Rowena

Rowena is Edwina’s daughter and Charlie’s twin sister. Her story is shaped by close but difficult family bonds: an eating disorder that persists in altered forms, a fierce commitment to her twin’s recovery, and a long estrangement from her mother after Charlie’s death. In adulthood, she builds a life in Australia, works with young women facing eating disorders, and makes a tentative gesture toward repairing the family’s broken connections.

Identity and early life

Rowena and Charlie are twins, though their childhood appearances seem to resist easy comparison. Lucas remembers Rowena as a girl with glasses and such fine hair that her scalp showed through; Charlie’s face, by contrast, seemed to change with every mood, while his unruly black curls remained constant. The twins shared a private world of books, drawings, and invented games. Lucas, nearly a year older, felt excluded from it, and their indifference to his opinions helped turn his resentment into hostility. He once smashed a model Charlie had spent a weekend making, an early instance of the antagonism that would mark their family life.

Rowena was eleven when Edwina married Dickie, and she was permitted to dress as a bridesmaid despite Lucas’s objection that she could not do so in glasses. Rowena answered that she could do what she liked. The exchange offers a small glimpse of her independence even as a child. Lucas did not attend the wedding: he had another engagement, the birthday party of Elise, his mother Barbara’s goddaughter.

Food, study, and growing independence

Edwina began to suspect something was wrong when Rowena was about fifteen. At the family table, Rowena cut food into tiny pieces, moved it around her plate, and chewed without swallowing much. She then avoided meals and offered explanations about large school dinners or food eaten after school. Edwina initially tried to interpret the behaviour as a phase, or as a response to studying for O-levels, eating alone, or the formality of the dining room. Those hopeful explanations did not make the pattern disappear.

By the time Rowena was at Oxford, she was doing better, but food remained governed by strict rituals. On her birthday weekend she travelled home by coach and ate a butterless ham sandwich slowly, shredding it into crumbs and washing the small mouthfuls down with repeated sips of water. Edwina knew not to watch her eat and busied herself with cleaning, polishing candlesticks, and going in and out of the garden. Their time together was easier while Dickie was away at rugby in Twickenham, and they could talk about Oxford without his presence shaping the conversation.

At university, Rowena found people whose priorities resembled her own. For the first time, she was not the only young woman in her class more interested in reading than in clothes. Her mother was relieved that she seemed happy, though still wished she would make more of herself; Rowena’s unappealing knitted jumper became one focus for Edwina’s concern. The contrast captures a recurring tension between Rowena’s own standards and the expectations others place on her.

After Charlie’s imprisonment, Rowena transferred her degree to UCL and completed it while living at home. She earned a first. Dickie described her as having worked almost exclusively, with no men or social life, but the achievement was unmistakably hers. Shortly before Charlie was due to be released, she left her publishing job and moved to Australia.

Charlie, Elise, and the cost of care

Rowena’s devotion to Charlie becomes most visible after his release and during his struggle with addiction. When he could not obtain a visa for Australia because of his prison sentence, she paid for him to go to Thailand and planned to meet him there. She hoped the change of place, time, sleep, and good food would help him recover. Her plans included yoga and meditation, books, swimming, and meals of barbecued fish. In a postcard to the family, she described markets, Buddhist temples, and a beach hut close to the sea; Charlie added his own exuberant note to the remaining space.

For a time, the family heard that Charlie was sober and healthy. Rowena believed he was improving and made friends wherever he went. But she had responsibilities in Australia, and after leaving him enough money for a return flight, she asked him to continue the regime they had established. He kept it up for almost a week, then joined other travellers and moved to a rougher part of the resort. Ten days after Rowena returned to Australia, Charlie was found dead in a backpackers’ hostel, a needle in his arm. Edwina had placed enormous hope in Rowena’s ability to save him and later blamed her for his death. In retrospect, Edwina recognizes that Charlie’s final choice was his own, not Rowena’s failure to rescue him.

Rowena also becomes a witness to Elise’s death. At the inquest, she described trying to revive Elise, giving her the kiss of life and attempting to clear her airway with her fingers. Nothing worked. Her precise account of the failed effort makes her part in the tragedy direct and physical: she was not merely connected to the dead girl through family and circumstance, but had tried to keep her alive.

Australia and the possibility of repair

Several years after Charlie’s death, Rowena retrained as a counsellor and worked at a Melbourne centre for young women with eating disorders. She also bought a small house near St Kilda beach and made a life there with her partner, Pat. Dickie described Pat as a freckle-faced blonde woman, with her arms wrapped around Rowena in an enclosed photograph. The move and Rowena’s new work suggest not a clean break from her past, but a life built in which her own experience of disordered eating could inform care for others.

Rowena’s relationship with Edwina remained severed for years. After the September 11 attacks, however, she tracked down Lucas’s email address and sent him a long, kind message. She apologized for missing Dickie’s funeral and explained that Pat was being treated for breast cancer, so she had chosen not to leave her. Rowena also told Lucas that she and Edwina were still estranged, while expressing hope that they might one day reunite. Her message acknowledges the distance without treating it as permanent.

Edwina’s later preparations give that hope a concrete destination. In a letter, Rowena invites her mother to come to St Kilda, where she could paint and where they would cook outdoors; she adds that she wears Edwina’s charm bracelet every day. Edwina gathers travel tickets and the keepsakes she intends to take, including the photographs and small family mementos recovered from the bottom drawer of her jewellery box. The book does not show the reunion itself. It leaves Rowena waiting in Australia, while her invitation makes reconciliation imaginable after years of grief, accusation, and silence.