Hello, Finch, and goodbye. Finch’s biographer has to begin here, in this pale place, where Finch’s life, her independent existence, seemed to finish. A low-security children’s-care facility called Farrington, in Southampton, on the coast. She spent ten years there. Because her photograph had been widely published, and the story a sensation, Finch was treated brutally by people who made it their sport to try to destroy her. She was raped by a junior care worker and said nothing about it, her right arm was broken twice in six years—in short, everything unfolded in the institutional style of the time, including the therapy. Finch was made to enlarge and solidify that day in Padstow until it was a monumental disk that blacked out the sun. She developed a stutter that left her mouth open so long that sometimes people thought she was choking. Hello, poor Finch, and goodbye.

Finch did her best to complete her education in piecemeal fashion. She discovered the nimble shape of her maths brain. She read the way people read who have no liberty—without humor or delicacy—and tolerated nothing but novels. She marked little crosses in the margins of her books at what seemed, to the therapists, random points. In fact, each cross marked a step on the path to the resolution (although these steps were very particular to Finch’s view of the world: in a simple action like closing a door, she saw ethical change—condemning Gregor Samsa for making his mother spill the coffee, dismissing Jane Eyre for cowering in a nook behind a curtain). And as her adolescence finished its work her body met her mind; she grew ever more heavyset and charmless, arms spattered with orange moles, an unfinished face, boneless and round, dominated by hulking spectacles. She was waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. There was never any trial for Finch, and no prison, and the curiosity of her case, from the therapeutic point of view, was how much her late teens came to be filled with a longing for a jury and for punishment. She fell in love with the idea of a judge the way other girls envision their princes. Finch wanted to feel the law. So when her own resolution came she rejected it. Finch turned twenty-one and was free to go. The popular dream of a new name and life was put at her disposal in the tidy form of paperwork. Instead, she voluntarily readmitted herself into an adult-care facility, Hollingsworth, in Holloway, North London. She didn’t want it to end unless it ended properly. Finch still wanted to feel the law come over her, like a storm.

Hollingsworth looked like an old-fashioned train station. The gardens were formal and small and made Finch very miserable. The trimmed hedges and coy circles of flowers. She spent time in the gardens only on the exceptional occasions that her mother visited, the two of them walking a constrictive figure eight while Finch’s mother worried a set of rosary beads, discreetly weeping, and Finch marvelled at her mother’s two curious pairs of eyebrows as they got going, the real pair crumpling beneath the fake, which sat a whole inch higher, drawn in pencil. For her part, Finch’s mother believed the correct ending was Catholicism. Her daughter need only return to the Church and prostrate herself before the Lord. But Finch disliked the little she understood of Christ on his mount, in your soul, with his body, and his blood, in your body. She didn’t want anybody in there.

In her third year in Hollingsworth, the man who had raped Finch was prosecuted for the rape of someone else. Finch followed the trial in the paper and wept at his dissonant grin, a family photograph on page 3. But she was glad at the lengthy sentence, felt again the mightiness of the law. Soon after, she finished a B.A. degree in pure and applied maths. This period also heralded the great Golden Age of Finch’s weight gain, when every day her fellow-residents could see significant development, like commuters passing a building site. Finch stopped being able to look people in their eyes. She became increasingly stationary, and spent an Easter in a lazy chair, reading “Clarissa.” It took almost two weeks to read its 1,892 pages, and when she was finished Finch stared at the last page several minutes, flicked it back, flicked it forward, and wondered what account she could possibly give of herself to her social worker that afternoon.

She lived on in this stasis, twenty years of it. No longer Rosalind Gordon, not yet Finch, nothing, really, except an ongoing therapeutic project for those so inclined, an anecdotal footnote in a young man’s Ph.D. Then, when she was forty-three, the facility in Holloway was told it had to close. There were no funds to fix the crumbling red brickwork, the damp. Finch was brought into the director’s office, and her options were outlined as she gazed over his shoulder to the gardens, where a man was forcing a cage over a hedge so that it might be trimmed into the shape of a sheep. Not caring to go to Wales or Devon to institutions that were unsuitable—high-security mental-health facilities, both of them—Finch decided to leave.

