Terence

Terence is Barbara’s hairdresser, loyal companion, and live-in carer in her later life. Their shared household begins as a decision that seems disastrous but proves useful to both: Barbara has a carer and coiffeur on site, while Terence, who is penniless, has a roof over his head. His death from a stroke is a decisive loss for Barbara, preceding her disorientation and wandering in the streets of Chelsea.

Identity and Place in Barbara’s Life

The novel introduces Terence through the objects and images associated with Barbara. In a photograph displayed in her care-home room, he sits beside her in a bow tie while she wears a turquoise taffeta frock. The picture evokes a social occasion, but it also records a relationship that became central to their everyday lives: Terence was Barbara’s loyal hairdresser and, later, her live-in companion.

The arrangement is described as having seemed disastrous at first, yet it worked out well in practical terms. Barbara gained someone who could care for her at home and attend to her hair; Terence gained housing. The account does not supply an independent history of Terence or explain his original circumstances beyond his poverty and his work as a hairdresser. Instead, it defines his place through the domestic relationship he formed with Barbara and the services, companionship, and shelter that their cohabitation brought together.

The Household Arrangement

Lucas’s recollection gives the relationship a sharper, more complicated edge. He remembers Barbara as finally able to relax once Terence had moved in. In Lucas’s view, Terence’s being homosexual and penniless meant he was unlikely to stray, and Barbara at last had a loyal companion and pet. This description reveals Lucas’s interpretation of his mother’s security and of the household’s balance of dependence; it should not be mistaken for Terence’s own account of the relationship, which the novel does not provide.

Terence’s role was also practical and visible in the careful management of Barbara’s appearance. The novel identifies him as the person responsible for her hair in the photograph: a towering structure of spun black nylon, sculpted around her own thinning, dyed hair. His skill was not a minor detail in their domestic life. Hairdressing made him part of the daily work of maintaining Barbara’s presentation, while the photograph preserves the polished result as an image of their shared life.

Hair, Photographs, and Domestic Memory

Barbara’s hair recurs as a concrete trace of Terence’s care. A box of Wella Raven Black remains in the bathroom cabinet at the flat, joining his work on her hair to the objects left in the home. The dye is mundane, but its presence makes his absence tangible: a familiar item persists after the person associated with it has died.

A separate photograph links Terence to Lucas’s twenty-first birthday. Barbara and Lucas are pictured together hours before the celebrations, with Lucas perched on the arm of her chair and birthday cards gathered on the windowsill behind them. The novel does not identify the photographer, but suggests that it was probably Terence, reasoning from the scale of Barbara’s hair. The possibility places him just beyond the frame: he may have arranged the image that records mother and son together, while remaining unseen in the resulting photograph.

Death and Its Consequences

Terence dies of a fatal stroke before Barbara enters the care home. His death is followed by a marked change in her behaviour. She begins wandering the streets of Chelsea at three in the morning and bangs on the door of Peter Jones, insisting that she needs bias binding and soda crystals. The episode presents her distress through a specific, dislocated errand and the unlikely hour at which she makes it. The narrative explicitly connects Terence’s stroke with Barbara being pushed over the edge, though it does not suggest that his death alone explains every aspect of her later condition.

By the time Lucas visits her in the home, Barbara can no longer walk and needs extensive physical assistance. She does not recognize him. In that scene, the image of Terence beside a dressed-up Barbara and the memory of the hair he fashioned contrast with her present dependence and with the loss that came before her institutional care. Terence’s death matters not only as an absence in Barbara’s life but as a turning point in the sequence of events that leads from their shared household to her wandering and eventual placement in a home.

Narrative Significance

Terence’s characterization is deliberately bounded. The reader sees him through photographs, household traces, and Lucas’s memories rather than through his own speech or interior perspective. His bow tie, Barbara’s elaborate hair, and the remaining hair dye give the relationship material form; the stroke and its aftermath establish the cost of losing the person who had shared her home and cared for her. This indirect portrait makes Terence important without inventing a fuller biography: he is remembered through the domestic work and companionship that shaped Barbara’s later life.