For Lizzie, it was a cause for unalloyed celebration when Olivia told them that she and Francis were going to have a baby. She loved Francis, looked forward to having a grandchild, and felt that Olivia’s desire to bring a child into the world, despite knowing that she had been an unwanted child at birth, was a deep reparation of her troubled history. For Martin, who had seen Sebastian earlier that day, there were dimensions to the situation, beyond his genuine delight, that he couldn’t discuss with anyone around the table, or even fully appreciate himself, in the atmosphere of jubilation that followed Olivia’s announcement. She had chosen to have the baby at the Royal Free, just up the road from her parents’ house, and had gone on to ask if she and Francis could stay for a while at Belsize Park during the first days of its life. Martin’s need to disguise the disorienting suspicion that his most disturbed patient, who came to the house three times a week, might well be his grandchild’s uncle had prevented him from thinking clearly about the implications at the time.
Olivia had now set off to Howorth and Martin was able to retreat to the sanctuary of his consulting room fifty minutes before his first patient arrived. Sitting in his worn armchair, staring at the mid-summer garden, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sebastian’s tendency to burst outside in moments of high tension, nor could he shake off the memory of Charlie and Olivia tottering around that same garden as small children or resting there, after being wheeled back and forth across the lawn until they fell asleep in their big old pram – which Lizzie was proud not to have thrown away, all those years ago, despite the children’s slightly anxious mockery of her sentimentality (who was she keeping it for?) and the memorable struggle of hoisting it sideways into the loft. The collision of these two images recurred several times while Martin got up to make a cup of coffee, standing at the back of the room by the cupboard where he kept a small fridge, a kettle and some biscuits, hidden from his hungry patients.
At least in January he could keep the garden door locked and, in any case, Olivia’s newborn baby was unlikely to go out there during those cold, dark days. Nevertheless, Olivia might naturally wander out on a sunny morning to get some fresh air in that fashionable and elusive enclosure, ‘a safe space’, only to find that her unknown twin was bellowing psychotically in the basement or crouched behind the curtains in a knot of primal fear. Martin’s other patients would lie down, free associating while they gazed at the ceiling, or perhaps closed their eyes, indifferent to the muffled sounds of domesticity that reached his consulting room: the rare, faint ring of the landline or the distant thud of the front door closing, only just audible in a pause. They would probably not notice anyone in the garden, or remark on it if they did, but for Sebastian, who often got up from his chair, or checked over his shoulder, nothing could be more provocative than an infant in its mother’s loving arms. At this stage of his treatment, the sound of Olivia’s baby crying might make him think he was hearing another delusional voice or being tortured by the sly, knowing soundtrack to his screaming psyche. Even if he were well enough by January to be sure that the baby was in fact a baby, he might not be able to stand the competition of seeing it being loved and looked after.
Martin’s growing conviction that Sebastian was Olivia’s twin brother came from the strange harmonies between some of the material that he brought with him to the sessions and the stories Karen had told Olivia about her brother’s early life. Towards the end of a session that appeared to be a long and rather generic allegory of explosive rage and potential attack – ‘where they keep the bombs hidden … the guns and the bodies riddled with bullet holes…’ – Sebastian revealed that when he was eighteen the Tanners had told him that he was an adopted child, but had refused to tell him anything about his mother, except to say that she was a bad woman who hadn’t wanted him, and that she lived in ‘the Arsenal area’. They said that if he was mad enough to want to meet her, he must do it on his own. The mysterious weapons depot and the ‘Gunners’ in Sebastian’s free association turned out not to be entirely metaphorical references, but historical and geographical ones as well. Martin knew that Karen lived in Arsenal; he also knew that Sebastian was the same age as Olivia; although his exact birthday still hadn’t yet come up, he knew it was in the same month as Olivia’s; he knew about the cigarette burns, now transformed into bullet wounds, and he knew that Olivia’s twin had been handed over for adoption at the same age as Sebastian. The evidence was hammering at the door, but Martin had still resisted making any official enquiries about Sebastian’s identity, preferring to work with the material that Sebastian brought to the sessions, keeping it sealed in the alembic of the psychoanalytic process. Now he wondered if he should just find out the facts of the case. Was Sebastian Olivia’s twin or not? And yet, knowing that he would never have tried to find out for Sebastian’s benefit, because the official facts would have introduced a foreign vocabulary into the lexicon of symbolic language that they were working to compile together, how could he justify doing that research simply to appease his own curiosity and concern? Part of him also wished he could discuss the matter with Lizzie, but he resisted doing so. She was a psychotherapist, and in theory he was allowed to discuss difficult cases with his colleagues, but she was also his wife and Olivia’s mother. Only absolute confidentiality could ensure that Sebastian’s insights were not tainted with the distrust and confusion that had afflicted him all his life. Ultimately, Martin could turn to the Ethics Committee; although, as a senior analyst, the Ethics Committee usually turned to him.
How had it come to this? There was an unwelcome Sophoclean intensity in discovering that a potentially hostile stranger turned out to be a close relation; to the possibility of his daughter meeting her mad brother for the first time as her father’s patient, or the possibility of his newborn grandchild provoking the anger and the envy of his gravely deluded uncle. A troubling entanglement of family and therapy was part of the foundations of Martin’s profession. Anna Freud, who was famously analysed by her father, remained unmarried for the rest of her life; no man could match up to the hero who had helped her to acquire the treasure of self-knowledge and see into the depths of her unconscious mind. The incestuous implications were clear, or at least should have been clear to a man so alert to incestuous implications, and yet who else could Freud have sent his daughter to see and how could he deprive her of the revolutionary benefits of the discovery he was in the course of making? Since those early untrammelled days, more and more boundaries had been put in place to protect the analytic process from the corruption of indiscretion, misuse of authority, countertransference, inadequate training and all the other difficulties attendant on forming a secure attachment to a therapist in order to turn that successful dependency into a successful independence for the patient. As one of the most careful guardians of those boundaries, Martin was disturbed to think that he might have inadvertently breached them, and yet the origins of all this explosive Arsenal-borne complexity were simple and well-intentioned enough: Martin had arranged to see Sebastian in his home consulting room because he felt he needed more sessions. His room had a separate entrance and usually the only other person at home was Lizzie, working with her own patients at the top of the house, with two entirely private floors in between. Olivia usually came to stay in the evening or at weekends, when the whole house was private. She was also the seasoned daughter of two psychotherapists, although Martin had only started working at home when the children went to primary school and Lizzie had waited until they had left home altogether. When he took Sebastian on as a patient, Francis had just been the rumour of Olivia’s new boyfriend, who Lizzie and Martin had yet to meet.
He was also confident that Sebastian was not a source of danger. Schizophrenia’s reputation for violence was exaggerated, except in the case of suicide, which about half of the schizophrenic population attempted, with one in twenty succeeding. Martin had worked with psychotic patients throughout his career and was certain that Sebastian was not criminally insane. He hadn’t just emerged from Broadmoor Hospital; he was an ambulatory schizophrenic who might have been frightening or repellent to some people, but to Martin, who was not easily frightened, he was a patient with a reasonable chance of recovery, who it would be unreasonable and unkind not to help.
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.