Edwina and Rowena

Edwina and Rowena’s mother–daughter relationship is shaped by affection that survives distance, but also by Edwina’s belated recognition of how much she failed to understand. Rowena is remembered as exceptionally clever and complicated, a daughter whose distress became visible in the most ordinary domestic places: at the dining table, in her bedroom, and eventually in letters Edwina could not bring herself to answer. The relationship’s central tension is not an absence of love, but the painful gap between loving a child and knowing how to reach her.

A daughter remembered through her room

Rowena’s old bedroom preserves the relationship in the form of things left behind. It is larger than the spare room and still arranged as a teenage girl’s room, though it has been abandoned for years. A quilt folded on the bare mattress was one of Edwina’s sewing phases: she cut up her daughter’s old summer dresses and joined the pieces with tiny stitches. The fabrics brought back holidays in France, fishing nets, sneakers, and happier summers. Sewing gave Edwina something to do with grief, but the image of stitching also measures what she could not repair: the loss that opened between her and her daughter.

The room’s few personal objects make that absence concrete. A silver-backed hairbrush and matching comb sit on the dressing table; a china horse stands on the windowsill, and a dressing gown hangs behind the door. These belongings have been left in a room that feels staged rather than lived in. For Edwina, it is not simply a spare bedroom in a house being shown to a visitor. It is the preserved space of a daughter whose life moved elsewhere, and whose past Edwina can still enter through objects.

Intelligence, education, and family friction

Edwina thinks of Rowena as clever and complicated, and remembers that she may have been only about twelve when she moved down there to get away from the boys. Her intelligence was apparent within the family: of the three children, Rowena had the finest brain, a fact that irritated Dickie. Their disagreement over education exposed different experiences and expectations. Edwina had hated boarding school and did not want her children sent away; Dickie dismissed that objection, insisting that everyone hated it and pointing out that he had been sent at seven. Lucas had been entered for Wyebourne College almost from birth, while Rowena’s education took a different course.

The contrast between the children sharpened family tensions. Lucas failed to gain entry to his father’s old college despite the effort and expense, while Rowena later won a place at Hertford College. Dickie responded to each disappointment with a migraine, and Rowena’s success made the imbalance impossible to overlook. Edwina’s memory of her daughter’s academic ability is therefore affectionate but not detached from the household’s rivalries: Rowena’s gifts could be celebrated and, at the same time, become a source of resentment.

The eating disorder and Edwina’s belated alarm

Edwina places the first signs of Rowena’s eating disorder when her daughter was about fifteen, sitting at the same table where the family had meals. Rowena cut food into minute squares, smeared it around her plate, and chewed without swallowing much. Then came excuses to miss meals, claims that she had already eaten large portions at school, and stories of eating toast after school. Edwina initially tried to explain the changes away: perhaps it was a phase, perhaps Rowena was studying too hard in her O-level year, perhaps she disliked eating with two adults in a formal dining room. Each possibility postponed the more frightening explanation.

The physical evidence grew harder to dismiss. Rowena’s uniform hung loosely as she lost weight, but Dickie reassured Edwina that girls often went through strange eating phases. He referred to Elise, Barbara’s goddaughter, who had been sent home from boarding school after developing anorexia nervosa and who, as far as he knew, was now fine. Edwina felt that attention kept returning to the House rather than to the distress unfolding in her own home. She had heard Rowena vomiting; Alicia found napkins full of rotting food hidden behind radiators in Rowena’s bedroom, along with evidence of binges and empty laxative packets.

Alicia’s discovery prompted Edwina to contact Rowena’s school. Meetings with therapists and doctors followed, with Rowena appearing ashen and caught out. She told her mother that restricting food seemed to be the one thing she could control. Edwina held her while they both cried, and the family briefly believed that they had caught the problem early. That hope proved incomplete. Rowena never fully recovered: she did not clear her plate or take seconds, avoided pudding unless drunk, and looked desperate when discovered eating cheese. When upset or stressed, she rejected food; Lucas, by contrast, sought comfort in the biscuit tin. The difference underscores how differently distress inhabited the children, and how little a single intervention could settle.

Affection, regret, and the unanswered letters

The room and its memories reveal how strongly Edwina still longs for physical closeness with Rowena. Remembering her daughter, she feels an almost overwhelming desire to stroke her head and bury her face in her neck. That impulse sits beside a painful admission: Edwina has been wrong, and time to put things right may be running out. Before she can change her mind, she reaches for blue airmail letters addressed to her and Dickie, which she has never answered, and hopes she has not waited too long. The letters turn regret into a specific history of missed response. The evidence does not establish what reconciliation follows, only that Edwina recognizes the cost of her silence and wants to act before the opportunity disappears.

A relationship within a wider cycle of blame

Edwina’s relationship with Rowena exists within a family repeatedly organized around injury, blame, and attempts at control. In a later confrontation, Edwina challenges Lucas to tell her how everything was her fault; Lucas refuses to continue the cycle of blame, revenge, and guilt. This exchange does not resolve the mother–daughter relationship or tell what Rowena herself thinks. It does, however, frame Edwina’s earlier regret within a broader change: she is beginning to see the damage caused when pain is converted into accusation, and to recognize that her own relationship with Rowena cannot be repaired by remembering affection alone. Its remaining possibility lies in acknowledging what went unanswered and reaching toward her daughter while there is still time.