To begin with, Roald and Liccy’s relationship was completely clandestine, and both intended that it should stay that way. Roald had no idea where this passion would lead him, while Liccy had only recently emerged from her acrimonious divorce, which would be made absolute in November 1974, and was in no mood to be involved in another marriage breakup. The two of them just wanted the simple pleasure of being together. During school terms, their trysts followed a regular pattern. Roald would choose a good bottle of wine from his cellar, then drive to London, stopping off to pick up two fresh Dover sole at the local fish-mongers on the way and some chlodnik—an ice-cold, creamy beetroot soup with chunks of lobster—from Stefan, the Polish chef at the Curzon House Club. As he waited for Stefan to prepare the soup, he would have a quick flutter on the blackjack tables. Then he would drive over to Liccy’s flat for dinner.
It is almost impossible to underestimate what a transformative effect the relationship had on him. At last he had found a companion who shared his love of antiques, paintings, food and good wine. Liccy was young and beautiful, strong and experienced. She was amusing and intelligent. She was an aristocrat, but a subversive one, who enjoyed breaking rules. She needed no looking after. It even seemed as if destiny had cut her out for him when he discovered she had been born in Llandaff—just a few streets away from the Villa Marie, where he himself had first drawn breath. His love for Liccy affected his personality, too. The man his family often found “undemonstrative and cerebral”24 began to become tactile and loving in ways that startled them. And his letters to Liccy are suffused with this unexpected tenderness and vulnerability.
My Darling, for nearly a year and a half, I have been seeing you fairly often. But with each month and each week that goes by, the desire to see you more and more often grows stronger and stronger. So this week is a rough one. Only fifty minutes away from you, but I cannot come. It has become absolutely necessary that I see you and touch you and talk to you every few days, and I suppose that’s what real love is all about. Lovemaking is another department, and of course that is also necessary. But the prime necessity, the first longing, the thing that has become vital and essential is “contact,” meeting together in a room, sitting down and talking, allowing the warmth to pass from one to another, the marvellous gentle warmth of love. R25
As Liccy’s visits to Gipsy House became more and more frequent, the Dahl children and the Crosland girls got to know each other and become friends. Ophelia warmed to what she saw as the Crosland elegance and sophistication, and struck up a good friendship with Charlotte, who felt that the two of them were “really quite similar … in a tomboyish way.”26 Liccy’s eldest daughter, Neisha, took great solace from the support that Roald was already giving her in her own ambitions to become an artist. They would pore over art books together and he would lend her paintings. She fondly recalled the many journeys to Gipsy House on Sundays, driving up in Liccy’s yellow Mini to eat Pat’s delicious roast chicken with cream and tarragon sauce that always seemed to be on the lunch menu. Pat, she remembered, was never anything other than warm and hospitable, “very cosy and natural … not at all a Hollywood film star in appearance, but quite bohemian.” Charlotte and Lorina however were initially quite frightened by Roald. They found it hard to deal with his need to be judgmental and the fact that he could be so combative in conversation. Nevertheless, the two families quickly bonded. Theo even developed a crush on Charlotte. He would sometimes travel down to London, bringing all three girls presents and taking them out to a musical. Eventually, the visits to Gipsy House became so regular that the Crosland girls began to balk at their frequency. “I sometimes felt like the au pair girl,” Neisha told me. “Ophelia and Lucy were a lot younger than us in those days and wanted to play kick the can when sometimes we’d rather be meeting our own friends or just hanging out at home.”27
