Dickie

Dickie, Edwina’s second husband and Lucas’s father, is a political speechwriter whose easy persuasiveness has consequences far beyond his career. He helps secure Charlie a place at Wyebourne, but when the school’s abuse scandal comes to light, his own experience of boarding school makes him treat what happened as ordinary. The resulting clash with Edwina exposes the gap between his idea of what boys endure and her insistence that a trusted adult abused her son. Later, after Charlie dies in Thailand, Dickie’s grief becomes a fragile attempt to explain the family’s pain to Lucas.

Identity and Political Life

Dickie works as a speechwriter for the Liberal Party. Edwina is not politically engaged: she likes the party’s quiet, inconclusive position, finds talk about his work boring, and avoids socializing with political figures. His career nevertheless places him near consequential events. He survives the party’s difficult period around Jeremy Thorpe and remains in his job under David Steel, whom Edwina finds charming from a distance.

His first wife, Barbara, relates to politics very differently. She enjoys its trappings and hopes for the influence and social position associated with being an MP’s wife, as her former bridesmaid Minty Landreth is. Barbara’s anger with Dickie concerns not only what she sees as his failures as a husband and father, but also what she considers his lack of political ambition. The contrast reveals a household in which political life matters intensely to one wife, scarcely interests the other, and does not seem to provide Dickie with a lasting source of enthusiasm either: by the end of one day, even he has tired of hearing about it.

Marriage to Edwina

Dickie’s marriage to Edwina is marked in her memory by small domestic details rather than by a new name or a gold ring. In their shared bedroom, she remembers that he expected to sleep on the left side of the bed—the side she had occupied with her first husband, Ollie. The change makes the room register the succession of marriages physically: the bed remains, but the person beside her and the meaning of its familiar sides have changed. Later, alone in the same room, Edwina notices the mattress’s deep dip and thinks of how she rolls into its middle. Dickie’s absence is thus present in the shape of the bed as well as in the history attached to it.

A few years into their marriage, Edwina planned another pregnancy. After she stopped taking the pill, Dickie approached conception with conspicuous determination: he made love to her more thoroughly than usual and, on a couple of occasions, asked her to stand on her head afterward, as if that might give his sperm a racing start. The account mixes practical hope with awkward comedy, while placing their private efforts inside a serious turning point. Edwina was thirty-six when she became pregnant for the second time, with her third child; a doctor confirmed it, in a period before over-the-counter pregnancy tests were available. The pregnancy is recalled in the same domestic setting as the painful event Edwina cannot forget, connecting Dickie’s hopes for a child to the grief and bodily memory that remain with her.

Charlie, Wyebourne, and the Abuse Scandal

Dickie’s political persuasiveness helps Charlie obtain a place at Wyebourne. He never tells Edwina how he arranged it. When the scandal at the school later breaks, she guesses how the placement came about and is furious: in her view, Dickie had entrusted their child to a man who was a known danger. Her accusation that he must have known is presented alongside a disturbing account of his actual response. Dickie genuinely does not understand why the revelations provoke such outrage; from his own experience, boys at boarding school were interfered with by an older boy or teacher, and he assumes they simply got over it. He even regards such experiences as something that could make a boy more of a man.

Edwina rejects that normalization outright. She calls what happened abuse and stresses that the man had been in a position of care. The conflict is not simply about Dickie’s role in obtaining the school place: it is also about the meaning he gives to boys’ suffering. Edwina sees a breach of trust and a failure to protect Charlie; Dickie’s assumptions recast abuse as an unpleasant but routine stage of growing up. His lack of comprehension, set against her certainty, becomes a source of lasting marital anger.

Charlie’s Death and Dickie’s Lasting Grief

Years after Charlie’s death, Dickie tells Lucas what happened after Rowena returned to Australia. Charlie had been sober and healthy while in Thailand, and Rowena had left him money for a return flight on the condition that he continue a regime of yoga and meditation, eat well, and drink only occasionally. He kept to it for almost a week. Then he fell in with other travellers and moved to a rougher part of the resort. Ten days after Rowena had gone back to Australia, he was found dead in a backpackers’ hostel, a needle still in his arm.

Dickie also tells Lucas that Charlie was cremated in Thailand and that Edwina brought his ashes home by plane, holding the urn as if it were a small child. He identifies the blame that followed: Edwina believed Rowena should have recognized her brother’s vulnerability and stayed with him, and told her that she might as well have killed him herself. Dickie says he is too old for the upheaval and that it is almost more than he can bear. The account shows his grief not as detached narration but as a burden he can barely finish describing; afterward he apologizes for being a nuisance and goes to bed coughing through the night.

The next morning Dickie has already left for the airport. His note to Lucas says he thought his son should sleep it off and closes with affection; Lucas remembers the three neat kisses. The tenderness of that small gesture sits beside the previous night’s whisky, grief, and family accusations. Dickie’s own death is later communicated to Lucas by Edwina in a long message giving the time and date of the death and of the burial. At the funeral, Lucas sits with his mother while Edwina stays with Alicia; the two sides do not speak. Dickie’s death therefore leaves no immediate reconciliation between his surviving family members, even as his final conversation with Lucas remains a record of the love and distress he struggled to express.