Ian McEwan - The Children Act

The rumble of Jack towing his suitcase further along the hall and into their bedroom seemed to her like an opening move. And an insult. By force of habit, she pulled off her shoes, then took up a document at random. The guitarist had a pleasantly appointed villa in Marbella. The torch singer rather fancied it for herself. But he had acquired it before the marriage, from his previous wife, in return for vacating the family home in central London. And that previous wife had come by it in a divorce settlement with her first husband. Irrelevant, Fiona couldn’t help herself ruling.

At a creak of a floorboard she glanced up. Jack paused in the doorway before heading for the drinks. He wore jeans and a white shirt unbuttoned to his chest. Did he imagine he was desirable? She noticed he hadn’t shaved. Even from across the room, his bristles showed white and gray. Pathetic, they were both pathetic. He poured himself a Scotch and raised the bottle in her direction. She shook her head. He shrugged and crossed the room to his chair. She was a spoilsport, no sense of occasion. He sat down with a homely sigh. His chair, her chair, married life again. She looked at the paper in her hand, the wife’s narrative of the guitarist’s desirable world, impossible to take in. There was silence while he drank and she stared across the room at nothing in particular.

Then he said, “Look, Fiona, I love you.”

After several seconds she said, “I’d rather you slept in the spare room.”

He lowered his head in assent. “I’ll move my case.”

He did not get up. They both knew the vitality of the unsaid, whose invisible spirits danced around them now. She had not told him to keep out of the flat, she had tacitly agreed he could sleep there. He had not told her yet whether his statistician had thrown him out or he had changed his mind or indulged sufficient ecstatic experience to see him to his grave. The change of locks had not been touched on. He was probably suspicious of her being out so late. She could barely stand the sight of him. What was required now was a row, one with several chapters stretching over time. There might be some rancorous digressions, his contrition might come wrapped in complaints, it might be months before she would allow him in her bed, the ghost of the other woman might linger between them forever. But they would likely find a way of being back, more or less, with what they once had.

Contemplating the mighty effort involved, the predictability of the process, wearied her further. And yet she was bound to it. As to a contract she must fulfill to write a boring, necessary legal manual. She thought she would like a drink after all, but that might have looked too much like a celebration. She was a long way from being reconciled. Above all, she could not bear to hear again that he loved her. She wanted to be in bed alone, on her back in the dark, biting into some fruit, letting the remains drop to the floor, then passing out. What was to stop her? She stood and began to gather up her papers, and it was then that he began to speak.

It was a torrent, part apology, part self-justification, some of which she had heard before. His mortality, his years of complete fidelity, his overwhelming curiosity about how it would be, and almost as soon as he left that night, as soon as he arrived at Melanie’s place, he realized his mistake. She was a stranger, he didn’t understand her. And when they went into her bedroom…

Fiona raised a warning hand. She didn’t want to hear about the bedroom. He paused, considered, and continued. He was a fool, he realized, to be driven by sexual need and he should have turned on his heel that night, when she opened her door to him, but he was embarrassed and felt bound to continue.

Clutching her briefcase against her stomach, Fiona stood in the center of the room, watching him, wondering how to stop him. It amazed her that even now, with the high marital drama in its opening scene, the Irish song continued to turn in her mind, quickening to the rhythm of Jack’s speech, and sounding both mechanical and festive, as though cranked out by a street organ grinder. Her feelings were in confusion, blurred by fatigue and hard to define as long as her husband’s plaintive words swept over her. She felt something less than fury or bitter resentment, and yet it was more than mere resignation.

Yes, Jack said, once he arrived at Melanie’s flat he felt stupidly obliged to go on with what he had started. “And the more trapped I felt, the more I realized what an idiot I was to risk everything we have, everything we’ve made together, this love that—”

“I’ve had a long day,” she said as she crossed the room. “I’ll put your suitcase in the hall.”

She stopped by the kitchen to take an apple and a banana from her shopping on the table. Having them in her hand as she went toward the bedroom brought back her relatively happy walk home from work. She had felt the beginnings of some ease. Hard to recapture now. She pushed open the door and saw his suitcase standing upright and prim on its wheels by the bed. Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack’s return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.

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

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