Tony had always conceived of the role of supervisor as analogous to that of the priest in confessional. As he understood it, the theory of Catholic confession was that you went when you had sins to confess; that the priest helped you to see the error of your ways; that you underwent a penance to remind you of the way, the truth and the light; that you departed, ostensibly to sin no more; and that whatever you brought into the box stayed between you and the priest. And presumably, God. Though He never seemed to intrude much on the practical proceedings of the Church.

Tony made an appointment with Dr Gold once or twice a year, when some aspect of his clinical practice was troubling him, when he felt he wasn’t dealing well with some element of his professional life, or, more rarely, when his personal life was throwing him conundrums he couldn’t readily solve. A fifty-minute hour under Jacob’s gentle probing usually suggested a solution to whatever he’d brought to the session. At the very least, it brought Tony a degree of clarity. The equivalent of Catholic penance was the process of digging away at the roots of the issue during their session. And of course, he would leave with the firm intention of making the changes that would resolve his difficulty.

And often he would fail.

But that was part of the process too.

Tony knew he should have talked sooner to Jacob after the debacle with Jacko Vance. He was conscious that he’d been avoiding it. Jacob, who wore his supervision lightly, had clearly been well aware of the media coverage and had left a message of support. Which, in the terms of their relationship, had been the equivalent of shouting, ‘Oi, get your arse down here, pronto.’

But he was here now, and that was what mattered. Today, he’d chosen the armchair rather than the chaise longue. Jacob sat across from him, long legs crossed, an elegant notebook open on his lap, Mont Blanc pen lying in the crack between the thick cream pages. ‘How are you?’ It was the question that always began their sessions. Unless Jacob had been living on a desert island with no access to the electronic media, he had to have a pretty good idea, given the coverage of the recent events in his life.