The Children Act Read Online Free PDF

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 nomood 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 EdithCavell hospital, Wandsworth. They urgently need to transfuse a cancer patient, a boy of seventeen years. He and his parents are refusing consent. The hospital