Further problems with reading Bowen's Death of the Heart

I'm completely befuddled by Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938). It takes a while for the novel to focus on the main character (I assume, part 3 may be different entirely), the 16-year-old orphaned Portia, who's shunted around from home to home, more or less unwanted (don't cry for her too much, though - her living conditions are hardly Dickensian) and her relationship with a cad, 23-year-old Eddie. But why does Bowen make everything so obscure and inscrutable? It's one thing for Portia to be confused by Eddie, who talked to her endearingly all the time - darling, he always calls her - and then who backs away from her and does all he can to make himself unattractive to her: flirting openly with other women, getting staggeringly drunk at dinner - and then he tearfully apologizes. For all their talk - even talk of marriage - we sense that both, especially Portia, are inexperienced, and as far as Bowen lets us know they never do more than kiss, if even that. The only conclusion I can draw is that Eddie is a repressed homosexual, fighting an internal battle against his urges, w/ Portia as the victim. But maybe that's too much of a contemporary reading (or a 1980s reading?). Whatever Eddie may be suffering from or through remains obscure through the first 2/3 of the novel, and we have no sense of why Portia is drawn to him unless it's that she sees no other options. But Bowen continues to make reading this novel as difficult as possible; I don't expect novelists to spell out everything for the reader, but at least give us some clue - especially if you include, as Bowen does, several sections of Portia's diary and of Eddie's correspondence to her: These sections could at least open up the characters in a new and more compelling way, but they're instead dusty dry - Portia's diary in particular no more than a cursory record of what she does each day. Why clog up your narrative w/ a diary unless it's revealing and insightful?