The Children Act

by Ian Mcewan

  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.

  THE BALLAD OF ADAM HENRY

  I took my wooden cross and dragged it by the stream.

  I was young and foolish and troubled by a dream

  That penitence was folly and burdens were for fools.

  But I’d been told on Sundays to live life by the rules.

  The splinters cut my shoulder, that cross
was heavy as lead,

  My life was narrow and godly and I was almost dead,

  The stream was merry and dancing and sunlight danced around,

  But I must keep on walking, with eyes fixed on the ground.

  Then a fish rose out of the water with rainbows on its scales.

  Pearls of water were dancing and hung in silvery trails.

  “Throw your cross in the water if you’re wanting to be free!”

  So I drowned my load in the river in the shade of the Judas tree.

  I knelt by the banks of that river in a wondrous state of bliss

  While she leaned upon my shoulder and gave the sweetest kiss.

  But she dived to the icy bottom where she never will be found,

  And I was full of tears until I heard the trumpets sound.

  And Jesus stood on the water and this he said to me,

  “That fish was the voice of Satan, and you must pay the fee.

  Her kiss was the kiss of Judas, her kiss betrayed my name.

  May he

  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- o
r 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.