God, how I needed to talk to her, to anyone. But instead, I took what solace I could from a walk along the river. When I got back I found that Sandy had indeed eaten a chicken madras and had taken her jet lag and her anger to bed early.
I picked at a microwaved spaghetti carbonara. I stared blankly at the television. I ran myself a bath. I took the necessary dose of antidepressants and sleeping pills. I crawled into bed. The chemicals did their job for around five hours. When I woke, the clock read 4:30 AM—and all I could feel was dread. Dread about my testimony today. Dread about yesterday’s debacle with Sandy. Dread about the influence that Grant Ogilvy would have on the judge’s decision. Dread, most of all, that I was now destined to lose Jack.
I went down to the kitchen to make myself a cup of herbal tea. As I walked by the living room, I saw that the light was on. Sandy was stretched out on the sofa, awake, lost in middle-of-the-night thought.
“Hi,” I said. “Can I get you anything?”
“You know what really kills me?” she said. “It’s not that you gave Dad that last drink. No, what so fucking upsets me is that you couldn’t tell me.”
“I wanted to, but . . .”
“I know, I know. And I understand all your reasons. But to keep that to yourself for all these years . . . Jesus Christ, Sally . . . didn’t you think I’d understand? Didn’t you?”
“I just couldn’t bring myself to admit . . .”
“What? That you’ve been carrying fifteen years’ worth of guilt for no damn reason? I could have talked you out of your guilt in a heartbeat. But you chose not to let me. You chose to keep stagnating in the fucking guilt, and that’s what really staggers me.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I’m right. I may just be a fat little suburbanite . . .”
“Now who’s trading in self-hate?”
She laughed a cheerless laugh. And said, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve always hated my last name. Goodchild. Too much to live up to.”
She pushed herself up off the sofa. “I think I’ll try to get two more hours of sleep.”
“Good idea.”
But I couldn’t sleep. I just took up her place on the sofa, and stared at the empty grate in the fireplace, and tried to fathom why I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I should have told her, why I dodged the absolution I so craved. And why every child wants to be a good child—and never can really live up to the expectations of others, let alone themselves.
Somewhere over the next few hours, I did nod off—and then found myself being nudged by Sandy, who had a mug of coffee in one hand.
“It’s eight AM,” she said, “and this is your wake-up call.”
I slurped down the coffee. I took a fast shower. I put on my good suit again. I did a little damage control with foundation and blusher. We were out the door and on the tube by nine-fifteen. It was a brilliantly bright, sundappled day.
“Sleep all right?” Maeve asked me as we settled down in the front left-hand row of the court.
“Not bad.”
“And how is your sister?”
“A bit better, I think.”
Just then Nigel showed up, accompanied by Rose Keating. She gave me a little hug.
“You didn’t think I was going to miss this, did you?” she asked. “Who’s the woman in the back row?”
“My sister,” I said.
“All the way over here from the States to support you? Good on her. I’ll sit with her.”
“How are our last-minute witnesses?” Maeve asked.
“Due here this afternoon, as requested,” she said.
“They know how to get to the high court?” Maeve asked.
“It’s all arranged. Nigel’s meeting one of them at Paddington during the lunch break, and I’m going to Victoria for the other one.”
Tony and Co. then arrived—his lawyers nodding at their counterparts on this side of the court, their client and his new partner avoiding my gaze as before. Just as I also didn’t want to make eye contact with either of them.
Then the court clerk stood up and asked us to do so as well. Mr. Justice Traynor entered, sat down, greeted us with a brief “Good morning,” and called the hearing to order.
It was now Maeve’s turn to present our case. And so she called her first witness: Dr. Rodale.
She didn’t smile at me from the witness stand. She seemed to be deliberately ignoring my presence—perhaps because that would give her testimony more weight.
Maeve got her to recite her professional qualifications, her long-standing association with St. Martin’s, the fact that she’d had two decades’ experience of treating women with postpartum depression, and had written several medical papers on the subject. She then had her outline, briefly, the emotional and physiological roller-coaster ride that was this condition, how it sneaked up on its victims unaware, how it often caused those in its vortex to do uncharacteristic things like uttering threats, becoming suicidal, refusing to eat or wash, committing violent acts . . . and how, with rare exceptions, it was always treatable.
Then she detailed my clinical case.
When she had finished Maeve asked her, “In your opinion, is Ms. Goodchild fully capable of resuming the role of full-time mother?”
She looked straight at Tony and said, “In my opinion, she was fully capable of that role when she was discharged from hospital nearly ten months ago.”
“No further questions, My Lord.”
Lucinda Fforde stood up.
“Dr. Rodale, during the course of your twenty-five-year career, how many women have you treated for postpartum depression?”
“Around five hundred, I’d guess.”
“And, of these, how many documented cases can you remember of a mother threatening to kill her child?”
Dr. Rodale looked most uncomfortable with this question.
“When you say ‘threatening to kill a child . . . ’?”
“I mean, just that: someone threatening to kill a child.”