Finch’s mother was sufficiently well off and there was a mazy family flat going begging in Kew. Wary of the family name on the lease, Finch’s mother sold this and bought for Finch the small place in Hampstead, so close to the Heath itself that the trees practically stretched their branches through the living room. Ruth Finch moved in. Tried to get used to bedrooms without emergency cords and kitchen drawers with knives in them. Wore red a lot (she thought it made people happy). Bought a complete set of Proust. Met Claire and Karen and Jemima. Certainly they wondered how Finch had got to be the way she was, but there was something about Finch that precluded the usual questions of country and blood. And all three women quickly learned not to try to talk to Finch about the personal. Finch might know the height and weight of your husband, his favorite wines, but she shrank back from any truly personal discussion, sexual or otherwise. Finch had no emotional vocabulary. “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters for their thoughts,” John Locke had said, and Finch kept this and a rattlebag of other personally chosen daily motivational quotes pinned up around the house, as her therapists had recommended. She believed in the sovereignty of other people! She didn’t want to be cut open and examined. She didn’t want to do it to anybody else, either.

Every two years or so, Finch silently endured the circling English tabloids, which, when they grew bored in the late summer, wondered where she was. In what people were now calling the “public imagination,” Finch was one of a very exclusive and notorious band of Englishwomen whose curling passport photos inspired extraordinary repulsion, vengeance. People wanted her to burn in Hell. People thought hanging was too good for her. Fortunately for Finch, she exited the world as a child and subsequently left no traces. No credit cards, no numbers, no addresses. Orange hair was the only continuity between tiny, thin-eyed Rosalind with her crooked nose, and bifocalled enormous Finch with her improbable, bashful grin. To terrorize herself, she sometimes gave over a moment to considering how fast the story might travel if it were released, so fast!

SOMEBODY ELSE’S BAD DAY

Clearly, it was an administrative oversight, but Finch took it as fate. She was a juror. With all that this entailed: a blue suit, a notebook, a cheese-and-onion sandwich. Finch was here, as a representative of her society, to sit in judgment upon the aberration of one of its members, a young woman from the Balkans called Danitsa. Danitsa had had a bad day. Danitsa stabbed Paul in the stomach with a four-inch kitchen blade! Twice! Although he looked fine now, which was confusing for Finch. The salient points were these: Danitsa had very tightly curled hair that shimmered with deliberate grease; she wore her blusher in the Eastern European style, a slice of pink along the cheekbone. She had tried to kill this man Paul, who looked like a bloodhound on its hind legs. Danitsa claimed not to be a prostitute, but everybody else said she was. Either way, this did not concern Finch. Danitsa said she was a waitress with a heroin problem who feared for her life when Paul broke down her door looking for his money. Finch couldn’t understand the relevance of this. Nobody denied that Danitsa had taken a knife to Paul’s hairy dog-belly, not even Danitsa. But there was contention about other things: how thoroughly she had been beaten that day, how often raped in the past, how thoroughly brought to the brink, how rightful in her final, stabbing motion. Not guilty, self-defense. The argument was offered and countered over a period of five days. Very little of it interested Finch. She concentrated on the initial, stark description of the stabbing. The depth, the damage, the missed organ, the intention. Once she’d heard all of that in the first hours of the first day, she was satisfied. Finch rested back in her second-row chair and unobtrusively began to read “Jude the Obscure,” holding the book with the roll of her belly and laying a coat over her lap. She studied the jurors. The black lady in the pleated skirt, the elderly white lady who wore glasses only to read, the young man with no hair at all, the man with one slug eyebrow inching across his forehead, the pretty young lady whose head was completely shaved and shone, the fellow whose teeth—