In Working for Love, Tessa gave Liccy the pseudonym “Grace” and recalled that her mother would return from her outings with her new friend, “bags brimming with lampshades, nighties and newfound knowledge.”28 Soon Liccy began to join Roald and Pat for dinner at the Curzon House Club, Dahl’s favorite gambling haunt in Mayfair. The club was situated in “one of the most beautiful Georgian houses in London,” and the interior gave Dahl a “thrill” every time he walked in there.29 Pat was no gambler, but Liccy took to the place like a duck to water. “In Felicity, Roald had found someone who adored the tables as much as he,” Pat recalled, adding that “she usually wound up a winner.”30 Liccy’s positive energy had a galvanizing effect on the Dahl family, and the younger children in particular warmed to her immediately. “We all loved Liccy,” Ophelia told me, recalling that she was like a burst of much-needed “jazzy” brightness into the Dahls’ broken world. “She was young and seemed to understand teenagers better than either of my parents—one of her friends drove a double-decker bus. At the time I had no inkling that my father was in love … only that he seemed lighter when she was around.”31 Tessa, too, was dazzled. It seemed to her as if Liccy had “resurrected” the family.32
Pat was still completely unaware of the affair, while the children continued to believe that Liccy was no more than a wonderful family friend, in whose company their father seemed unusually relaxed and happy. As Pat was often away on speaking engagements, Roald had bought a London flat in Battersea—not far from where Liccy lived—with some of the money invested in the children’s trust funds. Tessa and Pat increasingly spent time there. When Pat was away and the kids were at boarding school, Roald felt free to call Liccy from Gipsy House whenever he wanted to speak her. But when Pat was in Great Missenden, he would drive out of the village and call her from a local phone box. He was meticulous in his secrecy.
One person, however, tumbled to what was going on. And that was Tessa. A disturbed and rebellious youngster, she had been unhappy at her aunts’ boarding school, Roedean, and moved instead to nearby Downe House in Kent, another all-girls boarding school, which she then “walked out of” when she was just sixteen. It was the end of her formal education. Now, just as her father was beginning his relationship with Liccy, she had returned to live at home. There she felt she could help her father, whose approbation she craved, and be a “buffer” between him and Pat.33 Unfortunately, her actions had the opposite effect. Roald felt cramped by her desire to please, which came across as neediness, and, as Lucy Dahl once commented, “if there was one thing my father hated, it was to be demanded of. He liked to give, but he didn’t like to be demanded of.”34 He withdrew from Tessa, while she became increasingly neurotic. To Maria Tucci, the wife of Roald’s new editor Bob Gottlieb, who stayed there as a house guest, Tessa was “clearly wild and cracking up. … She was crazy, selfish and spoiled. … She was like a disaster in the making.”35 Yet Roald did little to try and take her in hand. He later admitted to Marian Goodman that he was becoming frightened of her.36
Tessa now ascribes much of her maladjustment to her early childhood. Even as a toddler, she felt constantly in the shadow of her elder sister who, she sensed, was blessed with a charm and natural radiance she lacked. Though her cousins assured me that all the Dahl children were treated equally, and though Sue Denson even recalled that Tessa had been Roald’s favorite, most others agreed that a special glow surrounded Olivia. Her early death seemed to offer Tessa no chance of ever escaping from this shadow. That situation was compounded when Ophelia was born in 1964, for it appeared that, even as a baby, she had inherited her dead sister’s mantle. Her name evoked Olivia’s. Her personality developed in a similar way. She had similar interests and mannerisms. It seemed to Tessa that her younger sister was Olivia “reincarnated.” She certainly felt that her father behaved as if she was. Once again, it seemed, she had another “favorite” to contend with. Moreover, her father, who had an instinctive mistrust of psychiatrists, decided not to take her to an analyst. Instead, so Tessa maintained, he medicated her with barbiturates.
