Barbara

Barbara Spinner is Lucas’s mother and Dickie’s first wife, but her importance extends well beyond that place in the family tree: she is Edwina’s long-standing adversary and the parent around whom Lucas’s loyalties, guilt, and eventual acts of care gather. Her relationship with her son is close enough to become an alliance against Edwina, while her later vulnerability exposes the distance between the mother Lucas remembers and the mother he has neglected.

Identity and Family Position

Barbara is the first Mrs Spinner and Lucas’s mother. Edwina remembers them as unusually close, “entwined like rope”: they shared pronounced widow’s peaks and a mutual loathing of Edwina. The comparison presents their bond as both intimate and defensive, a powerful mother–son attachment that leaves little room for Edwina to become a trusted member of the family.

That attachment shapes the household after Dickie and Edwina’s marriage. Lucas becomes a regular, part-time member of Edwina’s family, and Edwina makes efforts to welcome him, including creating a room for him and learning of his interest in the Apollo space mission. Yet Barbara remains the parent with whom he is most closely identified. Edwina knows he reports back to Barbara about what he wears and eats, so ordinary domestic details become potential ammunition in their conflict.

Barbara’s influence is also visible in the occasions she controls. She insists on hosting Lucas’s birthday celebrations, and the twins are never invited to River Walk. The arrangement keeps Lucas’s two family worlds separate: Dickie attends his son’s twenty-first birthday dinner at Claridge’s, followed by dancing at a West End discothèque, while Edwina is not invited. The silver-and-black invitation and careful observance of protocol contrast with the exclusion that defines Barbara’s relationship with Edwina and the twins.

Conflict with Edwina

Barbara and Edwina’s hostility is sustained through distance as much as direct confrontation. Barbara sends pithy handwritten notes in purple ink on personalised writing paper, but does not address them to Edwina by name. One complains about a sock Lucas had apparently lost after returning from Kennington. The small domestic grievance captures the larger pattern: Barbara monitors Edwina’s care of Lucas while withholding the ordinary recognition of direct, civil contact.

Their paths cross in person only four times across forty-five years: at a matinee of Jesus Christ Superstar, in Russell & Bromley, in court, and at Dickie’s funeral. Edwina is so unnerved by the first meeting that she cannot bring herself to return after the interval. Their infrequent encounters do not soften the antagonism; instead, each meeting becomes an occasion for it to reassert itself. Even at Dickie’s funeral, Barbara and Edwina remain on opposite sides of the church, each accompanied by someone close to her.

The funeral also makes Barbara’s prejudice visible. She wears a dramatic black swan-feather hat, while Alicia, standing constantly beside Edwina, wears a large orange-and-green turban that obstructs the view of people behind her. Barbara reacts with hostility to Alicia’s presence in the front row and to her appearance. The scene places Barbara’s contempt within a wider hierarchy of race and social position, as well as within the personal feud: Alicia’s loyalty to Edwina is itself a reason for Barbara to resent her.

Motherhood, Loyalty, and Lucas

Barbara’s bond with Lucas persists through the years, but it does not protect him from the consequences of his own decline. After Edwina’s miscarriage devastates Dickie, she struggles to manage Lucas and contacts Barbara to make sure someone will be home before sending him back to Chelsea. The episode shows Barbara as the parent who remains responsible for receiving him, even when the reconstituted household is under strain.

Later, Lucas’s visits to his parents diminish sharply through the 1990s. He is relieved that neither parent sees the squalor in which he lives, including a filthy lavatory, smeared mirrors, and a refrigerator full of rotting food. Dickie stops coming because Edwina needs him in London; Barbara’s visits also fall away as she becomes short of money. Lucas is not merely unaware of her circumstances: he chooses to remain oblivious to her financial difficulties and loneliness.

Barbara calls from across the Atlantic, usually on Sundays, and sometimes tells Lucas that she feels low. He cuts those conversations short, inventing important meetings or dates while his real preoccupation is cocaine. The contrast is stark: the mother who once organised his birthdays and remained bound to him is now reaching out from loneliness, while Lucas uses fabricated busyness to avoid hearing her. His excuses make their closeness more painful, not less, because the relationship survives as a claim he repeatedly fails to answer.

Decline, Estrangement, and Return

Barbara’s reduced circumstances are reflected in the sale of River Walk. The little money she has left goes toward making her new flat habitable, where her expensive, old-fashioned taste remains in the green watered-silk curtains, fringed and swagged. The furnishings preserve a visible trace of her former standing, even as her finances contract. Lucas knows these details only imperfectly because addiction and self-absorption keep him from responding to what they mean.

At Dickie’s funeral, Barbara grips Lucas’s suit sleeve with a claw-like hand. He remembers that gesture amid drink and drugs, and the funeral becomes one more scene in which proximity fails to become genuine connection. He and Edwina do not speak; he stays with Barbara while Edwina remains with Alicia. The family’s divisions are therefore enacted physically, across the church, even as everyone has gathered to mourn the same man.

In the final period of Barbara’s life, Lucas searches for the keepsakes that have disappeared from her flat. The search brings him to the building’s basement storage, where he finds her suitcases and the cheap leatherette photograph album that has come to matter more than her lost furs and jewellery. He understands that the album belongs beside her and carries it to the care home. Barbara lies beneath pale-blue sheets; Lucas places the album on her blankets, sprays Diorissimo near her pillow, and takes her hand. He allows himself to imagine that she smiles, but the scene does not claim a response he can know.

Narrative Role and Significance

Barbara’s history with Edwina helps establish a family system governed by divided loyalties and accumulated blame. Edwina’s memories of Barbara are so charged that even an imagined crisis revives the question of whether she would save Lucas from drowning. Much later, when Lucas admits that he arranged the theft of Edwina’s jewellery box because he owed money, Edwina asks him to explain how everything was her fault. Lucas refuses to continue the cycle of accusation, revenge, and guilt. Barbara is not the cause of every fracture, but her alliance with Lucas against Edwina is part of the history that gives that exchange its force.

The album at Barbara’s bedside offers a quieter counterpoint to that history. Lucas has spent years avoiding her calls and failing to attend to her loneliness; at the end, he brings an object that matters to her and stays beside her. His thought that blood is strong does not erase the damage or settle the family’s conflicts. It gives his final act a modest meaning: care arrives late, through attention to what Barbara values, when there is little else left to do.