Ian McEwan - The Children Act

Regarding the all-important matter of intent, the purpose of the surgery was not to kill Matthew but to save Mark. Matthew, in all his helplessness, was killing Mark and the doctors must be allowed to come to Mark’s defense to remove a threat of fatal harm. Matthew would perish after the separation not because he was purposefully murdered, but because on his own he was incapable of flourishing.

The Court of Appeal agreed, the parents’ appeal was dismissed and two days later, at seven in the morning, the twins entered the operating theater.

The colleagues Fiona valued most sought her out to shake her hand, or wrote the kind of letters worth saving in a special folder. Her judgment was elegant and correct, was the insiders’ view. Reconstructive surgery on Mark was successful; public interest faded and moved on. But she was unhappy, couldn’t leave the case alone, was awake at nights for long hours, turning over the details, rephrasing certain passages of her judgment, taking another tack. Or she lingered over familiar themes, including her own childlessness. At the same time, there began to arrive in small pastel-colored envelopes the venomous thoughts of the devout. They were of the view that both children should have been left to die and were not pleased by her decision. Some deployed abusive language, some said they longed to do her physical harm. A few of those claimed to know where she lived.

Those intense weeks left their mark on her, and it had only just faded. What exactly had troubled her? Her husband’s question was her own, and he was waiting for an answer now. Before the hearing she had received a submission from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster. In her judgment she noted in a respectful paragraph that the archbishop preferred Mark to die along with Matthew in order not to interfere with God’s purpose. That churchmen should want to obliterate the potential of a meaningful life in order to hold a theological line did not surprise or concern her. The law itself had similar problems when it allowed doctors to suffocate, dehydrate or starve certain hopeless patients to death, but would not permit the instant relief of a fatal injection.

At nights her thoughts returned to that photograph of the twins and the dozen others she had studied, and to the detailed technical information she had heard from medical specialists on all that was wrong with the babies, on the cutting and breaking, splicing and folding of infant flesh they must perform to give Mark a normal life, reconstructing internal organs, rotating his legs, his genitals and bowels through ninety degrees. In the bedroom darkness, while Jack at her side quietly snored, she seemed to peer over a cliff edge. She saw in the remembered pictures of Matthew and Mark a blind and purposeless nullity. A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.

For a while, the case had left her numb, caring less, feeling less, going about her business, telling no one. But she became squeamish about bodies, barely able to look at her own or Jack’s without feeling repelled. How was she to talk about this? Hardly plausible, to have told him that at this stage of a legal career, this one case among so many others, its sadness, its visceral details and loud public interest, could affect her so intimately. For a while, some part of her had gone cold, along with poor Matthew. She was the one who had dispatched a child from the world, argued him out of existence in thirty-four elegant pages. Never mind that with his bloated head and unsqueezing heart he was doomed to die. She was no less irrational than the archbishop, and had come to regard the shrinking within herself as her due. The feeling had passed, but it left scar tissue in the memory, even after seven weeks and a day.

Not having a body, floating free of physical constraint, would have suited her best.

THE CLICK OF Jack’s tumbler against a glass table returned her to the room and his question. He was looking at her steadily. Even if she’d known how to frame a confession, she was in no mood for one. Or any display of weakness. She had work to do, the conclusion to her judgment to proofread, with the angels waiting. Her state of mind was not the issue. The problem was the choice her husband was making, the pressure he was now applying. She was suddenly angry again.

“For the last time, Jack. Are you seeing her? I’ll take your silence as a yes.”

But he too was roused, out of his chair, walking away from her to the piano, where he paused, one hand resting on the raised lid, gathering his patience before he turned. In that moment the silence between them expanded. The rain had ceased, the oak trees in the Walks were stilled.

“I thought I’d made myself clear. I’m trying to be open with you. I saw her for lunch. Nothing’s happened. I wanted to talk to you first, I wanted—”

“Well, you have, and you’ve had your answer. So what now?”

“Now you tell me what’s happened to you.”

“When was this lunch? Where?”

“Last week, at work. It was nothing.”

“The sort of nothing that leads to an affair.”

He remained at the far end of the room. “There it is,” he said. His tone was flat. A reasonable man tested to exhaustion. Amazing, the theatrics he thought he could get away with. In her time on circuit, aging and illiterate recidivists, some with very few teeth, had come before her and performed better, thinking aloud from the dock.

“There it is,” he repeated. “And I’m sorry.”

“Do you realize what you’re about to destroy?”

“I could say the same. Something’s going on and you won’t talk to me.”

Let him go, a voice, her own voice, said in her thoughts. And immediately, the same old fear gripped her. She couldn’t, she did not intend to, manage the rest of her life alone. Two close friends her age, long deprived by divorce of their husbands, still hated to enter a crowded room unaccompanied. And beyond mere social gloss was the love she knew she felt for him. She didn’t feel it now.

“Your problem,” he said from the far end of the room, “is that you never think you have to explain yourself. You’ve gone from me. It must have occurred to you that I’ve noticed and that I mind. Just about bearable, I suppose, if I thought it wasn’t going to last, or I knew the reason why. So…”

He was starting to come toward her at this point, but she never learned his conclusion, or let her rising irritation form a response, for at that moment the phone rang. Automatically, she picked up the receiver. She was on duty, and sure enough, it was her clerk, Nigel Pauling. As ever, the voice was hesitant, on the edge of a stutter. But he was always efficient, pleasingly distant.

“I’m sorry to disturb you this late, My Lady.”

“It’s all right. Go ahead.”

“We’ve had a call from counsel representing the Edith Cavell hospital, Wandsworth. They urgently need to transfuse a cancer patient, a boy of seventeen years. He and his parents are refusing consent. The hospital would like—”