Edwina and Dickie

Edwina and Dickie’s relationship moves from an affair that breaks up his first marriage to a second marriage shaped by sexual obligation, contrasting attitudes to public life, and a profound conflict over their son Charlie’s schooling. Edwina remembers both the physical intimacy that drew them together and the guilt that made her feel obliged to sustain it; much later, Dickie’s intervention at Wyebourne College becomes the source of her fiercest anger toward him.

From Affair to Marriage

Edwina had seduced Dickie away from his first wife, Barbara. In Edwina’s later reckoning, that beginning gave sex a moral weight beyond desire: after Dickie left Barbara, Edwina felt it would be unfair for her, as the marriage-wrecker, to withdraw the very intimacy that had helped win him. She believed her body, brown eyes, slow smile, and willingness had been part of what he chose, and she continued having sex with him partly out of guilt. Their marriage thus carried its origin forward into its daily life, turning a past act of seduction into an obligation Edwina felt she had to keep renewing.

The couple’s sexual styles differed. Edwina remembered Ollie as energetic and enthusiastic, while Dickie was deliberate and almost ritualistic, as though following instructions. She thought his technique was good but did not enjoy kissing him as she had kissed Ollie. Her compact account of the difference was that she had loved Ollie and was grateful to Dickie. Gratitude, desire, and love therefore did not coincide neatly in her understanding of her marriages.

Dickie had described Barbara as cold and unresponsive, contrasting her expensive nightgowns and Pond’s night cream with Edwina’s sensuality. Edwina’s own memories complicate that comparison: she mostly slept naked, and Dickie valued her enjoyment of cunnilingus, which she understood as unusual in the 1970s. Yet after marriage, maintaining their enthusiastic sexual life became difficult. Edwina compared sex to exercise: she might not want to begin, but could enjoy it once underway. In old age, she no longer minded the prospect of never having sex again and had stopped sleeping naked, partly because seeing her aging body distressed her. Her recollections show how a role initially bound up with seduction became something she performed, and eventually something she could set aside.

A Shared Household, Unequal Interests

One small domestic detail remained striking to Edwina: Dickie expected to sleep on the left side of the bed, the side she had occupied with Ollie. The change of surname and the new wedding ring mattered less to her than this rearrangement of familiar space. In the present, she sleeps alone on a sagging mattress, and the bed’s dip has become a physical remnant of a shared life that is over. Her memories of the bedroom also place the marriage among her wider history of intimacy, rather than treating it as an isolated romance.

Their interests outside the home were less shared. Dickie worked as a political speechwriter for the Liberal Party (UK), a career Edwina regarded with little interest. She liked the party’s quiet, equivocal position but did not want to involve herself in Dickie’s professional world. He survived the political controversy surrounding Jeremy Thorpe and remained in post under David Steel, whom Edwina found charming, though she did not socialize with political figures. Barbara, by contrast, had valued political life and imagined the influence she might have wielded as an MP’s wife. Edwina found talk of Dickie’s work boring; by the end of the day, she recalls, Dickie did too. Their marriage did not make them equally invested in his public ambitions.

Children, Care, and Conflict

A couple of years into the marriage, Edwina planned another pregnancy. She stopped taking the pill, and Dickie approached conception with conspicuous determination, making love to her especially thoroughly and sometimes asking her to stand on her head afterward. The effort succeeded: at thirty-six, Edwina became pregnant with her third child. The account presents this as a deliberate joint undertaking, while also preserving the bodily awkwardness and almost comic precision with which the couple pursued it.

Their household depended heavily on Alicia, who had first met Edwina as a part-time cleaner and went on to care for the twins before staying to do the ironing and cleaning. Alicia had two sons living with her mother in Kingston and lived with her husband and some of his cousins; Edwina never visited her home or met those relatives. Alicia’s domestic labor was central to the household, but its terms were unequal. She cooked and did the laundry, while Dickie insisted that his work shirts be professionally cleaned. When Edwina told Alicia the shirts would be sent out, Alicia responded by banging pans and huffing in anger as Edwina hid in her studio. The episode reveals the friction beneath the household’s routines, and how the couple’s decisions could shift work onto the person employed to support their family.

Dickie’s and Lucas’s attitudes toward Alicia brought another strain into view. Dickie once admitted that Lucas had not previously been in close contact with a Black person. Edwina was furious at the racialized way he spoke of Alicia and told him that the language belonged to an earlier era. She connected his assumptions to Wyebourne College, where, in her view, the only Black people he or Lucas had encountered were pupils of royal descent or staff who cleaned the toilets. Her defense of Alicia is one of the clearest moments in which Edwina directly confronts Dickie’s outlook; the disagreement exposes how race and class shaped the family’s domestic life, even when Alicia was a familiar and indispensable presence in their home.

Wyebourne and the Marriage’s Breaking Point

When Charlie needed a place at Wyebourne College, Dickie offered to use his standing as an old boy to speak to the school. Edwina was shocked when Charlie was admitted. Later, when the school scandal emerged, she guessed that Dickie’s connections had helped secure the place and became angrier with him than she had ever been. She believed he must have known that the school was unsafe because Robbins had been in his year there; she accused Dickie of entrusting their child to a man who abused boys.

Dickie’s response did not resolve the accusation. He regarded sexual interference at boarding school as something boys simply experienced and got over, and he defended Robbins as someone he knew from school who would not hurt a fly. Edwina rejected this normalization and insisted that Robbins had abused a child while in a position of care. The evidence leaves a sharp difference between her belief that Dickie should have understood the danger and his stated belief that such conduct was ordinary. It does not establish that he knowingly placed Charlie in danger; it does establish why Edwina held him responsible for using his influence to secure the place and for minimizing the abuse afterward. Their conflict over Wyebourne brings their marriage’s competing loyalties into focus: Dickie’s deference to his school world against Edwina’s insistence that the harm to their son be named.