pianists and coax from certain notes above middle C a bell-like sound. Elsewhere, she thought by her touch she could persuade her listeners that they could hear the harp that belonged in the orchestral version. Right from his entry, Mark caught the spirit of tranquil resignation. For some reason he’d insisted on singing in English, not German, a freedom only granted to amateurs. The gain was the immediacy with which everyone understood a man retreating from the tumult. I really am as good as dead to the world. The couple sensed they were holding their audience, and their performance rose further. Fiona also knew she was moving at a stately pace toward something terrible. It was true, it wasn’t true. She would know only when the music ceased and she confronted it.

Again, the applause, the faint bows, and now, the calls for an encore. There was even some foot-stamping, which began to grow louder. The performers looked at each other. There were tears in Mark’s eyes. She felt her smile to be rigid. There was a metallic taste in her mouth as she turned back to the piano stool and the audience quietened. For seconds she kept her hands on her lap and her head down, refusing to glance across at her partner. From their selection of pieces committed to memory, they had already agreed on Schubert’s “An die Musik.” An old favorite. It never failed. She placed her hands in preparation on the keys but still she did not look up. The silence in the hall was complete, and finally she began. The ghost of Schubert may have blessed the introduction she played, but the rising three notes, a broken chord tenderly echoed lower, and again lower still, then resolving, belonged to another hand. In the quiet reiterated notes that pulsed in the background there may have been a gesture toward Berlioz. Who knew? Even Mahler’s song, in its melancholy acceptance, may have subliminally helped Britten in this setting. Fiona sent no apology in Mark’s direction. Her face was as rigid as her smile had been and she looked only at her hands. He had just seconds to rearrange his thoughts, but as he drew breath he was smiling and his tone was sweet, and sweeter still in the second verse.

This was always a generous audience, but it rarely rose to a standing ovation. That sort of thing was for pop concerts, as was shouting and whistling. But it rose as one now, with only a little hesitation from certain senior figures of the judiciary. Some younger enthusiasts shouted and whistled. But Mark Berner received the accolade alone, one hand resting on the piano, nodding and smiling in acknowledgment, and also watching with concern as his pianist walked quickly across the stage, gaze fixed on her feet, and went down the steps, pushing past the waiting members of the string quartet, and hurried toward the exit. It was generally assumed that the whole experience must have been unusually intense for her, and the benchers and their friends were sympathetic and clapped all the harder as she passed in front of them.

SHE FOUND HER coat and, careless of the fresh downpour, walked to the flat as quickly as she dared in high heels. In the sitting room, a couple of candles were as they had carelessly left them. Still in her coat, hair flattened to her scalp, water dribbling down her neck to the small of her back, she stood still, trying to remember a woman’s name. So much had happened since she last thought of her. She recalled a face, she heard a voice, then it came back. Marina Greene. Fiona took her phone from her handbag and called. She apologized for calling out of hours. They spoke briefly, for there were screaming infants in the background and the young woman sounded tired and harassed. Yes, she could confirm it. Four weeks ago. She gave the few details she knew and said she was surprised that the judge had not been informed.

Fiona remained standing in the same place, her gaze settled, for no particular reason, on the plate of food her husband had prepared, her mind a merciful blank. The music she had just played didn’t resonate in her mind, the way it usually did. She had forgotten the concert. If it was neurologically possible not to think, she had no thoughts. Minutes passed. Impossible to know how many. At a sound, she turned. The fire was in its last throes and collapsing into the grate. She went over to it, knelt down and set about building it up, lifting fragments of wood and coal, with her fingers rather than the tongs, and placing them on and near the remains of the glowing heat. After three strokes of the bellows, a splinter of pine caught fire, which spread to two larger pieces as she watched. She moved closer and let the spectacle of tiny flames, their sideways bobbing and swiping movements across the surrounding blackness of coal, fill her vision.

