Colin ‘Cubby’ Wall had decided that he wanted to go and say goodbye to Barry’s body too. Mary, usually compliant and agreeable, had found this excessive. Her voice had grown shrill on the telephone to Tessa; then she had begun to cry again, and said that it was just that she had not planned a large procession past Barry, that this was really a family affair . . . Dreadfully apologetic, Tessa said that she quite understood, and was then left to explain to Colin, who retreated into a mortified, wounded silence.
He had simply wanted to stand alone beside Barry’s body and pay silent homage to a man who had occupied a unique place in his life. Colin had poured truths and secrets he had confided to no other friend into Barry’s ears, and Barry’s small brown eyes, robin bright, had never ceased to regard him with warmth and kindness. Barry had been Colin’s closest ever friend, giving him an experience of male comradeship he had never known before moving to Pagford, and was sure he would never have again. That he, Colin, who felt himself to be perpetually the outsider and the oddball, for whom life was a matter of daily struggle, had managed to forge a friendship with the cheerful, popular and eternally optimistic Barry, had always seemed a small miracle. Colin clutched what was left of his dignity to him, resolved never to hold this against Mary, and spent the rest of the day meditating on how surprised and hurt Barry would have been, surely, at his widow’s attitude. (The Causal Vacancy, by J. K. Rowling)
Whom do ‘his’ and ‘him’ refer to?
(1) If they are not reflexive pronouns, they can’t be Colin at all, and so do they refer to the late Barry?
(2) Does ‘to him’ the complement of ‘clutched’? I’m afraid it may be not, not yet seen the case in dictionaries. Then does ‘to him’ a modifier for ‘his dignity.’ If the latter would be right, does ‘one’s dignity to somebody’ make sense? What does it mean? If neither of them are proper, what goodness does the clause mean?