“Well . . . to be honest about it, I only remember three other reported instances . . .”
“Only three other instances, out of five hundred cases. It’s obviously a pretty rare threat to make then. And let me ask you this: of those three cases . . . actually four, if you include Ms. Goodchild, how many of those actually went on to murder their child?”
Dr. Rodale turned to the judge.
“My Lord, I really find this line of questioning . . .”
“Doctor, you must answer the question.”
She looked straight at Lucinda Fforde.
“Only one of those women went on to kill her child.”
A triumphant smile crossed the lips of Lucinda Fforde.
“So, given that, one of those four women actually killed her child, there was a twenty-five percent chance that Ms. Goodchild would have killed her child.”
“My Lord—”
But before Maeve could utter anything more, Lucinda Fforde said, “No further questions.”
“Reexamination?”
“Absolutely, My Lord,” Maeve said, sounding furious. “Dr. Rodale, please tell us about the patient who killed her child.”
“She was suffering from extreme schizophrenia, and one of the worst cases of manic depression I’ve ever treated. She had been committed—and the murder happened on a supervised visit with her child, when the supervisor became physically ill and had to leave the room for no more than a minute to seek help. When she returned, the mother had snapped her child’s neck.”
There was a long silence.
“How rare is this sort of case in postpartum depression?” Maeve asked.
“Rarer than rare. As I said, it’s the one instance in five hundred or so cases I’ve treated. And I must emphasize again that, unlike all the other cases, this was one where the patient was essentially psychotic.”
“So there is absolutely no relation whatsoever between the condition suffered by the woman who killed her child and that of Ms. Goodchild?”
“Absolutely none whatsoever. And anyone who attempts to make that sort of comparison is guilty of a monstrous manipulation of the truth.”
“Thank you, doctor. No further questions.”
Next up was Clarice Chambers. She did smile at me from the witness box and, under gentle, brief questioning from Maeve, told her how well I had “bonded” with Jack, the grief I had displayed at our first supervised visit, and the way I had been able to establish a genuine rapport with him during our hourly visits each week. And then Maeve asked her virtually the same question she had posed to Dr. Rodale.
“As you have been the one and only person to have watched the interaction of Ms. Goodchild and her son over the past months, is it your professional opinion that she is a caring mother?”
“A completely caring mother, in whom I have the greatest confidence.”
“Thank you. No further questions.”
Once again, Lucinda Fforde played the “I have just one question for you” game. And the question was, “In your experience, don’t all mothers who have been legally prevented from unsupervised contact with their child—due to worries about the child’s safety—don’t they always express terrible grief in front of you?”
“Of course they do. Because—”
“No further questions.”
“Reexamination?”
“Ms. Chambers, is it true that, for the past six weeks, you have allowed Ms. Goodchild to have unsupervised contact with her child?”
“That is completely correct.”
“And why have you permitted this?”
“Because it’s clear to me that she is a normally functioning person, who presents no danger whatsoever to her child. In fact, I’ve actually felt that way about her since the beginning.”
“Thank you very much, Ms. Chambers.”
Moving right along, Jane Sanjay took the stand. She explained that she had been my health visitor—and had seen me several times after I had come out of hospital with Jack. And she reported that she had no doubts about my competence as a mother. Maeve asked, “However, this was before the full-scale effects of the postpartum depression had afflicted her, is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s true—but she was, at the time, obviously suffering from exhaustion, postoperative stress, not to mention ferocious worry about her son’s condition. The exhaustion was also exacerbated by sleep deprivation, and the fact that she had no help at home. So, under the circumstances, I thought she was coping brilliantly.”
“So, there was nothing in her behavior to indicate a woman who could not deal with the day-to-day business of child care?”
“None at all.”
“You know, of course, that she did accidentally breast-feed her son while taking a sedative. Is that, in your professional experience, a rare occurrence?”
“Hardly. We must have a dozen of those cases a year in Wandsworth. It’s a common mistake. The mother isn’t sleeping, so she’s on sleeping pills. She’s told, ‘Don’t breast-feed while taking the pills.’ The child wakes up in the middle of the night. The mother is befuddled. She breast-feeds the child. And though the child goes floppy for a bit, he or she simply sleeps it off. And in the case of Sally . . . sorry, Ms. Goodchild . . . the fact that this happened didn’t have any bearing whatsoever on my opinion that she was a thoroughly competent mother.”
“No further questions.”
Up came Lucinda Fforde.
“Now, Ms. Sanjay, didn’t the breast-feeding incident of which you speak happen after your dealings with Ms. Goodchild?”
“That’s right. She entered hospital for a time thereafter.”
“She entered a psychiatric unit thereafter . . . the breast-feeding incident being the event that brought her to hospital. So how can you say that you know that this incident was just a common mistake if you weren’t there?”
“Because I’ve dealt with these sorts of cases before.”
“But you didn’t specifically deal with this one . . .”
“I dealt with Ms. Goodchild . . .”
“But before the incident, is that not right?”
Pause. Jane was cornered, and she knew it.
