Lucas and Barbara

Lucas and Barbara’s relationship is the novel’s most enduring blood bond, but closeness does not protect it from neglect. Their connection is formed in a divided family, tested by Lucas’s years of addiction and avoidance, and brought into focus when he sits beside his dying mother and chooses presence over blame.

A close bond inside a divided family

Barbara is Lucas’s mother and Dickie Spinner’s first wife. When Dickie marries Edwina, Lucas becomes Edwina’s stepson, but Edwina never experiences him as her own child: they share no DNA, and she admits that her years of remembering his birthday, preparing breakfast, washing his clothes, and wrapping Christmas presents felt like pretending to care. That distance helps define the household Lucas and Barbara share. Edwina recalls Barbara and Lucas as close, “entwined like rope,” united by their mutual loathing of her. Their alliance gives Lucas a place in the family, but it also sharpens the conflict between Barbara and Edwina.

Edwina’s account shows that Lucas’s position in the home was uneasy from the beginning. She remembers first seeing him covered in blood, then later trying to welcome him as an official, if part-time, member of the family. She learned about his interest in the Apollo space mission and painted a mural for him; a hand-painted tile marked his bedroom door as his. Dickie argued that Lucas might want to return, even briefly, and Edwina could not openly refuse. In practice, when Lucas came back to Britain, he stayed with Barbara. These details place Barbara not only in opposition to Edwina, but also as Lucas’s more natural home within the fractured household.

Care, dependence, and withdrawal

The bond persists across distance. Lucas’s mother usually phones on Sundays, while Dickie tries to reach him midweek. But as Lucas’s addiction deepens, he becomes absorbed in his own life and increasingly unwilling to hear what Barbara needs. When she begins to say that she is “a bit blue, darling,” he ends the call by claiming he has important meetings or dates. The excuses conceal his isolation: his only real appointment is with alcohol. His self-protection becomes a form of abandonment, especially because Barbara is lonely and short of money.

The family’s circumstances change after River Walk is sold. Barbara has little money left after making her new flat habitable, and the green watered-silk curtains, with their fringes and swags, remain as evidence of her expensive, somewhat old-fashioned taste. Lucas later recognizes that she was “a teeny bit strapped for cash,” but at the time he chooses not to understand the severity of her difficulties. The contrast is painful: the son who once belonged so closely to his mother becomes unavailable when her need is explicit.

Lucas does not see the worst of his own decline through his parents’ eyes. Their visits to him in the 1990s trail off, and he is relieved that they do not witness his filthy home, rotting food, or the state of his life. Dickie’s visits cease because Edwina needs him in London; Barbara’s visits also recede. The distance gives Lucas a measure of privacy, but it leaves his mother’s loneliness and his own deterioration largely unspoken between them. Terence looks after Barbara when Lucas is too intoxicated or selfish to do so, quietly occupying a caring role Lucas has failed to fulfil.

The cost of absence

Years later, Edwina understands that Lucas’s distance from Barbara was not simply indifference. She sees again the bedroom tile with his name and the Christmas presents left untouched, and imagines the boy’s fear that, whenever he was away, his mother might be trying to kill herself. In her interpretation, his vigilance belonged to a childhood shaped by Barbara’s distress, not to anything Edwina herself had done. The memory complicates the hostility surrounding the family: Lucas’s closeness to Barbara may have involved fear and responsibility as well as affection.

Lucas’s own recognition arrives through loss and crisis rather than through a planned reconciliation. After Dickie’s funeral, Lucas travels back to New York in a drunken, drug-fuelled state. During severe turbulence, violently sick in a tiny plane toilet, he realizes that he no longer wants to die. He enrolls in a twelve-step programme and begins an unsteady recovery. The revelation does not erase his neglect of Barbara, but it marks a turning point: he has to live long enough to face the relationships he has evaded.

The bedside vigil

As Barbara nears death, Lucas returns to her. He brings her leatherette photograph album because he recognizes that the few pages of family pictures matter more than the furs and jewellery she has lost. He places the album on her blankets, sprays Diorissimo around her pillow, pulls a chair close, and holds her hand. He tells her, “I’m here, it’s okay.” The gesture is small and practical, but it answers the long record of unanswered calls and curtailed conversations with the simplest form of care: staying beside her.

Lucas thinks of Barbara as the only relative he has left and allows that she may have loved him a little too much, while conceding that this may be what mothers do. His imagined comfort for her is a remembered family idyll: Barbara on a sun lounger at River Walk, a cherry-topped cake and a chilled drink nearby, Dickie bowling while Lucas bats as a boy home for the summer. The scene is an idealized moment before the family’s losses and conflicts. It does not undo what came after, but it gives Lucas a way to hold his mother within a memory of shared warmth rather than only illness and absence.

Significance of the relationship

Lucas and Barbara’s bond is marked by a tension between intense attachment and prolonged failure of care. Their closeness in the divided household is recalled chiefly through Edwina’s perspective, while Lucas’s adult behavior reveals how addiction turns emotional withdrawal into concrete neglect. The late vigil reverses that pattern without claiming that the past has been repaired: Lucas cannot recover the calls he ended or the support he withheld, but he can return, bring the album, and hold his mother’s hand. The novel’s insistence that blood remains strong is therefore not a promise that kinship prevents harm; it is a recognition that the tie endures, even after estrangement, and can still call Lucas back to the bedside.