The Children Act Read Online Free Page A

she suspected the affair had already begun. He had not troubled himself to deny it, and she was not going to ask again. It was not only pride. She still dreaded his reply.
    “Well,” he said after their long pause. “Wouldn’t you?”
    “Not with this gun to my head.”
    “Meaning?”
    “I shape up or you go to Melanie.”
    She assumed he had understood her meaning well enough but had wanted to hear her say the woman’s name, which she had never spoken out loud before. It evinced a tremor or a tightening in his face, a helpless little tic of arousal. Or it was the naked phrasing, the “go to.” Had she lost him already? She felt suddenly dizzy, as though her blood pressure had dipped, then soared. She pushed herself upright on the chaise longue, and set down on the carpet the page of the judgment still in her hand.
    “That’s not how it is,” he was saying. “Look, turn this around. Suppose you were in my place and I was in yours. What would you do?”
    “I wouldn’t go and find myself a man and then open negotiations with you.”
    “What, then?”
    “I’d find out what was troubling you.” Her voice sounded prim in her ears.
    He gestured toward her grandly with both hands. “Fine!” The Socratic method, as used, no doubt, on his students. “So what is troubling you?”
    For all the stupidity and dishonesty of the exchange, it was the only question and she’d invited it, but she felt irritated by him, condescended to, and for the moment she didn’t reply and instead looked past him down the room to the piano, barely played in two weeks, and the silver-framed photos it supported in country-house style. Both sets of parents from wedding day to dotage, his three sisters, her two brothers, their wives and husbands present and past (disloyally, they struck no one off), eleven nephews and nieces, then the thirteen children they in turn had made. Life accelerating to people a small village clustered on a baby grand. She and Jack had contributed nothing, no one, beyond family reunions, near-weekly birthday presents, multigenerational holidays in the cheaper sort of castle. In their apartment, they hosted much family. At the end of the hallway was a walk-in cupboard filled with folded-up cot, highchair and playpen, and three wicker baskets of chewed and fading toys in readiness for the next addition. And this summer’s castle, ten miles north of Ullapool, awaited their decision. According to the ill-printed brochure, a moat, a working drawbridge and a dungeon with hooks and iron rings in the wall. Yesterday’s torture was now a thrill for the under-twelves. She thought again of the medieval sentence, seven weeks and a day, a period that began with the final stages of the Siamese twins case.
    All the horror and pity, and the dilemma itself, were in the photograph, shown to the judge and no one else. Infant sons of Jamaican and Scottish parents lay top-and-tailed amid a tangle of life-support systems on a pediatric intensive-care bed, joined at the pelvis and sharing a single torso, their splayed legs at right angles to their spines, in resemblance of a many-pointed starfish. A measure fixed along the side of the incubator showed this helpless, all-too-human ensemble to be sixty centimeters in length. Their spinal cords and the base of their spines were fused, their eyes closed, four arms raised in surrender to the court’s decision. Their apostolic names, Matthew and Mark, had not encouraged clear thinking in some quarters. Matthew’s head was swollen, his ears mere indentations in roseate skin. Mark’s head, beneath the neonatal woolen cap, was normal. They shared only one organ, their bladder, which was mostly in Mark’s abdomen and which, a consultant noted, “emptied spontaneously and freely through two separate urethras.” Matthew’s heart was large but “it barely squeezed.”Mark’s aorta fed into Matthew’s and it was Mark’s heart that sustained them both. Matthew’s brain was severely