“Yes, I suppose that’s right.”
“As for your claim that ‘though the child goes floppy for a bit, he or she just sleeps off the drugs,’ I have a clipping here from the Scotsman, dated 28 March of this year—a short news item, detailing a death of a two-week-old boy in a Glasgow hospital after his mother breast-fed him while taking a similar sedative. No more questions.”
“Reexamination, Ms. Doherty?”
“Yes, My Lord. Ms. Sanjay, have you ever dealt with a death like the one just described?”
“Never—but I am certain it could happen. But only if the mother had ingested far beyond the normal dose of sedatives. I’d be interested to know if that mother in Scotland had been a drug addict—because many addicts mainline high doses of the drug. And if you then breast-fed a baby after mainlining an overdose of sedatives, well . . . a tragedy like that can happen.”
The judge came in here.
“Just out of interest, was the Glaswegian mother a drug addict, Ms. Fforde?”
Ms. Fforde looked profoundly uncomfortable.
“She was, My Lord.”
After Jane was dismissed, the moment I was dreading had arrived. Maeve Doherty called my name. I walked down the aisle, entered the witness box, took the oath. I looked out at the courtroom and had that same sensation I had the one and only time I appeared onstage in a school play: the sheer terror of having all eyes upon you, even if the audience (in this case) was such a small one.
Maeve was brilliant. She stuck to the script. She didn’t ooze sympathy (“That won’t play with Traynor”), nor did she lead me by the nose. But, point by point, she got me to explain the whirlwind nature of my relationship with Tony, my feelings about being pregnant in my late thirties, my difficult pregnancy, the horror of discovering that Jack was in intensive care after his birth, and the fact that I began to feel myself mentally slipping into a black swamp.
“You know the expression ‘In a dark wood’?” I said.
“Dante,” Mr. Justice Traynor interjected.
“Yes, Dante. And an apt description of where I found myself.”
“And in those moments of lucidity when you reemerged from this ‘dark wood,’ ” Maeve asked, “how did you feel about shouting at doctors, or making those two unfortunate comments about your son, or accidentally breast-feeding him while on sleeping pills?”
“Horrible. Beyond horrible. And I still feel horrible about it. I know I was ill at the time, but that doesn’t lessen my guilt or my shame.”
“Do you feel anger toward your husband about how he has behaved?”
“Yes, I do. I also feel that what’s happened to me has been so desperately unfair, not to mention the most painful experience in my life . . . even more so than the deaths of my parents. Because Jack is my son. The center of my life. And because he’s been effectively taken away from me—and for reasons that haven’t just struck me as unjust, but also trumped up.”
I gripped the rail of the witness stand as tightly as I could during this final statement. Because I knew that if I let go, the entire court would see my hands shaking.
“No further questions, My Lord,” Maeve said.
Lucinda Fforde now looked at me and smiled. The smile of someone who wants to unnerve you, wants you to know they’ve got you in their sights and are about to pull the trigger.
“Ms. Goodchild, after being told of your son’s critical condition while at the Mattingly Hospital, did you say: ‘He is dying—and I don’t care. You get that? I don’t care’?”
I gripped the rail tighter.
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you, a few weeks later, call your husband’s secretary at work and say: ‘Tell him if he’s not home in the next sixty minutes, I’m going to kill our son’?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you breast-feed y
our son while taking sedatives after being specifically told not to do so by your GP?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did your son end up in hospital after this incident?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Were you hospitalized for nearly two months in a psychiatric unit after this incident?”
“Yes, I was.”
“In 1988, did your father attend your commencement party at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did you give him a glass of wine at that party?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did he tell you that he didn’t want that glass of wine?”
“Yes, he did.”
“But you made the comment, ‘How middle aged,’ and he downed the wine. Was that the correct sequence of events?”
“Yes.”
“Did he then drive off later that evening, killing himself, your mother, and two innocent passengers in another car?”
“Yes, he did.”
“I thank you, Ms. Goodchild, for confirming that all the major accusations against you are correct ones. No more questions, My Lord.”
“Reexamination, Ms. Doherty?”
“Yes, My Lord. But before I begin, I would like to take issue with the fact that counsel used the word ‘accusations’ in the context of my client. It should be noted that Ms. Goodchild is not on trial here.”
“Noted,” Traynor said, with a bored sigh.
“Ms. Goodchild, did you mean what you said when you said: ‘He is dying—and I don’t care. You get that? I don’t care’?”
“No, I didn’t mean it at all. I was suffering from postoperative shock.”
“Did you mean what you said when you threatened the life of your child?”
“No—I was suffering from clinical depression.”
“Did you ever commit any violent act against your child?”
“Never.”
“Did you ever breast-feed him again while taking sedatives?”
“Never.”
“Are you now over your postpartum depression?”
“I am.”
“Did you give a glass of wine to your father on the fateful June night in 1988?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Now even though you didn’t force it down his throat—and, in fact, made nothing more than a flippant comment—do you still feel guilty about giving him that glass of wine?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 107
