Edwina and Barbara

Edwina and Barbara’s long hostility turns a remarried family into a landscape of divided loyalties. Barbara is Dickie’s first wife and Lucas’s mother; Edwina becomes Lucas’s stepmother, but never feels that their household is truly shared. Their antagonism is sustained less by frequent confrontation than by avoidance, reports passed through Lucas, and a domestic life in which each woman remains present to the other without becoming reconciled. Its consequences reach beyond the two women: Lucas’s position between his mother and stepmother helps make family belonging feel conditional, while the story’s later rejection of blame offers a possible break in the pattern they established.

The Family Triangle

Edwina remembers Barbara as the original Mrs Spinner, nearing ninety in the memory, and recalls that even the thought of her makes her stomach churn. Barbara and Lucas are described as exceptionally close, entwined like rope. Edwina had tried hard to join that closeness, only to feel that the two shared their widow’s peaks and, more consequentially, their mutual loathing of her. The resulting rivalry is not simply a contest between former and current wives: it places a child within an existing bond between mother and son, while Edwina’s role in the new household remains uncertain.

Edwina’s account of being Lucas’s stepmother makes that uncertainty stark. For years she remembered his birthday, wrapped his Christmas presents, made his breakfast, and washed his clothes, fulfilling the practical duties of a parent while feeling as if she were performing care rather than experiencing it. She sees Lucas as Barbara’s child, not her own, and stresses that she and Lucas share no DNA. Her private resentment goes further: she imagines that, in a capsized boat, he would be the last person she saved, and wonders whether she might hold him underwater. These thoughts expose the hostility’s intimate cost. Edwina’s efforts to provide for Lucas do not dissolve her sense that he belongs to Barbara and that she herself is acting a part.

Contact at a Distance

The women’s hostility is maintained through indirect communication. Edwina remembers Barbara’s handwritten notes in purple ink on personalized stationery, including a complaint about a missing sock after Lucas had returned from Kennington. The notes were not addressed to Edwina; Barbara would not even write her name. Their form turns an ordinary domestic detail into a pointed accusation while preserving distance between the women. Lucas’s clothing, visits, and habits can become material for scrutiny, with Edwina conscious that Barbara hears about how he is treated and what happens in the house.

Their rare direct encounters make that distance measurable. In forty-five years, Edwina says, they come face to face four times: at a matinee of Jesus Christ Superstar, where Edwina is too unnerved to return after the interval; in Russell & Bromley; in court; and at Dickie’s funeral. At the funeral in Southwark Cathedral, the building’s size allows them to be kept far apart. Lucas sits with his mother, while Edwina neither speaks to him nor receives an effort from him to seek her out. She leaves the wake early, feeling as if she has attended a work function in which she has no real place. The funeral makes the family division visible: bereavement brings the household together physically, but not into a shared circle of intimacy.

An earlier telephone exchange shows how the women’s avoidance affects even a practical decision about Lucas. After Dickie is devastated by a difficult weekend with his son, Edwina decides she cannot simply send Lucas back to Chelsea without checking that someone will be there to receive him. She has never spoken to Barbara before. When Edwina identifies herself, Barbara immediately hangs up. Edwina’s irritation at the abruptness is mixed with a practical concern about what would happen in a genuine emergency. She then tells Lucas to call his mother himself. Barbara refuses to let Edwina put him in a cab and will not enter Edwina’s house, but arranges to collect her son and instructs him to wait outside. A black cab arrives precisely an hour later. The exchange establishes a pattern: Barbara will arrange Lucas’s return, but not cross the threshold of Edwina’s home or deal with Edwina directly.

The Household as a Site of Conflict

The rivalry also belongs to a wider domestic structure in which Edwina’s authority as stepmother is both exercised and undermined. She tries to make Lucas welcome, even creating a room for him after learning of his interest in the Apollo space mission. A hand-painted tile identifies it as his room, and Dickie has argued that Lucas might want to come back, even for a night. Yet Edwina remembers that she could not bring herself to say that she did not want him there under any circumstances, and feels relief when Lucas stays with Barbara on returning to Britain. The room’s welcome and Edwina’s private rejection coexist: her care is real in its actions, but never free of resentment or uncertainty about her place.

The strain also touches the household’s paid care and racial assumptions. Alicia, a part-time cleaner when Edwina first meets her, becomes the twins’ daily nanny and later remains to do ironing and cleaning. Edwina recalls that her mother used a racist slur for Alicia; later, Edwina angrily challenges Dickie when he describes Lucas as having had little contact with a Black person. She associates Dickie’s assumptions with the education he and Lucas received at Wyebourne College. This material does not make Barbara responsible for those attitudes, but it clarifies the crowded social world around the stepmother conflict: domestic labor, race, class, and household authority intersect, while Edwina’s own attempt to defend Alicia sits alongside her antagonism toward Barbara and Lucas. The family’s divisions are not confined to the women’s exchanges; they shape who is welcomed, who performs care, and who is treated as an outsider.

Blame and Its Inheritance

Late in the story, the old rivalry resurfaces as Edwina considers Lucas’s childhood fear that, whenever he was away, his mother might be killing herself. She insists to herself that this fear was caused by Barbara’s madness, not by Edwina. When she senses that Lucas is angry, she challenges him to explain how everything could have been her fault. The question draws the family’s inherited habit of accusation into the open: Lucas does not want to blame anyone. He describes a cycle of blame, revenge, and guilt that has gone on too long and needs to stop.

Lucas then confesses that he arranged the theft of Edwina’s jewelry box. He had been in trouble at school and owed money; when someone offered him a solution, he handed over the house keys and told them when it would be safe to enter. He says the plan worked in its immediate aim, but that everyone was hurt in the end. The confession concerns Lucas’s own actions, not a new direct confrontation between Edwina and Barbara. Its importance to their relationship is that it interrupts the reflex to assign all damage to one person: Edwina trembles and weeps, while Lucas declines to revive the family’s familiar cycle of blame and revenge. Barbara and Edwina do not reconcile in these scenes. Instead, the relation’s final movement is indirect but significant: the hostility that shaped Lucas’s place between them is acknowledged as part of a destructive inheritance, and Lucas tries to end its repetition.