Charlie Steals and Flees After Alicia Is Injured

Charlie Steals and Flees After Alicia Is Injured is the incident that turns Edwina’s long efforts to help Charlie into lasting estrangement. During an attempted theft from Edwina’s home, Charlie is confronted by Alicia, who is injured in a struggle on the stairs. Charlie runs, leaving her behind. In Dickie’s later account to Lucas, the theft matters not only as a crime but as the final breach of a trust Edwina had repeatedly tried to preserve.

Background and the Last Straw

By the time of the incident, Edwina had spent years continuing to help Charlie despite his repeated demands for money, driving lessons and a car. She urged him to seek a place at a London art school or volunteer backstage painting theatre sets, and bought him clothes. When he neglected his appearance, including stopping shaving and washing his hair, she persisted. After he lost his two front teeth in a fight, she paid for expensive dental work. When he called from a phone box at three in the morning, crying and apparently in need of help, she collected him, brought him home and fed him soup, without demanding thanks when he left. Dickie presents this pattern of assistance and forgiveness as the history against which the theft must be understood: Edwina had not simply hoped Charlie would improve; she had repeatedly acted on that hope.

The incident takes place on an unspecified weekday in September, either a Tuesday or Thursday. Dickie recalls London in autumn, with leaves turning, while Edwina is away meeting her agent about possible commissions. She hopes to meet Charlie in town, buy him lunch and perhaps get him shoes. Charlie promises to come but does not appear. Edwina waits until four o’clock before giving up and heading home. His absence is the immediate disappointment; what she finds at home makes it the last straw.

The Theft and Alicia’s Injury

At the house, Edwina finds Alicia lying in agony at the bottom of the stairs. Charlie has entered and taken a selection of valuable antiques that would be easy to sell. The stolen property includes silverware and framed landscapes whose value he knows. He has filled a rucksack and is preparing to leave when Alicia catches him. The account gives no further explanation of how Charlie entered the house or of what happened before Alicia confronted him.

A stand-off follows on the stairs. Dickie explicitly leaves unresolved whether Charlie pushed Alicia or whether she fell; the remembered account does not establish the cause of her fall. It does establish what follows: Charlie does not stop to help her. He runs, leaving Alicia badly hurt. Her injuries include a smashed hip and collarbone. The distinction between the uncertain mechanics of the fall and Charlie’s certain decision to flee is central to Dickie’s telling. The event is not framed as a settled account of how Alicia was injured, but as an undeniable abandonment at the moment she needed help.

Consequences for Edwina and Charlie

Alicia’s injuries and Charlie’s flight destroy Edwina’s trust. Dickie describes the change through the image of a bolt sliding across the part of her heart that had always belonged to Charlie. After the incident, Edwina has the locks changed. The practical act of securing the house accompanies a much larger emotional closure: the care she had continued to offer no longer protects their relationship from the consequences of his actions.

Dickie says that the bolt has remained in place. Edwina cannot forgive Charlie and becomes convinced that he stole her jewellery box years earlier, concluding that he has lied to her over a long period. That suspicion is presented as Edwina’s belief, not as proof that Charlie took the box. In her view, however, the stairway incident confirms a pattern of broken love and trust. The attempted theft thus extends beyond the antiques and the immediate harm to Alicia: it reshapes how Edwina interprets Charlie’s past and makes reconciliation harder to imagine.

Dickie’s Recollection

The incident reaches the reader through Dickie’s account to Lucas, rather than through a directly narrated scene. Dickie introduces it as the final instalment in the story of Charlie’s decline and Edwina’s attempts to help him. His detail about the weekday being either Tuesday or Thursday, followed by his insistence that the exact day does not matter, keeps the emphasis on the rupture rather than the calendar. The memory is vivid in its concrete particulars—the rucksack, silverware, landscapes, the stairs and Alicia’s injuries—while leaving the disputed cause of her fall open.

Lucas remembers hearing the account at one in the morning. Dickie had refilled his glass, was drunk and exhausted, and needed help getting to bed. Lucas had not dared look at his father in case he was crying. That remembered setting gives the account a second emotional consequence: the story of Charlie’s abandonment of Alicia is itself difficult for Dickie to tell. For Lucas, it becomes a memory of his father’s distress as well as an explanation of why Edwina’s hope for Charlie finally gave way to mistrust.