The Children Act Read Online Free

abyss.
    He was settling into his chair, a studded, wood and leather piece with a look of medieval torture about it. She had never liked Victorian Gothic, and never less than now. He crossed his ankle over his knee, his head was cocked as he looked at her in tolerance or pity, and she looked away. Seven weeks and a day also had a medieval ring, like a sentence handed down from an old Court of Assize. It troubled her to think that she might have a case to answer. They’d had a decent sex life for manyyears, regular and lustily uncomplicated, on weekdays in the early morning just as they woke, before the dazzling concerns of the working day penetrated the heavy bedroom curtains. At weekends in the afternoons, sometimes after tennis, social doubles in Mecklenburgh Square. Obliterating all blame for one’s partner’s fluffed shots. In fact, a deeply pleasurable love life, and functional, in that it delivered them smoothly into the rest of their existence, and beyond discussion, which was one of its joys. Not even a vocabulary for it—one reason why it pained her to hear him mention it now and why she barely noted the slow decline of ardor and frequency.
    But she had always loved him, was always affectionate, loyal, attentive, only last year had nursed him tenderly when he broke his leg and wrist in Méribel during a ridiculous downhill ski race against old school friends. She pleasured him, sat astride him, now she remembered, while he lay grinning amid the chalky splendor of his plaster of Paris. She did not know how to refer to such things in her own defense, and besides, these were not the grounds on which she was being attacked. It was not devotion she lacked but passion.
    Then there was age. Not the full withering, not just yet, but its early promise was shining through, just as one might catch in a certain light a glimpse of the adult in a ten-year-old’s face. If Jack, sprawled across from her, seemed absurd in this conversation, then how much more so must she appear to him. His white chest hair, of which he remained proud, curled outover his shirt’s top button only to declare that it was no longer black; the head hair, thinning monkishly in the familiar pattern, he had grown long in unconvincing compensation; shanks less muscular, not quite filling out his jeans, the eyes holding a gentle hint of future vacancy, with a matching hollowness about the cheeks. So what then of her ankles thickening in coquettish reply, her backside swelling like summer cumulus, her waist waxing stout as her gums receded? All this still in paranoid millimeters. Far worse, the special insult the years reserved for certain women, as the corners of her mouth began their downward turn in pursuit of a look of constant reproach. Fair enough in a bewigged judge frowning at counsel from her throne. But in a lover?
    And here they were, like teenagers, shaping up to discuss themselves in the cause of Eros.
    Tactically astute, he ignored her ultimatum. Instead he said, “I don’t think we should give up, do you?”
    “You’re the one who’s walking away.”
    “I think you have a part in this too.”
    “I’m not the one about to wreck our marriage.”
    “So you say.”
    He said it reasonably, projecting the three words deep into the cave of her self-doubt, shaping them to her inclination to believe that in any conflict as embarrassing as this, she was likely to be wrong.
    He took a careful sip of his drink. He was not going to getdrunk in order to assert his needs. He would be grave and rational when she would have preferred him loudly in the wrong.
    Holding her gaze he said, “You know I love you.”
    “But you’d like someone younger.”
    “I’d like a sex life.”
    Her cue to make warm promises, draw him back to her, apologize for being busy or tired or unavailable. But she looked away and said nothing. She was not going to dedicate herself under pressure to revive a sensual life she had at that moment no taste for. Especially when