The Children Act by Ian McEwan

court rose to her on the stroke of ten. She listened tocounsel for the distressed mother, applying to retrieve her child through the Hague Convention. When the Moroccan husband’s counsel got to his feet to persuade Fiona of some ambiguity in his client’s assurance, she cut him off.
    “I was expecting to find you blushing on behalf of your client, Mr. Soames.”
    The matter was technical, absorbing. The thin frame of the mother remained partly hidden behind counsel, and seemed to shrink further as the arguments became more abstract. It was likely that when the court rose, Fiona would never see her again. The sad affair would come before a Moroccan judge.
    Next, she heard an urgent application on behalf of a wife seeking maintenance pending suit. The judge listened, she asked questions, she granted the application. At lunchtime she wanted to be alone. Pauling brought her sandwiches and a bar of chocolate to eat at her desk. Her phone lay under some papers, and at last she gave in, scanned the screen for texts or missed calls. Nothing. She told herself she felt neither disappointment nor relief. She drank tea and allowed herself ten minutes to read the newspapers. Mostly Syria, reports and lurid photographs: the government shelling civilians, refugees on the road, impotent condemnations from foreign ministries around the world, an eight-year-old boy on a bed, left foot amputated, weak-chinned etiolated Assad shaking hands with a Russian official, rumors of nerve gas.
    There was far greater misery elsewhere, but after lunch sheconfronted more of the local kind. She was dismissive of an
ex parte
application for an order excluding a husband from the matrimonial home. The presentation was protracted; the owlish counsel’s nervous blink irritated her further.
    “Why are you doing this without notice? I see nothing in the papers that would make that necessary. What communication have you tried to have with the other side? None, as far as I can see. If the husband’s happy to give an assurance to your client, you really shouldn’t be bothering me with this. If he isn’t, then serve notice and I’ll hear both sides.”
    The court rose, she stalked out. Then back to hear argument for and against a prohibitive-steps order on behalf of a man who said he feared violence from his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Much legal argument about the boyfriend’s prison record, but it concerned fraud, not assault, and finally she refused the application. An assurance would have to do. A cup of tea in her room, then back again to hear a divorcing mother’s emergency application for her three children to have their passports lodged with the court. Fiona was minded to grant it, but after she heard argument about the aggravating complication that would follow, she refused.
    Back in her room at five forty-five. She sat at her desk, staring blankly at her bookshelves. When Pauling came in, she started, and thought she may have been asleep. He let her know that press interest in the Jehovah’s Witness case was now strong. Most of tomorrow morning’s papers would carry thestory. On the press websites there were pictures of the boy with his family. The parents themselves may have been the source, or a relative grateful for some quick cash. The clerk put in Fiona’s hands the papers for the case and a brown envelope which clinked mysteriously as she unsealed it. A letter bomb from a disappointed plaintiff? It had happened before, when a device, clumsily assembled by an enraged husband, failed to explode in the face of her then clerk. But yes, her new keys, opening the way to her other life, her transformed existence.
    And so, half an hour later, she set off toward it, but by a circuitous route, for she was reluctant to enter the empty apartment. She left by the main entrance and walked west on the Strand to the Aldwych, then went north along Kingsway. The sky was battleship gray, the rain barely noticeable, the Monday rush-hour crowds lighter than usual.