One night, she heard her father arrive back from London. It was quite late. Ear
lier in the day he had suggested she take a “wonderful new sleeping pill” that he himself had recently been prescribed. She didn’t think it strange, as her father had often offered her pills. She had taken it before she went to bed. But it had little effect on her and she was still awake when he returned. She heard him go to the telephone and make a call to Paris. Curious, she went to the top of the stairs to listen. Soon, she realized her father was calling Liccy. “I heard him on the phone and I heard him saying, ‘Madame Crosland s’il vous plait’ … I think he just presumed he’d drugged me sufficiently not to hear. … But I heard him have this phenomenally amorous conversation, which was nothing like I’d heard him have with anyone else in my life, certainly not Mum.”37
She returned to bed. Next morning, she called her aunt, Else Logsdail, and went over to see her. She told her everything she had heard. Else tried to calm her down and advised her that, whatever else she did, she should not tell her father. But Tessa was not about to heed this advice, and the next evening she asked her father bluntly if he was going to get a divorce. When he asked her why, she confronted him with her evidence. Caught in the headlights as it were, he exploded, accusing her of prying into his life, of snooping, of being “a nosy little bitch.” “I’m fed up with it. I’m fed up with you,” he told her. “Get out of my house, I don’t have any energy left for little bitches like you.”38 Tessa was stunned. As she was packing her bags to leave, Roald returned and told her that she could stay, but he wanted her to promise that she would talk to Liccy before she told her mother anything. Tessa agreed.
Two days later, she went up to London, where, after some discussion, Liccy presented her with a difficult choice. As neither Roald nor she wanted to hurt Pat, Tessa could either “devastate” her father by forcing him to break off the relationship or share their secret and let things go on. Tessa, hoping she would earn her father’s love and become “more of a part of his life,” took the latter option and promised not to tell her mother anything.39
Pat herself still had no suspicions. She and Roald went to Tobago together on what she described as “a second honeymoon” in January 1974.40 There, she remembered, he was “outrageously witty” and “charmed everyone. Including me.” She came home for some cosmetic surgery on her face, which was still damaged from the stroke. But soon afterwards, Roald seemed to have become “strangely cold” again.41 That summer, the family suddenly changed their holiday plans. Roald decided not to go to Norway, but to join Liccy, her girls, and a friend of theirs called Phoebe Berens, in Minorca. Neisha recalled that while the Croslands were staying in a picturesque eccentric house at the end of a jetty, the Dahls—who had booked at the last minute—were forced into an unattractive holiday development near a crowded beach. “It was definitely a holiday designed so Mummy and Roald could be together,” she chuckled.42 Cracks in the facade of Roald’s marriage were now beginning to appear. Liccy had confided what was going on to her friend Phoebe, and when Pat “bragged” to her about how happy she was with Roald and what a great sex life they were having, Phoebe’s look of disbelief began to make Pat unsure of Roald’s fidelity. But she upbraided herself for being “a nasty, suspicious tight-ass.”43 In fact, according to Tessa, her father’s sex life with her mother was very far from being healthy. “He would confide in me,” she recalled, telling her things about his physical relationship with her mother that were “sordid” and “inappropriate.”44
As the two families came to be more and more in each other’s pockets, it was not just Pat who began to be suspicious. Lucy had a hunch her father was “schtupping” Liccy when they got back from that holiday in Minorca and saw that she was in almost every photograph.45 Then Liccy had her tonsils out and unexpectedly came to stay at Gipsy House to recuperate. Pat later told Lucy that she had caught Roald leaving their bedroom in the middle of the night. “She opened her eyes and he froze and they just looked at each other. Both acknowledged what was happening,” Lucy told me. Then Pat “turned over and went back to sleep.” Ophelia noticed bottles of wine from Gipsy House cellar in Liccy’s flat, while Neisha wondered why there were so many orchids on the table and so many boxes of Roald’s favorite Bendicks Mints in the cupboard. Charlotte found aeroplane tickets and an itinerary for Roald and her mother in the bedside drawer. The intrigue was being stretched to the breaking point.
At the root of these machinations was Roald’s attempt to balance his desire to keep his family together with his obsessive, romantic need for Liccy. Perhaps he hoped that, with time, his desire for her would ebb. But it was a love that, far from waning, was becoming ever stronger. They spoke constantly and when she was away he felt the need to write and tell her how much he loved her.
