Edwina’s marriage to Dickie

Edwina’s marriage to Dickie is remembered less as a wedding than as a set of domestic and emotional adjustments whose consequences linger in the house. She had drawn Dickie away from Barbara Spinner, his first wife, and later understood parts of their marriage as an effort to repay that choice: through sex she did not always want, through attempts to welcome his son Lucas Spinner, and through a continuing suspicion that Dickie might have been better off staying where he was. The marriage joined two families, but it did not erase the tensions between them.

The marriage in retrospect

Edwina’s recollection settles on small, durable signs of the second marriage. She remembers the unfamiliar surname and the new gold ring, though she already had a perfectly serviceable wedding band. More striking was Dickie’s expectation that he sleep on the left side of the bed—the side Edwina had occupied with Ollie Treadaway. That ordinary disagreement makes the past feel physically present: marriage altered the arrangement of the bed without making the earlier marriage disappear.

Edwina distinguishes the two husbands through their styles of lovemaking. Ollie had been energetic and enthusiastic; Dickie, by contrast, was deliberate, almost ritualistic, and technically accomplished. She had never enjoyed kissing Dickie as she had kissed Ollie. Her private assessment is stark: she loved Ollie and was grateful to Dickie. The contrast does not cancel the second marriage, but it reveals that Edwina entered it with an emotional history that the new ring and surname could not replace.

Desire, duty, and the cost of leaving Barbara

Edwina recalls that she often had sex with Dickie out of guilt. She had used her body, brown eyes, slow smile, and small white teeth to seduce him away from Barbara; after he left his first wife, Edwina felt it would be unfair to withdraw the sexual attention that had helped win him. In her account, sex becomes both intimacy and an unpaid debt, a way of sustaining the bargain she believed had brought them together.

Dickie had described Barbara as sexually cold, contrasting her night cream and expensive nightgowns with Edwina’s sensuality and willingness. Edwina remembers trying to maintain that role after they married, even as the effort became harder. Her comparison of sex to exercise captures the compromise: she might not feel inclined at first, but could enjoy it once she began. In old age, she no longer wants to have sex and feels distressed by the sight of her body. The woman who once felt at ease in her own skin has become more prudish, a change she connects to age and bodily discomfort rather than to any renewed obligation to Dickie.

A stepmother inside the family home

Dickie’s marriage to Edwina also made her a stepmother to Lucas. She knew that Lucas reported back to Barbara about what Edwina wore and how the household ate. This scrutiny affected even the privacy of her own bedroom: Edwina did not want her stepson to see her naked and give Barbara further cause to criticize her. She feared that domestic complaints—such as serving fish fingers for Sunday lunch—might be joined by accusations about sexual impropriety. Barbara’s handwritten notes, including one about a missing sock, made the hostility tangible without requiring direct confrontation.

Edwina’s effort to make Lucas welcome is particularly revealing. After an earlier incident had been brushed under the carpet, Dickie suggested that Lucas might want to return, even if only for a night. Edwina could not bring herself to refuse outright, though she was relieved when Lucas later stayed with Barbara after returning to Britain. At the time Lucas became a regular, part-time member of the family, Edwina researched his interest in the Apollo space mission and painted a mural for him. A hand-painted tile declared the room his. Lucas arrived with a small leather suitcase, barely acknowledged the work, and shut the door on Edwina and the twins as they excitedly praised their mother. The welcome was sincere, but it did not produce the closeness Edwina hoped for.

The household and its unequal arrangements

The marriage was lived within a household whose practical work depended heavily on Alicia. She had first come as a part-time cleaner with two sons living in Kingston, cared for by their grandmother, and then continued in the Treadaway home after the twins no longer needed a nanny. She did the cooking and laundry; Dickie preferred to have his work shirts professionally cleaned. When Edwina told Alicia that this arrangement would end, Alicia banged the pans in anger while Edwina hid in her studio. That domestic dispute shows how the household’s routines—and the labor sustaining them—were negotiated within the marriage rather than simply provided by Edwina and Dickie.

The unequal racial attitudes in the family sharpened those tensions. Dickie admitted that Lucas had not been in close contact with a Black person before Alicia. Edwina objected angrily to his wording and rejected the assumptions behind it, while reflecting that Dickie’s education at Wyebourne College had left him accustomed to a world in which Black people appeared chiefly as pupils of royal descent or as cleaning staff. Her response exposes a divide between husband and wife, but also the limits of her own household: Alicia’s indispensable work did not prevent her from being subjected to racialized language and class inequality.

Regret and the marriage’s unresolved balance

Edwina’s retrospective judgment is not that Dickie’s decision to leave Barbara brought simple happiness. She remembers wondering whether he had sacrificed too much. She had little interest in his political career and considered herself a poor cook; she suspected that, apart from the enthusiastic sex she says was mostly performed, she made a poor second wife. Dickie’s political life had survived a difficult episode and continued, but Edwina found talk of his work boring, unlike Barbara, who had cared about political influence and the prospect of being an MP’s wife.

Afterward, Edwina repeatedly wondered whether Dickie wished he had not left Barbara. She imagines that much might have been avoided had he stayed, then links that thought to Ollie in a sentence that trails off. The marriage remains caught between competing forms of attachment: Edwina’s love for her first husband, her gratitude to her second, and her guilt about the woman Dickie left. Its significance lies in that unresolved accounting. The marriage changed who belonged in Edwina’s home, but neither the new ring nor her efforts as wife and stepmother could make the past—or the costs of the choice—settle into a single, finished story.