Josh

Josh is the son of Oliver Rose and Barbara Rose and Eve’s younger brother. As their parents’ separation turns the family home into a place of hostility and physical danger, Josh appears both as a child trying to hold the family together and as someone whose safety has become part of the crisis. His return with Eve leads him into the house’s collapse, where the siblings escape the immediate danger but destroy the paired figures that had survived the wreckage.

Identity and Family Background

Josh is one of the two children of Oliver Rose and Barbara Rose. The novel gives relatively little independent access to his private thoughts; much of what readers learn about his feelings comes through what Eve tells Ann and through Oliver’s observations. This limited perspective places Josh within the family system rather than apart from it: his parents’ separation changes his ordinary routines, unsettles his relationship with both parents, and makes the house itself a source of fear.

For a time, Josh maintains some connection with Oliver even as the parents become openly hostile. Oliver continues to attend Josh’s basketball games, a recurring duty that offers one measure of continuity amid the deterioration at home. Josh also finds solace in basketball and other sports. These activities do not resolve the household crisis, but they give him a life beyond the daily confrontation and help him retain some ordinary equilibrium.

Oliver’s reflections reveal a more painful complication in the father-son bond. He thinks of Josh as a boy in his own image, yet also resents that Josh was formed in part from Barbara’s genes. Oliver recognizes that this feeling is unworthy and feels guilty about it; he has a similar reaction to Eve. The thought exposes how far the marital conflict has distorted Oliver’s sense of family: even his love for his children is, in his mind, compromised by their connection to Barbara. The passage describes Oliver’s damaging perception, not a rejection expressed by Josh himself.

Life in the Divided Household

As the conflict intensifies, the children initially try to bring Oliver and Barbara back together. Their attempts fade as the parents’ hostility becomes unmistakable, and they settle into reluctant acceptance of a household divided under one roof. Josh’s adaptation is quieter than Eve’s: he keeps attending sports and maintains contact with his father, while the atmosphere around him remains charged with strategies, concealment, and estrangement.

The possibility of being sent away to camp brings the danger of that arrangement into focus. Eve tells Ann that she does not want to go, explaining that she fears leaving Oliver and Barbara alone together. She worries that, without the children present, anything might happen. Eve also says that the siblings can no longer talk to either parent as they once might have, and that the family seems to have ceased to exist even though everyone still lives in the same house. Her account establishes the conditions surrounding Josh as well: camp is not simply a departure from home but a proposed escape from a conflict the children cannot control.

When the children leave, Oliver and Barbara meet at the Sidwell Friends School parking lot. Oliver follows Barbara’s station wagon in his Ferrari as she carries the children and their luggage. Josh makes a direct appeal to his father: “I sure wish you two would either make up or make peace,” he whispers. Oliver assumes Josh said the same thing to Barbara. The request distinguishes reconciliation from a ceasefire: Josh longs for his parents to repair their relationship, but even peace between them would be better than the continuing war. Oliver hugs him and feels regret, although that tenderness is entangled with his resentment toward Barbara and his own guilt about it.

Return from Camp

After the children have been away for three weeks, Eve tells Ann that neither parent has contacted them and that Josh is a nervous wreck. Their attempts to reach home have failed: the telephone has been disconnected, and a telegram sent to their parents has come back marked undeliverable. Eve has also contacted both grandmothers, who have heard nothing. The silence turns the children’s earlier fear of leaving their parents alone into a new fear that they have been abandoned or shut out.

Eve decides to go home and see for herself. Ann tries to delay her, promising to find Oliver and Barbara and make them call, but Eve and Josh leave on a one-o’clock bus before Ann can prevent them. The return is therefore a response to the adults’ failure to communicate, not a casual visit. By travelling together, the siblings act on their belief that they remain their parents’ children regardless of the separation. Their arrival at the house also brings them directly into the hazardous environment from which their absence had temporarily kept them away.

They reach the house by taxi and look at it before the cab pulls away. Oliver sees them from inside but, disoriented and afraid, retreats into the darkness rather than greet them. When the children knock and call, “Mom. Dad. It’s us,” he still cannot respond. They open the door and enter. The slick floor causes them to fall as they try to make their way toward the stairs; they struggle up, fall again, and grope forward. Josh’s return places him not only in the path of his parents’ conflict but inside the mechanical chain of danger created throughout the house.

The Collapse and Escape

As Eve and Josh advance, the untacked stair carpet gives way and cast-iron pots begin rolling down the stairs. The clock’s chimes sound, pictures fall, and the children press together, narrowly avoiding the descending pots. Barbara, watching from above, tells them to go back, then implores Oliver to save their children. Her appeal breaks through his fixation on the struggle with Barbara: he repeats that they are their children and tells Eve and Josh to get out while he tries to rescue her.

The siblings move through the litter and make their way out of the open door. They survive the immediate collapse, though they remain outside, frightened and watching as the danger continues inside. When Ann later enters the wreckage, she finds them following her. Eve calls for her parents and asks why they did this. The question gives voice to the children’s bewilderment: the destruction is not an abstract consequence of the separation but the shattered setting of their family life, with Oliver and Barbara dead beneath the rubble.

The Cribb and Molineaux Figures

Among the debris, Josh gets down on his knees and finds one of the familiar Cribb and Molineaux Staffordshire ceramic boxing figures. The figure he holds is Molineaux, its black head still strikingly clean and its pugilistic pose intact. Eve reaches for the companion figure, Cribb. For a frozen moment the siblings hold the pair with equal force; Josh grips Molineaux by its base and claims it as his, while Eve claims Cribb.

Their struggle ends not in possession but in destruction. As Josh and Eve pull against one another, the figures snap apart, leaving shattered plaster in each child’s hands. The scene echoes the parents’ contest over their shared home and possessions, but shifts that conflict onto the next generation: even after Oliver and Barbara’s deaths, the children reproduce a struggle over who gets to keep what remains. Josh’s presence at the end of the novel is thus defined by both survival and inheritance. He leaves the collapsed house alive, but the family’s emblematic pair of fighters does not survive the siblings’ claim to it.