You may think, my darling, that I have a rather dreamy sort of absent-minded memory, and up to point you would be right. But it is only like that with things that I do not really care very much about. I am able to remember vividly in an absolute detail anything that is important to me. And so, you see, when you are away, as you are now, I’m able to console myself just a little bit by living again and again through the splendid moments of our last meeting and the wonderful one before that and … and lots and lots of others. Great times, marvellous times. Easily the best times of my own particular life and how can I possibly thank you enough for that. Only, I think, by loving you a tremendous amount, which is what I do.46
Liccy herself was in a difficult situation. Though she reciprocated his feelings entirely, she believed that Roald and she would never be able to live together because he did not want a divorce to rip his family apart. Tessa agreed that it took her father many years to contemplate separation, but her reasoning was more cynical. She believed that it was not so much to do with distressing her mother or his children as it was with disturbing his writing routine at Gipsy House.
He didn’t want to lose his house and his hut and he didn’t know what a divorce settlement would do … of course he didn’t want to lose his children, but I think he loved the hut most of all. He never thought he’d write anywhere else. … There was an equilibrium there. He had a routine. Every single day of his life was the same. He got up at the same time, he took the children to school, he made his thermos of coffee, he answered his letters, he went up to the hut, he worked to a certain time, he listened to The World and One, he had his Bloody Mary, he had his second Bloody Mary, he had his lunch, he had his nap, he watched the horse racing, he put on his bets, he got up, he took his coffee back to the hut. He was up there till about quarter to six. He’d start sniffing the scotch at six, then he’d either drive up to London or he’d have supper at home, then he’d take the dogs out they’d go out and pee and he’d go to bed. Imagine disrupting that. By the time his affair with Liccy was really strong, he’d been doing that for over twenty years.47
The complex knot of deceit inevitably began to unravel. Pat maintains that her own suspicions were finally confirmed in the summer of 1975, when she and Roald had supper with Liccy at the Curzon House Club and she felt as if suddenly she had become Liccy’s guest. In the cloakroom after dinner was over, she described Liccy turning and giving her a look. “It said very plainly, you have lost him. He is mine. I was sure then and I am sure of it now. No one can ever tell me I misread what was written in her eyes.” Next day, in a Knightsbridge restaurant, Pat asked Tessa directly if her father was having an affair with Liccy. Tessa confessed that they were. Pat went berserk, and when she later confronted Roald, she recalled that, rather than feeling embarrassment, he seemed to experience instead “bizarre delight in my distress.”48
It is likely Pat simply mistook his sheer relief that the lies were over, but her desire to turn Roald into a monster was understandable. She felt deceived and rejected. Her decision to take out her frustrations on her children was less forgivable. She stormed into eleven-year-old Ophelia’s bedroom and blurted out the news that her father had betrayed her. Ophelia burst into tears. Roald got into his car and drove to the phone box to call Liccy, who came up to Gipsy House the fol
lowing day. In a tense and emotional encounter, Liccy and Roald tried to persuade Pat that she was overreacting. Roald told her that he wanted Liccy’s companionship but did not want a divorce. Liccy herself simply observed that they had created a situation where no one could be happy.
Pat believed that infidelity, but not divorce, was tolerated within the Dahl family, and felt a pressure from Roald’s siblings to let him continue his affair. She also knew the Dahls had always had an uncharacteristically open attitude to sex. Roald had made his own views quite plain in 1949. “The love of two comparative strangers of the opposite sex for each other is neither straightforward, uncomplicated nor especially constant,” he had written then, while making a cogent and thoughtful case for cohabitation before marriage, so that young people could “test their love for each other and check their chances of a successful partnership.”49 His own family’s experience also resonated with this philosophy. Back in Bexley before the war, Sofie Magdalene—either through ignorance, exhaustion or lack of interest—presided over a household where sex was far from taboo. Alfhild was the most promiscuous, sleeping openly under her mother’s roof with several men—including Alfred Chenhalls and Dennis Pearl—before she finally chose to marry Leslie Hansen. Pearl himself also slept with her younger sister, Else, while Chenhalls, a notorious corridor creeper, attempted repeatedly to seduce both Else and Asta.
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