Dickie and Barbara

Dickie and Barbara’s marriage is defined by the distance that grows between them after the birth of their son, Lucas, and by the affair through which Dickie eventually leaves her for Edwina. Its consequences continue long after the marriage has ended: Barbara and Edwina remain antagonists, while a handful of unavoidable encounters give their decades-long separation a public as well as domestic shape.

Marriage and Family Life

Dickie wanted a large family, and he had been deeply disappointed that Barbara struggled to conceive. There were repeated visits to specialists before Lucas was born. The delivery was especially difficult, involving forceps, and Dickie later said that Barbara more or less decided their sexual relationship was over after Lucas’s arrival. Even the smallest sign of affection, he told Edwina, made Barbara flinch. He described her as recoiling from sex and cast her as a cold, inaccessible wife, a characterization Edwina would remember when comparing their different approaches to intimacy.

The marriage therefore comes into view largely through Dickie’s account to Edwina, who is his lover before she becomes his second wife. His description of Barbara helps explain the contrast he draws between them, but it is not a neutral account: Dickie presents Barbara’s reserve as the obstacle and Edwina’s sensuality as its opposite. Edwina understands that she helped draw him away from his first marriage, and later feels that she owes him sex because her body and willingness had helped win him. The affair is thus entangled with guilt and obligation as well as desire.

The Affair and Separation

When Barbara needs an operation, Dickie does not leave her at once. He tells Edwina that the operation has been dreadful and takes Barbara on a cruise to the Caribbean to recover. He invokes the doctor’s orders and the seriousness of Barbara’s condition as reasons he cannot yet abandon her. For Edwina, his decision is infuriating: she has expected him to leave his wife, but instead he takes Barbara away, while Edwina remains at home in Kennington.

The postponement sharpens the triangle rather than resolving it. Edwina turns her frustration into a private joke in her illustration work, painting a sunburned, middle-aged brunette into a colour plate for Betsy and Tom’s Seaside Adventures. The publisher questions the figure’s relevance, and she has to paint it out. The episode gives her resentment a concrete outlet, while the image’s removal mirrors the way Barbara’s presence cannot simply be excluded from Edwina and Dickie’s relationship. Dickie eventually deserts Barbara and marries Edwina, but the available recollections do not make the transition a clean break: Barbara remains part of the family history Edwina has to live with.

Rivalry in the Household

The conflict persists through the women’s indirect contact. Barbara sends Edwina terse handwritten notes in purple ink on personalised writing paper, complaining, for example, that Lucas returned from Kennington with a missing sock. The notes are not directly addressed to Edwina; Barbara will not even write her name. Their small domestic subject matter gives the estrangement its daily register: the former and current wives are linked through Lucas and the management of his belongings, yet communicate through accusation rather than conversation.

Edwina is also conscious that Lucas reports back to Barbara about what he wears and eats. This scrutiny makes Edwina wary of giving Barbara further grounds for criticism, down to the possibility that her household habits might be presented as evidence against her. The rivalry is therefore not limited to the circumstances in which Dickie left his first wife. It shapes Edwina’s sense of being watched and judged inside her own home, with Lucas positioned between the two households.

Encounters and Aftermath

In the forty-five years following their first meeting, Edwina and Barbara come face to face only four times: at a matinee of Jesus Christ Superstar, in Russell & Bromley, in court, and at Dickie’s funeral. The encounters are sparse, but their settings chart the persistence of a relationship that has become almost entirely one of avoidance. At the matinee, Edwina is so unnerved that she cannot return after the interval. At the funeral, Southwark Cathedral is large enough for the women to be kept apart.

Dickie’s funeral also exposes the separation’s continuing effect on the family. Lucas sits with Barbara, his mother; Edwina does not speak to him, and he makes no effort to find her. She leaves the wake early, feeling that it resembles a works do in which she has never belonged. The former marriage is over, but its divisions still organize who sits with whom and who feels entitled to remain.

Significance

The relationship is presented through contrast: Dickie describes Barbara as physically resistant and Edwina as sexually generous, while Edwina’s memories reveal how that contrast becomes a debt she feels obliged to repay. Marriage is not shown as a simple passage from an incompatible wife to a more suitable one. Dickie’s delay when Barbara is ill, Edwina’s resentment, and Barbara’s continued presence through Lucas and her notes all complicate that account.

The four encounters over forty-five years give the estrangement an almost ceremonial rhythm, culminating in the funeral where physical distance cannot erase the family divisions. Barbara and Edwina rarely speak directly, yet remain connected through Dickie, Lucas, and the household judgments that pass between them. Their separation is less an absence of relationship than its enduring form: a marriage that has ended but continues to structure family loyalties and Edwina’s sense of belonging.