Barbara’s suicide attempt is disclosed retrospectively through Lucas’s account of childhood fear. Its significance lies not only in the attempt itself, but in the enduring vigilance it imposed on her son: he remembers believing that he had to keep watch over Barbara whenever he was at the house.

The Attempt and Its Aftermath

Some weeks after Barbara’s attempt, she told Lucas that she had cleared out some of his baby books to make room for new ones. His books about Betsy and Tom had disappeared, while his Noddy collection remained; Barbara defended keeping Noddy as a classic. The detail that she had finally removed the dressings from her wrists makes the exchange an oblique record of recovery, set beside the ordinary work of clearing a child’s shelves.

Lucas’s Childhood Fear

Years later, Lucas explains how Barbara’s suicide attempt shaped his experience of visiting the house. As a child, he feared that she might cut her wrists again, jump from the roof, or kill herself with knives, rope, or poison. He lay awake in the attic bedroom imagining these possibilities, then woke having wet the bed; Edwina laughed at him. The attempt thus persisted not as a single past crisis but as a threat Lucas believed he had to monitor whenever he was away from Barbara.

Edwina initially answers by recalling her own failed efforts to reach him: she had painted a moon on his bedroom door, only for him to scribble over it and slam doors in her and Dickie’s faces. But the tile bearing Lucas’s name cracks again before her, and she sees the old scenes differently. The untouched Christmas presents, his scowls and silences, and his terror at leaving Barbara unattended now form a pattern she can recognize: the child was frightened, not simply hostile. She distinguishes that fear from her own responsibility, attributing it to Barbara’s mental illness, even as Lucas’s demand that she account for his childhood reopens their conflict.

The House as a Frame for Recollection

When Lucas returns to 137 Kennington Road to give something back and make sense of his history with the house, its present condition gives the memory a physical setting: the paint is peeling, grime clouds the windows, and weeds fill the cracked steps. A crooked For Sale sign suggests that the place may soon be lost to him, even as he stands outside trying to account for what happened there. The recollection therefore emerges not as a detached report of Barbara’s crisis but as part of Lucas’s effort to confront the house’s accumulated meanings. Its worn, almost sleeping appearance sits against the urgency of the childhood fear he describes, making the return itself a form of reckoning.

Competing Accounts of Responsibility

Lucas’s recollection makes Barbara’s suicide attempt the hidden context for behavior Edwina had once read as rejection: his silences and hostility were bound to the fear that, if he stopped watching, his mother might die. Edwina’s response does not erase that fear; she recognizes it in the memory of the untouched Christmas presents and the cracked name tile, while resisting Lucas’s implication that she was responsible for what happened. The scene leaves the attempt’s significance suspended between these accounts: Barbara’s crisis shaped Lucas’s childhood, and its consequences continued to surface in the strained history he and Edwina were trying to explain.