The Children Act Read Online Free PDF Page B

would like—”
    “Why are they refusing?”
    “Jehovah’s Witnesses, My Lady.”
    “Right.”
    “The hospital’s looking for an order that it will be lawful to proceed against their wishes.”
    She looked at her watch. Just past ten thirty.
    “How long have we got?”
    “After Wednesday it will be dangerous, they’re saying. Extremely dangerous.”
    She looked around her. Jack had already left the room. She said, “Then list it for hearing on short notice at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. And give notice to the respondents. Direct the hospital to inform the parents. They’ll have liberty to apply. Have a guardian appointed for the boy with legal representation. Direct the hospital to serve evidence by 4 p.m. tomorrow. The treating oncologist should serve a witness statement.”
    For a moment her mind blanked. She cleared her throat and continued. “I’ll want to know why blood products are necessary. And the parents should use their best endeavors to file their evidence by noon on Tuesday.”
    “I’ll do it straightaway.”
    She went to the window and stared across the square, where shapes of trees were turning solid black in the last of the slowJune dusk. As yet, the yellow streetlights illuminated no more than their circles of pavement. The Sunday-evening traffic was sparse now and barely a sound reached her from Gray’s Inn Road or High Holborn. Only the tap of thinned-out raindrops on leaves and a distant musical gurgling from a nearby drainpipe. She watched a neighbor’s cat down below pick a fastidious route around a puddle and dissolve into the darkness beneath a shrub. It didn’t trouble her, Jack’s withdrawal. Their exchange had been heading toward excruciating frankness. No denying the relief at being delivered onto the neutral ground, the treeless heath, of other people’s problems. Religion again. It had its consolations. Since the boy was almost eighteen, the legal age of autonomy, his wishes would be a central concern.
    Perhaps it was perverse to discover in this sudden interruption a promise of freedom. On the other side of the city a teenager confronted death for his own or his parents’ beliefs. It was not her business or mission to save him, but to decide what was reasonable and lawful. She would have liked to see this boy for herself, remove herself from a domestic morass, as well as from the courtroom, for an hour or two, take a journey, immerse herself in the intricacies, fashion a judgment formed by her own observations. The parents’ beliefs might be an affirmation of their son’s, or a death sentence he dared not challenge. These days, finding out for yourself was highly unconventional. Back in the 1980s a judge could still have made the teenager a ward of court and seen him in chambers or hospital or at home. Backthen, a noble ideal had somehow survived into the modern era, dented and rusty like a suit of armor. Judges had stood in for the monarch and had been for centuries the guardians of the nation’s children. Nowadays, social workers from Cafcass did the job and reported back. The old system, slow and inefficient, preserved the human touch. Now, fewer delays, more boxes to tick, more to be taken on trust. The lives of children were held in computer memory, accurately, but rather less kindly.
    Visiting the hospital was a sentimental whim. She dismissed the idea as she turned from the window to go back to her couch. She sat down with an impatient sigh and took up her judgment in the matter of the Jewish girls from Stamford Hill and their contested well-being. Her last pages, her conclusion, were again in her hands. But for the moment she couldn’t bring herself to look at her own prose. This was not the first time that the absurdity and pointlessness of her involvement in a case had temporarily disabled her. Parents choosing a school for their children—an innocent, important, humdrum, private affair which a lethal blend of bitter division and too much money had transmuted into a