At last, thoughts came in the form of two insistent questions. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask for my help? The answer came back in her own imagined voice. I did. She rose, aware of a pain in her hip as she went to her bedroom to retrieve the poem from the bedside table, where it had lain for six weeks. Its melodramatic tone, the puritanical suggestion that a bid for freedom, throwing the heavy cross in the river, receiving one chaste kiss, should be satanically inspired had deterred her from reading it again. There was something dank or suffocating about the Christian paraphernalia—the cross, the Judas tree, the trumpets. And she was the painted lady, the fish with rainbows on its scales, the treacherous creature that led the poet astray and kissed him. Yes, that kiss. It was her guilt that had kept her away.

She crouched down by the fire again and set the poem before her on the Bokhara rug. Her coal-dust fingerprints smudged the top of the page. She went directly to the final verse—Jesus standing miraculously on the waters of the river, announcing that the fish was Satan in disguise and the poet “must pay the fee.”

She reached for her glasses on the table behind her and leaned closer in to follow the crossed-out and encircled words. “Knife” was deleted; so were “pay,” “Let him” and “blame.” The word “himself” was deleted, reinstated, deleted again. “Mustn’t” was replaced by “must,” and “sinks” by “drowns.” “May” was by itself, without a balloon, floating above the fray, with an arrow indicating it should replace “And.” She was getting the hang of his methods and his handwriting. And then she had it, she saw it plainly. There was even a meandering connecting line running between the chosen words. The Son of God had delivered a curse.

When she heard the front door open, she didn’t turn away, and this was how Jack glimpsed her as he passed by the sitting room on his way to the kitchen. He assumed she was tending the fire.

“Build it right up,” he called. And then, from further away, “You were brilliant! Everyone loved it. And so moving!”

When he came back with the champagne and two fresh glasses, she had stood to take off her coat and fling it over the back of a chair and remove her shoes. She was standing still in the center of the room, waiting. He didn’t notice her pallor as he gave her one of the glasses and she held it out to be filled.

“Your hair. Shall I get you a towel?”

“It’ll dry.”

He removed the metal stopper and filled her glass, then his own, which he set down while he went over to the fire and emptied the coal scuttle over it and put on three large logs, wigwam style. He turned on the hi-fi and started the Jarrett again.

She murmured, “Jack, not now.”

“Of course. After tonight! Stupid of me.”

She saw that his wish was to get back quickly to where they were before the concert, and she felt sorry for him. He was doing his best. Soon he would want to kiss her. He came back to her, and in the silence, which had hissed in her ears the instant the hi-fi was off, they touched glasses and drank. Then he talked about her and Mark’s performance, of his, Jack’s, tears of pride when they all stood at the end, and what people were saying afterward.

“It went well,” she said. “I’m so glad it went well.”

He was not a musician, his taste was strictly for jazz and blues, but he spoke plausibly enough about the concert and remembered the pieces separately. Les nuits d’été was a revelation. He was especially moved by the “Lament,” he even understood the French. The Mahler he would need to hear again, for he sensed an enormous reservoir of feeling in it but he couldn’t quite connect first time around. He was glad that Mark sang it in English. Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it. She listened gravely, or appeared to, and gave short responses and nods. She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill. The fire took, and Jack, noticing that she was shivering, guided her toward it, and there he poured the rest of the champagne.

They had lived in the square a long time, and he knew the Gray’s Inn benchers almost as well as she did. He began to tell her about the people he had run into that evening. The square was tightly knit; the people in it fascinated them. The late-evening postmortem was a feature of their lives together. It was easy for her to continue mumbling an occasional response. Jack remained in an elevated state, excited by her performance, and by what he thought lay ahead. He told her about a criminal lawyer who was setting up a free school with others. They needed a Latin translation for their motto, “Every child a genius.” Three words maximum, short enough to be sewn onto a school blazer, under a heraldic phoenix rising from the ashes. It was a fascinating problem. Genius was an eighteenth-century concept, and Latin renderings of “child” were mostly gender-specific. Jack had come up with “Quiusque parvuli ingenium”—not quite as strong as genius, but natural wit or ability would do nicely. At a pinch “parvuli” could encompass girls. Then the lawyer had asked him if he’d be interested in creating a lively Latin course for eleven- to sixteen-year-olds of mixed abilities. Challenging. Irresistible.

