Edwina Spinner

Edwina Spinner, also known as Edwina Treadaway, is a children’s illustrator, the mother of twins Rowena Treadaway and Charlie Treadaway, and the second wife of Dickie Spinner. Her importance lies in the contradiction between the care she has given her family and her sense that family bonds cannot guarantee safety or affection. She can be devoted to her children and persistently hopeful for Charlie while regarding Lucas Spinner, her stepson, as almost a stranger; late in life, his confession forces both of them to confront the damage sustained in that divided household.

Identity and Family Background

Edwina becomes Dickie’s wife after he leaves Barbara Spinner, Lucas’s mother, for her. When Dickie first tells Lucas about the new relationship, he presents Edwina as someone Lucas will love, but the boy is unconvinced. The two families do not quickly become one: Lucas remembers Edwina’s twins as absorbed in their own games, with Rowena reading and Charlie drawing, while he feels like an unwelcome outsider. Edwina, for her part, laughs at Lucas and calls him a funny, priggish little thing. Their early discomfort settles into a durable stepfamily division rather than easy intimacy.

Her bond with Barbara is openly antagonistic. Edwina recalls Barbara as Lucas’s mother and the first Mrs Spinner, and remembers the two women as closely bound by a shared hostility toward her. Lucas’s loyalties remain with Barbara, while Edwina’s position as his stepmother never gives her the feeling of a genuine maternal bond. She remembers years of doing the expected work—remembering his birthday, wrapping Christmas presents, making breakfast and washing clothes—but describes herself as feeling like a woman acting the part of someone who cared. She insists that they share no DNA and says they merely tolerated one another.

Care, Work, and the Household

Edwina’s household depends heavily on Alicia, first a part-time cleaner who came to the family home and helped care for the twins, and later a long-serving domestic worker. Alicia’s own two sons were in Kingston with their grandmother; she lived off the Old Kent Road with her husband and some of his cousins. Edwina never visited Alicia’s home, but Alicia came to hers every day until the twins no longer needed a nanny, then stayed on to do the ironing and cleaning. Edwina remembers their first day together vividly: both were soaked by the rain, and Alicia’s beehive hairstyle had collapsed into a matted heap.

Alicia handled much of the cooking and laundry. Dickie, by contrast, wanted his work shirts sent out for professional laundering, a preference Edwina remembers as prompting Alicia’s anger. Alicia disliked housework and doing things for Lucas; Lucas disliked her touching his belongings, and clothes needing repair were set aside for matron. Their domestic life thus contains both sustained practical care and friction over who performs it and whose needs take precedence.

Edwina also rejects Dickie’s racialized description of Alicia. When he says Lucas has not been in such close contact with a coloured person before, Edwina nearly hits him with a serving spoon. She rebukes the language as racist and outdated, and connects Dickie’s assumptions to the schooling he and Lucas received at Wyebourne College, where the only Black people they encountered were, in her account, pupils of royal descent or staff cleaning toilets. Her anger makes clear that she sees Alicia not as an abstract lesson in tolerance but as a person whose labor and dignity matter in the family home.

Motherhood and Loyalty to Charlie

Edwina’s openness to artistic play shapes how she raises the twins. She allows drawing on the walls and Charlie wearing her lipstick, explaining that she wants children to expand their artistic horizons, experiment and be whoever they want to be. Lucas rejects this freedom and says he wants to be a bank manager; as an adult, he wonders whether his career in finance was partly a way of resisting Edwina. Her permissiveness therefore becomes part of the contrast between her encouragement of invention and Lucas’s effort to define himself against her.

After Charlie’s imprisonment, Edwina refuses to give up on him. When he will not return home, she continues trying to build a future for him: she urges him to apply to a London art school or volunteer backstage painting theatre sets, buys him clothes, and pays for expensive dental work after he loses his two front teeth in a fight. She also collects him after he calls from a phone box at three in the morning, brings him home and feeds him soup, without demanding thanks when he leaves again. Dickie remembers this as a near-limitless willingness to forgive, a devotion that contrasts with the eventual rupture between mother and son.

That rupture follows Charlie’s return to the family home to steal antiques. Edwina is away meeting her agent and hopes to meet Charlie for lunch and buy him shoes; instead, she returns to find Alicia badly injured at the bottom of the stairs. Alicia had confronted Charlie as he tried to leave with silverware and valuable framed landscapes. Whether Alicia was pushed or fell is left unresolved, but Charlie fled without helping her. Her smashed hip and collarbone, and his failure to stop, destroy Edwina’s trust. She changes the locks, and Dickie describes the break as a bolt sliding across the part of her heart that had always belonged to Charlie. Edwina later believes Charlie also stole her jewellery box and had lied to her for years.

Estrangement, Confession, and the Cycle of Blame

Edwina’s feelings toward Lucas are harsher still. She admits that, if a boat capsized, he would be the last person she would save, and has wondered whether she might hold his head underwater. Yet Lucas is part of the house in small, physical ways, and one room was arranged for his possible return: Edwina researched his interest in the Apollo space mission and painted him a mural, marking the door with a tile bearing his name. The gesture of welcome coexists with her conviction that she never truly wanted him there. When Dickie suggested Lucas might come back, she could not refuse outright; she was relieved when he stayed with Barbara instead.

The family’s history of injury also shapes how Edwina understands responsibility. She concludes that being a wife and mother means feeling obliged to keep the family safe while being unable to do so, because misfortune can recur without warning. The conviction is painfully tested by Charlie’s actions and by Alicia’s injuries, neither of which Edwina could prevent. In old age, her imagined future is elsewhere: she pictures herself above St Ives in a wooden house with a veranda, drinking coffee in the cold and wine in the sun, cooking sardines and painting the sea in oils. The prospect of painting again offers a life beyond the household’s accumulating losses.

When Lucas returns and asks her to tell him how everything was his fault, Edwina’s challenge exposes the accusation that has governed their relationship. Lucas says he no longer wants to blame anyone; blame has led to revenge and then guilt, and he wants that cycle to end. He confesses that he arranged the theft of Edwina’s jewellery box because he was in trouble at school and owed money. He handed over the house keys and told the thieves when the house would be safe to enter, believing the plan would bring money without anyone being hurt. Instead, everyone was hurt. Edwina trembles and weeps as he tells her. The confession does not erase their history, but it replaces suspicion with the truth and gives their final encounter a different possibility: not innocence, but an end to automatic blame.