In the early 1970s, his new editor at Knopf, Bob Gottlieb, and his wife, Maria Tucci, came for dinner at Gipsy House and were struck by the easy confidence with which Roald ran everything: supervising the food, leading the conversation, radiating energy all round. At the end of the meal, Tucci recalled him going upstairs for a moment to check that Ophelia and Lucy were both asleep in bed. As he returned, she watched him from the kitchen. He was quite unaware that he was being observed. She was shocked to see the transformation that had taken place. Gone was the mask of the incandescent entertainer; instead, “his whole face had sagged with exhaustion.” But the moment Roald saw her, he instantly “pulled himself together” and the two of them had an animated conversation about Russian painters. It was quite clear to Tucci that “everything that looked so perfect was in fact breaking apart,” and that Roald himself was in danger of becoming “a truly tragic figure”—a writer who wanted “to control everything in his own life,” but was gradually becoming a victim of circumstances and events that were beyond his control.77
His ability to disguise his tiredness and ill health was waning. A hip replacement in March 1977 reminded him once again how vulnerable he was and just how little Pat was able or wished to look after him. His old school friend from St. Peter’s, Douglas Highton, wanted to visit him in hospital in the London Clinic and phoned Gipsy House to ask when would be a good time. Pat, he recalled, was “very offhand, very cold.”78 He was shocked at her lack of warmth, and was touched by the fact that Roald had brought orchids with him into the hospital to keep his spirits up. One particularly grim day Roald called Liccy and told her he simply had to see her. She came over immediately. From then on, they would often meet illicitly if he went away on business trips, Liccy using the name Fiona Curzon when she checked into his hotel. It was the one thing that made him look forward to travel. In almost every other respect, he was now reluctant to leave Great Missenden.
Roald loved Gipsy House and he loved his routine. He loved his hut, he loved listening to music, he loved his games of snooker on Saturday evening, and he loved his orchid house, which also contained a huge cactus that he had inherited from his mother and that periodically required the roof to be raised in order to accommodate it. He was near to his sisters. Olivia’s grave was close to hand. His memories of that countryside now went back over thirty years. He had taken full root in the Chiltern soil and become, as Tessa described him, “completely a creature of habit.”79 Though living in London, Tessa was still a frequent visitor. Theo was almost permanently in residence. Like most of his siblings, he had found school disagreeable and ended up with a private tutor, which he infinitely preferred. His injuries limited the speed at which his mind moved, but in almost all other respects he led a relatively normal life. He drove himself to work nearby, and was always at the door to greet guests when they arrived. He, too, liked the regularity of life at Gipsy House. Neisha remembered him as being “adorable, like a puppy,” “very programmed” and “very constant in mood—a bit like an old man” whenever they came to visit. He followed her younger sister, Charlotte, around “like a shadow” and was usually in charge of the ice bucket when it came to pre-dinner drinks. He always put on a tie and lots of aftershave before dinner. He was “impeccable.” Neisha imagined that he probably changed for dinner even if he and Roald were there on their own. Lucy and Ophelia, however, were quite the opposite and still true to Roald’s bohemian ideals. They were “wild,” Neisha recalled. “No shoes and socks and a bit snotty and a bit dirty.”80
In 1978, Pat was featured on the British television show This Is Your Life, in which famous celebrities unexpectedly reencounter their past. Various Hollywood and theatrical stars joined Pat’s schoolteachers, her friends and family in paying tribute to her career and to her extraordinary recovery. Roald sat through the whole self-congratulatory jamboree with a studiedly grumpy expression on his face. At the end of it, Pat affectionately reached for his hand. He pointedly withdrew it and put it back in his pocket.81 She was mortified. But for Roald the celebration simply reminded him what a charade his public existence had become. He missed Liccy terribly and felt daily deprived of his greatest pleasure, her company. He ached for her physically and yearned for her conversation. Above all, he missed the “gentle warmth” of the love that he had discovered so late in life and that had been taken away from him so swiftly. Almost constant pain from his back exacerbated this sense of injustice and brought out the quarrelsome, cantankerous side of his nature. It was a dark period. Even Ophelia began to notice that her father’s “lightness” had disappeared.82 Weekends home from school seemed to drag, she remembered. When Pat’s mother wrote to complain that she had been excluded from staying at Gipsy House during the preparations for This Is Your Life, Roald dictated a scathing letter telling Eura Neal neither he nor Pat ever wanted to see her again. Pat felt as if “a lifetime of antagonism between them had burst like a ripe boil.”83
