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Would he be more virtuous, do you think, if he was castrated? Or do you think virtue is a struggle against our natural inclinations?’
    ‘Our Jo will do what he has to do, won’t you, Jo?’ and Gibson lay his large hand over his son’s head.
    Then all of a sudden Eve threw her baby into her father’s arms and buttoned up her nightdress.
    ‘Oh my God !’ she exclaimed to her lily-bearing visitor. ‘Shouldn’t you be in Hull?’
    Indeed, that’s exactly where Dr Fothering should have been. Even as Gibson and Eve were being dispatched to their new life together, Fothering was applying for his first consultant’s post in Hull. His thesis on Eve, subject to a few alterations, had found its way to a sympathetic examiner at London University and passed well. In fact, the future was looking bright, very bright, for the young psychiatrist eager to make a name for himself in the softer therapies.
    It is a well-documented fact that some patients become dependent on their doctors; it is less well-known, but equally true, that some doctors become dependent on their patients. Let the fate of poor Dr Fothering be a lesson to all of them.

    Eve and Gibson moved into their new home early in April 1984, in a cul de sac off Wolfson Drive on the Arbury Estate. Their house was only five years old, and some young offenders had redecorated it shortly before they moved in. It’s status as ‘sheltered housing’ didn’t mean much: the previous occupants, a family of five sons, had one by one found their way to prison, and the mother had finally given up on the lot of them and gone to live with her elderly parents in Scotland. But it did mean the Council was obliged to provide brand new carpets and curtains, and Gibson and Eve were both happy and grateful to have such a fine new home. Gibson was particularly happy, because the house backed onto fields and had a large, if hitherto neglected, garden. And as a wedding present (they were married on the first of May), Eve had bought Gibson a greenhouse.
    As can be imagined, the community was happy to have new neighbours and welcomed thetom of things. He had read through both Eve and Gibson’s files vigorouslym. Even the vicar called on them; a man they far preferred to their new social worker, Roger Bolt, a Northerner who was suspicious of all things Southern, always deeming them to be ‘not what they seemed’. He looked first at the sexy, blonde Eve, and then at the lumpen, slow Gibson, and he knew that he had to get to the bot, yet never bought Dr Fothering ’s grandiose theories for a moment, and when Dr Fothering dared to suggest that Mr Bolt’s approach to the couple was rather heavy-handed , and that in front of his senior too, a grudge was born.
    Perhaps if Bolt had been more sympathetic to Fothering’s approach, and been happier to take the baton from him regarding the care of his beloved Eve, Dr Fothering would have been happier to have deserted his post at Fulbright and set off to pastures new in Hull. But Eve had become for him his own wayward, teenage daughter – no, more than that, for the good father knows instinctively when to let go – Fothering’s ego was bound up there too, his past, present, and alas, future were inveigled in Eve’s merest utterance. He could notfind it within himself to trust that bloody Northerner, Bolt, or that control freak senior of his, June Briggs. What if Eve became manic again? Would they drug her up, because they couldn’t cope? Would they take away her baby? There’s not one person I can trust in the entire Social Services Department, he thought, not one. They know nothing of the human spirit. Good God, what will happen to her?
    It’s true, a wife or even a girlfriend would have compelled Dr Fothering to re-centre himself; even a decent hobby might have distracted him. But if Roger Bolt with his long, nasal Northern vowels irritated him, Dr Fothering in Hull was about as happy as a squid in a goldfish bowl. The comparative