She listened without expression. No child of hers would ever wear such a wonderful badge. She was excessively vulnerable, she realized.

She said, “That would be a good thing to do.”

He caught the flatness of her tone and looked at her differently.

“Something’s up.”

“I’m all right.”

Then, frowning as he recalled the question he had failed to ask, he said, “Why did you walk off at the end?”

She hesitated. “It was too much for me.”

“When they all stood? I almost cracked up completely.”

“It was the last song.”

“The Mahler.”

“‘The Salley Gardens.’”

He assumed an amused, disbelieving look. He had heard her perform it with Mark a dozen times before. “How so?”

There was also in his manner a touch of impatience. He was wanting to fulfill the promise of a wonderful evening, to put their marriage back together, kiss her, open another bottle, take her to bed, make everything easy between them once more. She knew him well, she saw all this, and again she felt sorry for him, but she felt it from a great distance.

She said, “A memory. From the summer.”

“Yes?” His tone was only mildly curious.

“A young man played that tune to me on his violin. He was just learning. It was in a hospital. I sang along. I think we made a bit of a din. Then he wanted to play it again, but I had to leave.”

Jack was in no mood for puzzles. He struggled to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Start again. Who was this?”

“A very strange and beautiful young man.” She spoke vaguely, trailing away.

“And?”

“I suspended proceedings while I went to his bedside to see him. You remember. A Jehovah’s Witness, very ill, refusing treatment. It was in the papers.”

If he needed reminding it was because he was installed in Melanie’s bedroom at the time. Otherwise, they would have discussed the case.

He said staunchly, “I think I remember it.”

“I gave the hospital leave to treat him and he recovered. The judgment had… it had an effect on him.”

They stood as they had earlier, on each side of the fire, which now gave off a fierce heat. She stared down into the flames. “I think… I think he had strong feelings for me.”

Jack set down his empty glass. “Go on.”

“When I was on circuit he followed me up to Newcastle. And I…” She wasn’t going to tell him what happened there, and then she changed her mind. No point concealing anything now. “He walked through the rain to find me and… I did something so stupid. In the hotel. I don’t know what I was… I kissed him. I kissed him.”

He took a step away from the fire’s heat, or from her. She no longer cared.

She whispered, “He was the sweetest fellow. He wanted to come and live with us.”

“Us?”

Jack Maye had come of age in the 1970s among all its currents of thought. He had taught in a university his entire adult life. He knew all about the illogic of double standards, but knowing could not protect him. She saw the anger in his face, tightening the muscles along his jaw, hardening his eyes.

“He thought I could change his life. I suppose he wanted to make me into a kind of guru. He thought I could… He was so earnest, so hungry for life, for everything. And I didn’t…”

“So you kissed him and he wanted to live with you. What are you trying to tell me?”

“I sent him away.” She shook her head, and for the moment she couldn’t speak.

Then she looked at Jack. He stood well away from her, feet apart, arms crossed, his still-handsome, good-natured face stiff with anger. A wisp of silvery chest hair curled up through his open-necked shirt. She had sometimes seen him tease it up with a comb. That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.

Only now, when it stopped, were they aware of the rain that had been beating at the windows.

Into this deeper silence he said, “So what’s happened? Where is he now?”

She spoke in a quiet monotone. “I heard it tonight from Runcie. Some weeks ago his leukemia came back and he was taken into hospital. He refused the transfusion they wanted to give him. That was his decision. He was eighteen and there was nothing anyone could do. He refused and his lungs filled with blood and he died.”