That year Roald went into hospital again for yet another operation on his spine. Far from being fearful of the procedure, he seemed eager for the escape it offered from his domestic environment. “I haven’t minded it here at all,” he told Ophelia. “I’ve never had such a peaceful rest since I was a baby in a pram. I’ve just been lying down and reading and watching a bit of telly—and very few visitors. Lovely. Next week I’m sure I’ll be able to go home and that won’t be nearly so peaceful.”84 Interviewed on the long-running BBC Radio series Desert Island Discs in 1979, he confessed that he longed for isolation. Asked whether he would mind being alone on a desert island, he replied: “I hate to say it, but I would love it.”85
His secret meetings with Liccy were soon discovered. It was Ophelia who called him on the phone in his hotel room in 1978 when he was supposedly up in Glasgow having a meeting with a potential illustrator and immediately recognized Liccy’s voice at the other end of the line. Ophelia pretended she hadn’t done so but she understood immediately what was going on. Her emotions were conflicted. She felt disappointment that the double-dealing was beginning again but also relief that Liccy might be returning to her father’s life. Soon she would also come to understand that it was not just the prospect of pleasure that had brought him to Scotland. He was running an errand of mercy.
While en route to Scotland, the vehicle in which Liccy’s daughter Charlotte was travelling as a passenger had spun off the road. She was thrown out of the window and subsequently rushed to hospital in a coma, where she was diagnosed with a severely fractured skull. Liccy had called Roald for help almost as soon as she arrived at the hospital and he responded immediately, flying to Scotland to be with her, and offering advice and support with medical treatment. As Charlotte emerged from her coma, she recalled seeing Roald—“this tall, long, lanky man”—leaning over the sink in her room. He too had recently been in surgery. He was asking her boyfriend, who was a medical student, to change the dressing on a wound on his back. “It was all very secret that he was up there,” Charlotte added. “But he helped my mother an awful lot.”86 When Charlotte returned to London to convalesce, Ophelia called Neisha and arranged to have lunch with her. “We were huddled up in this Arcade near Sloane Street,” Neisha recalled. “I remember how really tight we were … and [Ophelia] looked at me and she said: ‘Your mum’s having an affair with my dad. And this watch, that’s not my dad, that’s your mum buying it, isn’t it?’ ” For Neisha it was the first time she had been certain of her mother’s relationship with Roald, and the deceit of it pained her, yet even then she could see that it was “the biggest love story ever.”87 Charlotte agreed. “I felt hurt,” she told me, “but I don’t know another couple who were ever so much in love.”88
Ophelia’s vexation too soon subsided. Before long, she was going over to Liccy’s flat to pick out the shards of glass that continued to emerge from Charlotte’s scalp for many weeks after the accident. “I understood that going to visit Liccy was traitorous,” she would write later. “But the truth was I adored her. I was thrilled at th
e prospect of seeing her again.” After a few hours, Liccy would often usher her out, telling her that Charlotte was tired and needed to rest. Sometimes Ophelia would lurk behind and see her father’s dark blue BMW pull up outside the flat a few minutes after she had departed. She found it strangely reassuring.
From her flat nearby, Pat became suspicious that the affair had restarted and tried to enlist her younger children as spies. But Ophelia and Lucy were torn between loyalty to their mother and their awareness of just how miserable their father was without Liccy. They remembered how his weariness evaporated when she was around, how she could transform his mood, making him more affectionate, more loving. They could also see that he needed someone to look after him. For his part, Roald could not bear the fact that Liccy was often away filming: he encouraged her to give up this “ruthless, horrible, druggy world” and train as a gilder, so that she could see him more often. She did not take long to heed his advice. Eventually, after taking a crafts course at City and Guilds, she started her own company, Carvers and Gilders, in partnership with three other craftspeople. Explaining the breakup to Sonia Austrian, Roald once admitted, perhaps disingenuously, that all he wanted was someone to make him a cup of tea.89 Sonia, who was often inclined to take Pat’s part against Roald, admitted that she could see why he felt that way, and even Pat would acknowledge that when Roald started to become frail, she was in no position to look after him. It was no surprise that a part of Ophelia longed for Liccy to come and save her “crumbling family.”
