Edwina Treadaway

Edwina Treadaway is the mother of Rowena Treadaway and Charlie Treadaway, and the stepmother of Lucas Spinner. A working illustrator whose domestic life depends on the often-unrecognised care of Alicia, she is both a provider and a wary, sometimes resentful presence within her family. Her estrangement from Lucas, her fury at Dickie Spinner’s response to abuse at school, and her final confrontation with the truth about a burglary make her story a study in the distance between family duty and affection—and in how easily grief and suspicion harden into blame.

Family Identity and the Work of Care

Edwina’s relationship with Lucas is defined by an uncomfortable mismatch between the duties she performed and the bond she felt. For years she remembered his birthday, wrapped his Christmas presents, made his breakfast, and washed his clothes. Yet she describes herself as having felt like an actress pretending to care. Lucas was Barbara Spinner’s son, not hers, and Edwina and Lucas tolerated one another rather than sharing a sense of kinship. Her private resentment is extreme: she imagines that, if a boat capsized, Lucas would be the last person she saved, and wonders whether she might hold him underwater. The thought lays bare the violence that can lie beneath the respectable language of family obligation.

That antagonism belongs to a larger stepfamily history. Edwina remembers Barbara as Lucas’s mother and her own persistent enemy; the two women were closely bound by mutual dislike of Edwina. Lucas’s first arrival in Edwina’s life, she recalls, was marked by blood on his hands, an image she associates with a nightmare. Later, when the incident had been put aside, Lucas became a regular, part-time member of the household. Edwina tried to make him welcome: after learning of his interest in the Apollo space mission, she painted a mural for his room and had a tile bearing his name placed on the door. She could not refuse Dickie’s wish to leave room for Lucas to return, but was relieved when he stayed with Barbara instead. The room’s careful welcome and Edwina’s inward resistance coexist without cancelling one another.

Her early years raising the twins expose how precarious domestic care could be. Alone in a large house needing money and repairs, with two small children and no income, she sometimes felt she could not go on. She did not know how to cook on the Aga that Ollie Treadaway had insisted on; after he was gone, she used it for warmth and relied on a Baby Belling to heat the babies’ food. Tinned soup and jars of baby food left her aware that Rowena and Charlie were not eating well. Alicia’s arrival changed the practical reality of the household: she dried and changed the soaked children, found dry clothes, and fed them hot toast and honey. Edwina later credited Alicia with helping her survive, though the two women seemed to have little in common.

Alicia’s care continued well beyond the first encounter. She came to the house every day until the twins no longer needed a nanny, then stayed to do the ironing and cleaning. Edwina’s own work and freedom depended on this labour. She made substantial money illustrating the Betsy and Tom books; although another team wrote the words, her characterisation and painted details helped make the books successful. Working at home allowed her to draw and paint while Alicia looked after the twins, with the two women often meeting for lunch before Edwina returned to her studio. Edwina’s professional independence was real, but it rested on care that the household could easily take for granted.

Motherhood, Marriage, and Conflict

Edwina understands motherhood through its limits as well as its duties. She reflects that a wife and mother may feel responsible for keeping her family safe, but cannot control what happens to them. This knowledge informs her anger when the school abuse scandal involving Charlie comes to light. She confronts Dickie over having entrusted their child to a man she regards as a predator, while Dickie’s response—that abuse of boys at boarding school was ordinary and something they would get over—reveals a gulf between them. Edwina insists that the adult entrusted with a child’s care abused him; Dickie minimises the harm. Her fury is directed not only at the abuser but at the failure of protection that made the abuse possible.

Her position within the household is also tested by the children’s changing place in it. At a birthday gathering, Dickie arranged commemorative photographs and posed Lucas alongside the twins. Edwina questioned inwardly why Lucas was included when the occasion was for Rowena and Charlie, yet played along and took Polaroids with one of the new cameras. She was privately disappointed that Dickie’s gift had been so successful with the children, especially Charlie, who delighted in watching each image appear. The episode captures Edwina’s divided response: she can participate in family rituals while still feeling displaced or resentful within them.

The House, Work, and Memory

For Edwina, the family home preserves the traces of those who have lived in it, including Lucas, whom she cannot simply exclude from its history. His dandruff and nail clippings remain part of the room, which had been arranged for him in case he came back. The room’s marked door and the remembered care taken to welcome him stand in painful contrast to the hostility she admits feeling. The house is not just a backdrop to family life; it holds the evidence of efforts to make a place for people who never fully belonged to one another.

Edwina’s work offers another way of inhabiting the house. The first-edition Betsy and Tom books remain on a shelf, material reminders of a career built around her illustrations. At home she could move between the children’s nursery or kitchen and her own studio, whose smell of turpentine marked out a space for her creative work. Alicia made that arrangement possible. Edwina’s account therefore links artistic achievement to domestic cooperation rather than presenting the two as separate lives.

Betrayal, Suspicion, and Disclosure

Charlie’s later return to the house brings a sharper rupture. While Edwina is away at a meeting with her agent, hoping to meet Charlie and buy him lunch and shoes, he enters the home and takes valuable antiques, including silverware and framed landscapes. Alicia catches him as he is about to leave with a rucksack full of stolen goods. During the confrontation on the stairs, she is badly injured, suffering a smashed hip and collarbone. Charlie runs without helping her. Edwina changes the locks, and Dickie describes the event as closing off the part of her heart that had belonged to Charlie. She cannot forgive him and comes to believe that he had also stolen her jewellery box years earlier.

Edwina’s mistrust of Charlie and Lucas’s concealed guilt converge when Lucas finally admits that he arranged the earlier burglary. He says that he was in trouble at school, owed money to someone dangerous, and handed over the house keys and information about when the home would be safe to enter. He had expected the arrangement to bring money without anyone being hurt; instead, he says, everyone was hurt. The confession corrects Edwina’s long-held suspicion that Charlie was responsible for that theft, but it does not undo the consequences of the deception.

The disclosure comes as Edwina opens the old jewellery box and finds its ordinary compartments empty. Its remaining contents—a wedding ring, a lock of hair, the children’s baby teeth, and a photograph—make the box a container of family memory as well as a record of loss. Lucas’s admission leaves Edwina trembling and unable to speak. When she later challenges him to explain how everything was her fault, he refuses the invitation to assign blame. He recognises the family’s repeated movement from accusation to revenge to guilt and wants that cycle to stop. Edwina’s story ends not with an easy reconciliation, but with the truth exposed and the possibility of a different response opened between them.