Their house was always cold, even in sunny Greece. And there was an emptiness to it – a lack of warmth, physical and emotional. This was due in large part to Mariana’s father, who, although a remarkable man in many ways – good-looking, powerful, razor sharp – was also highly complicated. Mariana suspected he had been damaged beyond repair by his childhood. She never met her father’s parents, and he rarely mentioned them. His father was a sailor, and the less said about his mother, the better. She worked at the docks, he said, with such a look of shame, Mariana thought she must have been a prostitute.

Her father grew up in the slums of Athens and around the port of Piraeus – he started working on the ships as a boy, quickly becoming involved with trade and the import of coffee and wheat and – Mariana imagined – less savoury items. By the time he was twenty-five, he had bought his own boat, and built his shipping business from there. Through a combination of ruthlessness, blood, and sweat, he created a small empire for himself.

He was a bit like a king, Mariana thought – or a dictator. She was later to discover he was an extremely wealthy man – not that you would have guessed it from the austere, Spartan way they lived. Perhaps her mother – her gentle, delicate English mother – might have softened him, had she lived. But she died tragically young, soon after Mariana was born.

Mariana grew up with a keen awareness of this loss. As a therapist, she knew a baby’s first sense of self comes through its parents’ gaze. We are born being watched – our parents’ expressions, what we see reflected in the mirror of their eyes, determines how we see ourselves. Mariana had lost her mother’s gaze – and her father, well, he found it hard to look at her directly. He’d usually glance just over her shoulder when addressing her. Mariana would continually adjust and readjust her position, shuffling, edging her way into his sight line, hoping to be seen – but somehow always remaining peripheral.

On the rare occasions she did catch a glimpse into his eyes, there was such disdain there, such burning disappointment. His eyes told her the truth: she wasn’t good enough. No matter how hard she tried, Mariana always sensed she fell short, managing to do or say the wrong thing – just by existing, she seemed to irritate him. He disagreed with her endlessly, no matter what, performing Petruchio to her Kate – if she said it was cold, he said it was hot; if she said it was sunny, he insisted it was raining. But despite his criticism and contrariness, Mariana loved him. He was all she had, and she longed to be worthy of his love.

There was precious little love in her childhood. She had an elder sister, but they weren’t close. Elisa was seven years her senior, with no interest in her shy younger sibling. And so Mariana would spend the long summer months alone, playing by herself in the garden under the stern eye of the housekeeper. No wonder, then, she grew up a little isolated, and uneasy around other people.

The irony that Mariana ended up becoming a group therapist was not lost on her. But paradoxically, this ambivalence about others served her well. In group therapy, the group, not the individual, is the focus of treatment: to be a successful group therapist is – to some extent – to be invisible.

Mariana was good at this.

In her sessions, she always kept out of the group’s way as much as possible. She only intervened when communication broke down, or when it might be helpful to make an interpretation, or when something went wrong.

On this particular Monday, a bone of contention arose almost immediately, requiring a rare intervention. The problem – as usual – was Henry.

3

Henry arrived later than the others. He was flushed and out of breath, and he seemed a little unsteady on his feet. Mariana wondered if he was high. She wouldn’t have been surprised. She suspected Henry was abusing his medication – but being his therapist, not his medical doctor, there was little she could do about that.

Henry Booth was only thirty-five years old, but he looked older. His reddish hair was speckled with grey, and his face was covered with creases, like the crumpled shirt he wore. He also wore a perpetual frown, and gave the impression of being permanently tense, like a coiled spring. He reminded Mariana of a boxer or a fighter, preparing to give – or receive – the next blow.

Henry grunted an apology for being late; then he sat down – clutching a paper coffee cup.

And the coffee cup was the problem.

Liz spoke up immediately. Liz was in her mid-seventies, a retired schoolteacher; a prim stickler for things being done ‘properly’, as she put it. Mariana experienced her as rather trying, even irritating. And she had guessed what Liz was about to say.

‘That’s not allowed,’ Liz said, pointing a finger, quivering with indignation, at Henry’s coffee cup. ‘We’re not allowed to bring in anything from outside. We all know that.’

Henry grunted. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s the rules, Henry.’

‘Fuck off, Liz.’

‘What? Mariana, did you hear what he just said to me?’

Liz promptly burst into tears, and things degenerated from there – ending in yet another heated confrontation between Henry and the other members of the group, all united in fury against him.

Mariana was watching closely, keeping a protective eye on Henry, to see how he was taking this. For all of his bravado, he was a highly vulnerable individual. As a child, Henry had suffered horrific physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his father before he was taken into care and shunted around a series of foster homes. And yet, despite all this trauma, Henry was a remarkably intelligent person – and it had seemed, for a while, as if his intelligence might be enough to save him: at eighteen he got a place at university, to study physics. But he only lasted a few weeks before his past caught up with him; he had a massive breakdown – and never fully recovered. There followed a sad history of self-harm, drug addiction, and recurring breakdowns landing him in and out of hospital – until his psychiatrist referred him to Mariana.

Mariana had a soft spot for Henry, probably because he’d had such rotten luck. But even so, she was unsure about admitting him into the group. It wasn’t just that he was significantly more unwell than the other members: seriously ill patients could be held and healed very effectively by groups – but they could also disrupt them to the point of disintegration. As soon as any group establishes itself, it always arouses envy and attack – and not just from forces on the outside, those excluded from the group, but also from dark and dangerous forces within the group itself. And ever since he’d joined them a few months ago, Henry had been a constant source of conflict. He brought it with him. There was a latent aggression in him, a bubbling anger, that was often difficult to contain.

But Mariana didn’t give up easily; as long as she was able to maintain control of the group, she felt determined to work with him. She believed in the group, in these eight individuals sitting in a circle – she believed in the circle, and its power to heal. In her more fanciful moments, Mariana could be quite mystical about the power of circles: the circle in the sun, the moon, or the earth; the planets spinning through the heavens; the circle in a wheel; the dome of a church – or a wedding ring. Plato said the soul was a circle – which made sense to Mariana. Life was a circle too, wasn’t it? – from birth to death.

And when group therapy was working well, a kind of miracle would occur within this circle – the birth of a separate entity: a group spirit, a group mind; a ‘big mind,’ it was often called, more than the sum of its parts; more intelligent than the therapist or the individual members. It was wise, healing, and powerfully containing. Mariana had seen its power first-hand many times. In her front room, over the years, many ghosts had been conjured up in this circle, and laid to rest.

Today, it was Liz’s turn to be spooked. She just couldn’t let go of the coffee cup. It brought up so much anger and resentment in her – the fact Henry thought the rules didn’t apply to him, that he could break them with such disdain; then Liz suddenly realised how much Henry reminded her of her older brother, who had been so entitled, and such a bully. All Liz’s repressed anger towards her brother started surfacing, which was good, Mariana thought – it needed to surface. Provided Henry could stand being used as a psychological punchbag.

Which, of course, he couldn’t.

Henry leapt up suddenly, letting out an anguished cry. He flung his coffee cup onto the floor. It split open in the centre of the circle – and a growing pool of black coffee spread out onto the floorboards.

The other members of the group were immediately vocal and somewhat hysterical in their outrage. Liz burst into tears again, and Henry tried to leave. But Mariana persuaded him to stay and talk through what had happened.

‘It’s just a fucking coffee cup, what’s the big deal?’ Henry said, sounding like an indignant child.