The Children Act

by Ian Mcewan

  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.

  Quand viendra la saison nouvelle,

  Quand auront disparu les froids …

  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 pi
ece. 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.