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god, an angel with the glad tidings – life, not death. Rosalind’s best moments are outside court, when a powerful litigant backs down in the face of superior argument; or, rarer, when a judgment goes her way and establishes a point of principle in law. Once a week, usually on a Sunday evening, they line up their personal organisers side by side, like little mating creatures, so that their appointments can be transferred into each other’s diary along an infrared beam. When they steal time for love they always leave the phone connected. By some perverse synchronism, it often rings just as they’re getting started. It’ll be for Rosalind as often as for him. If he’s the one who is obliged to getdressed and hurry from the room – perhaps returning with a curse for keys or loose change – he does so with a longing backward glance, and sets off from his house to the hospital – ten minutes at a brisk pace – with his burden, his fading thoughts of love. But once he’s through the double swing doors, and crossing the worn chessboard linoleum tiles by Accident and Emergency, once he’s ridden the lift to the third-floor operating suite and is in the scrub room, soap in hand, listening to his registrar’s difficulties, the last touches of desire leave him and he doesn’t even notice them go. No regrets. He’s renowned for his speed, his success rate and his list – he takes over three hundred cases a year. Some fail, a handful endure with their lights a little fogged, but most thrive, and many return to work in some form; work – the ultimate badge of health.
    And work is why he cannot wake her. She’s due in the High Court at ten for an emergency hearing. Her paper has been prevented from reporting the details of a gagging order on another newspaper. The powerful party who obtained the original order successfully argued before a duty judge that even the fact of the gagging cannot be divulged. A point of press freedom is at issue, and it’s Rosalind’s quest to have the second order overturned by the end of the day. Before the hearing, briefings in chambers, then – so she hopes – an exploratory chat in the corridors with the other side. Later she’ll lay out the options to the editor and management. She’d have come in late last night from meetings, long after Henry dozed off without his supper. Probably she drank tea at the kitchen table and read through her papers. She may have had difficulty falling asleep.
    Feeling unhinged and unreasonable and still in need of talking to her, he remains at the foot of the bed, staring towards her shape under the duvet. She sleeps like a child, with her knees drawn up. In the near-total darkness, how small she seems in the hugeness of the bed. He listens to her breathing, which is almost inaudible on the intake, quietlyemphatic on the exhalation. She makes a sound with her tongue, a wet click against the roof of her mouth. Many years ago he fell in love with her in a hospital ward, at a time of terror. She was barely aware of him. A white coat coming to her bedside to remove the stitches from the inside of her upper lip. Then it was another three months before he kissed those lips. But he knew more of her, or at least had seen more of her, than any prospective lover could expect.
    He approaches now and leans over her and kisses the warm back of her head. Then he comes away, closing the bedroom door quietly, and goes down to the kitchen to turn on the radio.
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    It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners – these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two packs are chosen, then