Guilt and blame

Guilt and blame form a recurring pattern in which grief is turned into accusation, accusation into punishment, and punishment into further guilt. Through Lucas’s response to Charlie’s death and Edwina’s estrangement from Rowena, the novel shows how the search for someone to hold responsible can prolong suffering. Its late movement is not toward a verdict that settles everyone’s share of fault, but toward the harder distinction between acknowledging harm and continuing to retaliate.

Lucas: guilt after Charlie’s death

Lucas’s feelings about Charlie are divided between resentment and remorse. He believes Charlie spoiled everything and holds him responsible for the damage surrounding Elise’s death, even while recognizing that Charlie may not have killed her. When Dickie recounts Charlie’s apparent recovery in Thailand and his death ten days after Rowena returned to Australia, Lucas does not voice the hatred and accusation he could have expressed. His silence leaves the blame unresolved rather than extinguishing it.

After drinking with Dickie, Lucas wakes to find the whiskey bottle empty and Dickie’s pad Thai largely untouched. He is late for work and feeling ill when he accepts cocaine in the toilets. The immediate change is emotional as well as physical: for the first time in eight years, he feels no guilt. He becomes certain that he was right to testify in court and to sign what he understands as Charlie’s death warrant. That certainty is temporary. The narrative connects the moment to years of drinking and drug use, a life his parents never suspected because he continued to work and exercise between binges. Addiction makes it possible for Lucas to avoid thinking about Charlie, but it does not resolve his responsibility or grief; it suspends them.

Memory, responsibility, and repair

Lucas’s guilt also reaches back to childhood. He remembers hiding under a bed in the grown-ups’ bedroom, waiting for one of the twins to find him, until Dickie comes in and tells him that the twins are downstairs having tea. In the present, the memory of Edwina making him eat chickpeas and lumpy lentil soup leads him to insist to himself that she did not deserve what he later did. The remembered food is ordinary, but it becomes part of a private reckoning: his resentment toward Edwina cannot excuse his actions against her.

The novel describes guilt as having shaped Lucas’s life for both good and ill. Charlie’s death leads him into drinking and drugs; Dickie’s death, by contrast, prompts him to stop. Even after that change, Lucas remains troubled by what he has done and wants to put some part of the story right. He recognizes that repair cannot restore everything, comparing the limits of his effort to replacing a pane of glass in a derelict house. Dickie’s remembered instruction to make an effort gives this desire a practical direction. Lucas searches for Edwina’s missing suitcases, reasoning that the residents of her building must have somewhere to store luggage; the building’s basement has a designated storage space. His effort is small beside the history of harm, but it replaces passive self-reproach with an attempt to act.

Edwina’s grief and the transfer of blame

Edwina’s grief over Charlie also becomes a way of assigning responsibility. She recalls having indulged and forgiven him until he hurt Alicia, and eventually concluding that he had always been weak. Yet she continued to hope that Rowena could save him in Thailand. After Charlie died, Edwina blamed Rowena for the death of her twin and punished her by ignoring her letters and refusing to speak to her. In this account, grief fixes on the surviving daughter, although Edwina comes to recognize that Charlie made the choice to put the needle into his arm.

Her reflection on Lucas offers a parallel, not an identical judgment. Edwina says she will never forgive him for what he did in court, but she can now understand how events led there. She connects the consequences to her relationship with Dickie and recognizes that people can react badly when they lose someone they love. This understanding does not erase the injury or amount to forgiveness. It does, however, allow her to see her own conduct toward Rowena as something she must answer for, rather than treating her daughter as the cause of Charlie’s death.

Breaking the cycle

When Lucas returns to Edwina, she anticipates another argument about who is at fault. He refuses that familiar pattern: he does not want to blame anyone, because blame has led to revenge and then guilt. His choice is not to claim that no one bears responsibility. Rather, he stops using accusation as the next step in an already damaging sequence. In the same encounter, Edwina worries about his flushed face and wonders whether she would help him if he were in danger, a fleeting sign that their old hostility coexists with a remaining human concern.

The returned jewellery box makes Lucas’s wish to repair the past tangible. Edwina sees it on the table beside the tidied letters and understands that the lost keepsakes can now go with her to Australia. The object cannot restore the years of estrangement, and Edwina still says she has no reason to forgive Lucas; nevertheless, its return gives their encounter a consequence beyond accusation. She picks up Rowena’s latest letter. The novel therefore leaves guilt unresolved as a feeling but alters what the characters do with it: Lucas tries to make restitution, and Edwina begins to face the part she played in separating herself from her daughter.