4 ideas
She stays on the Thames with her daughters Martha and Tilda, never quite asking him back and never quite letting go. When she finally crosses London to see him, the meeting fails, and the novel's storm then sets boats and people loose without resolving her marriage.
The houseboat people rest on mud at low tide and float at high tide, so they are twice a day neither fully on land nor fully at sea. The novel uses this physical condition to show people suspended between commitments: marriage and separation, respectability and failure, staying and leaving. The setting is the psychology, not a backdrop for it.
Tilda climbs masts, mudlarks, and sells salvaged tiles to a dealer. When parents are absorbed in their own uncertainty, children take on practical authority early, and they often read situations more clearly than the grown-ups do.
The Reach holds people who have not managed ordinary life on shore: a marine painter selling a leaking boat, a male prostitute used to store stolen goods, and an ex-naval officer whose wife wants to leave. Their shared failure produces real solidarity and mutual tolerance.