“So he died for his faith.” Her husband’s voice was cold.

She looked at him without comprehension. She realized that she had not explained herself at all, that there was so much she hadn’t told him.

“I think it was suicide.”

For some seconds neither spoke. They heard voices, laughter and footsteps in the square. The musical event was breaking up.

He cleared his throat softly. “Were you in love with him, Fiona?”

The question undid her. She let out a terrible sound, a smothered howl. “Oh Jack, he was just a child! A boy. A lovely boy!” And she began to weep at last, standing by the fire, her arms hanging hopelessly at her sides, while he watched, shocked to see his wife, always so self-contained, at the furthest extremes of grief.

She was beyond speech and the crying would not stop and she could not bear any longer to be seen. She stooped to gather up her shoes and hurried across the room in her stockinged feet and along the hallway. The further away from him she was, the louder she cried. She reached her bedroom, slammed the door behind her and, without turning on the light, fell onto the bed and sank her face into a pillow.

HALF AN HOUR later, when she woke, climbing in a dream an interminable vertical ladder from the depths, she had no memory of falling asleep. Still in a daze, she lay on her side, facing the door. Along its bottom edge, a slit of light from the hallway was reassuring. But the imagined scenes before her were not. Adam falling ill again, returning home weakened to his loving parents, meeting the kindly elders, returning to the faith. Or using it as the perfect cover to destroy himself. May he who drowns my cross by his own hand be slain. In low light she saw him as she had on her visit to Intensive Care. The pale thin face, the shaded purple under huge violet eyes. The caked tongue, arms like sticks, so ill, so determined on death, so full of charm and life, pages of his poetry spilling over the bed, pleading with her to stay and play their song again when she had to return to court.

There, in court, with the authority and dignity of her position, she offered him, instead of death, all of life and love that lay ahead of him. And protection against his religion. Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed to him. With that thought she slipped back into a deeper sleep and woke minutes later to the singing and the sighing of the gutters. Would it ever stop raining? She saw the solitary figure making his way up the drive of Leadman Hall, bent against the rainstorm, finding a way in the dark, hearing the falling branches. He must have seen ahead the lights in the house and known she was there. He shivered in an outhouse, wondering, waiting for his chance to talk to her, risking everything in the pursuit of—what exactly? And believing he could get it from a woman in her sixtieth year who had risked nothing in life beyond a few reckless episodes in Newcastle a long time ago. She should have been flattered. And ready. Instead, on a powerful and unforgivable impulse, she kissed him, then sent him away. Then ran away herself. Failed to answer his letters. Failed to decipher the warning in his poem. How ashamed she was now of her petty fears for her reputation. Her transgression lay beyond the reach of any disciplinary panel. Adam came looking for her and she offered nothing in religion’s place, no protection, even though the Act was clear, her paramount consideration was his welfare. How many pages in how many judgments had she devoted to that term? Welfare, well-being, was social. No child is an island. She thought her responsibilities ended at the courtroom walls. But how could they? He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

When she shifted position she felt against her face the pillow wet and cold. Fully awake now, she pushed it aside to reach for another, and was surprised to touch a warm body stretched out alongside her, at her back. She turned. Jack lay with his head propped on his hand. With the other he pushed her hair clear of her eyes. It was a tender gesture. By the light from the hall she could just see his face.

He said simply, “I’ve been watching you sleep.”

After a while, a long while, she whispered, “Thank you.”

Then she asked him if he would still love her once she had told him the whole story. It was an impossible question, for he knew almost nothing yet. She suspected he would try to persuade her that her guilt was misplaced.

He put his hand on her shoulder and drew her to him. “Of course I will.”

They lay face-to-face in the semidarkness, and while the great rain-cleansed city beyond the room settled to its softer nocturnal rhythms and their marriage uneasily resumed, she told him in a steady quiet voice of her shame, of the sweet boy’s passion for life and her part in his death.