He settled back into his armchair, realising that although he had needed to get up to make a cup of coffee, he didn’t especially need to drink it. He had caught himself being a little buffeted by these unexpected developments, but now he was returning to his professional centre of gravity: his basic conviction that it didn’t matter what conundrums arose in an analysis, as long as the practitioner was stable and had internalised his own analysis enough to continue reflecting and not to act out under pressure – at least, not more than he had just done by making an unnecessary cup of coffee, moving between the professional armchair in which he saw all his patients and the private cupboard that he never opened when his patients were present. This tiny enactment of his dilemma was forgivable. What would not be forgivable would be to betray either his family or his patient, but both those outcomes could be avoided. Sebastian was only in the house for a hundred and fifty minutes a week, his analysis was progressing well, and Martin only had to tell Lizzie and Olivia the times of his sessions, explaining that he had an especially vulnerable patient who might be confused or perturbed if he saw or heard the baby. The truth was that in practical terms, it was quite manageable; the intensity of his initial response had come from imagining the potential impact of a collision between Sebastian and Olivia. The birth of her child was bound to resurrect Olivia’s deepest feelings about her own rejection at birth, but if she met her psychotic twin at the moment that she was standing squarely against the contagion of trauma, then any sense she might have that she could not prevent the shadow of her history from falling on another innocent generation would become that much more daunting.

There was also the fact that, while Martin was not analysing his own daughter, like the founding father of his profession, he was writing a paper with her about different approaches to schizophrenia. It was a subject on which both their professional interests converged, so why shouldn’t they collaborate in writing about their findings? This particular entanglement of family and therapy seemed to be taking place at an impeccably academic level of discussion, but the fact that Sebastian was suffering from the complex disease he had urged her to focus on created a secret familial overload that only Martin was aware of. From a certain point of view, it might look as if an adopting father and an adopted daughter were repressing the genetic Caliban of a mad twin for their own convenience and peace of mind. This would of course have been an illusion. They were both aware of the weakness of the evidence for a genetic basis to schizophrenia and the startling contrast between Olivia’s mental health and Sebastian’s reinforced that view. Still, in the underwater world he had spent the last half-hour exploring, the world of incongruous encounters and potential unravelling, the subject matter of their paper seemed to be wrapping its tentacles around the authors and dragging them into murky depths. It was worth acknowledging these dimensions in order to discount them with more clarity.