My mother had been abandoned and it felt like we were drowning. It wasn’t her fault. She too had loved gardening and antiques but their marriage was sour, old and she had started to resent his talents and his love of solitude. She could do very little on her own and he was still looking after her as he was growing old. He was tired and she was angry with him. She couldn’t forgive him for loving Liccy and for lying and now she felt discarded by her husband and her children. It was a terrible conundrum to be in as an adolescent. We tried to make it up to Mom but she saw us all as traitors. How could we love the woman who had betrayed her? 90
In 1979, Pat sought sanctuary in the Abbey of Regina Laudis, a Benedictine monastery in Bethlehem, Connecticut, whose abbess, Dolores Hart, a former movie actress, was reputed to have given Elvis Presley his first screen kiss. It was “an unpretentious place in the New England countryside … almost hidden in a valley of pine and maple and surrounded by flowers.” Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, had recommended it. Pat spent three days there quietly trying to come to terms with her failing marriage. The same summer she visited Martha’s Vineyard for the first time—with Lucy and Ophelia—staying with Millie Dunnock and her husband. There, she “fell in love” with the island.91 Theo eventually joined them and they all went to holiday in California, but without Roald, who stayed behind in England.
In 1980, Pat bought a house on the Vineyard at Edgartown, just across from Chappaquiddick. It had once been owned by the whaling captain on whom Herman Melville had reputedly based Captain Ahab. Roald visited it briefly the following summer, commenting wearily to the Boston Globe on his way back that “people get tired of being with each other for years—day in, day out. They need some time away from each other.”92 When he got home, he wrote Pat a letter that speaks volumes as to how exhausted he had become.
Darling Pat,
I arrived here this morning feeling as though I had been boiled in a saucepan for days like a dirty handkerchief. I had spent most of the journey over thinking hard about how much I suddenly hate travelling and rushing round at airports and how much I love just sitting in Gipsy House.
I can no longer take the heat. I seem to sweat in it all the time. The actual physical effort of moving my rotten old body around in it is far, far greater than people realize. And it is so painful.
I am not old. Sixty-fiveish is not all that ancient by modern standards and lots of people at that age are bouncing around all over the place. But the combination of two steel hips, no calf muscles (from the spine injury) and six spine operations, has, I honestly believe, added at best, ten years to my age from a physical standpoint. Probably more.
I do try not to display pain openly, but I am never out of it unless I am sitting or lying down, and then only half the time. On this trip I was never out of pain. I take three or four drinks and begin to feel fairly normal under the anaesthetic and then I can do my stuff joking about socially. But that is not the way I want to go on.
I long to sit quietly in Gipsy House which I adore, writing my books and stories which I adore more and playing snooker a couple of times a week which I also adore, and popping up to London twice a week to play blackjack for which I have a passion. Those things are what I like doing in my retarded physical condition. I really do feel that my travelling days are virtually over. I don’t mind a couple of hours at a time in my car, puttering around the wine districts of France in cool weather. But that’s about the limit.
The Vineyard is not my cup of tea. I would be totally dishonest if I said it was. Neither the heat, nor the crowds, nor my inability to do my work make it congenial. Already (it is now 6 PM and I have been back here ten hours) I am beginning to feel a sense of contentment creeping over me. I am “at home.” Tomorrow I can settle down to writing seven days a week. On Wednesday we will play snooker. And the weather is cool, my back is aching less.
I must tell you that during that nightmare rush around Boston Airport when we arrived in a mini plane from the Vineyard with lots of baggage and were trying to get a ticket for Theo (with no porters and no trolleys) I came very close to simply throwing myself out of the large airport window, right through the glass. The urge was enormous, as the back pain was like a red hot knife.
So there we are. The burden of my song is that everybody please excuse me from travelling far distances anymore. I’m not up to it and it’s time I said so.
I love everyone in the family, especially you, but just let the old boy vegetate in his own surroundings.
Love
Roald 93
Though Pat was well aware of the problems and later admitted that the “only time Roald and I were really close was in a time of crisis,” she too had not fully faced up to the fact that her marriage might be nearing its end.94 Increasingly, she was away from home. Roald described her “swashbuckling around America giving lectures (at $4000 each!) to the blue-rinse section of Alaska, Texas, Michigan etc … I can think of no worse way to earn a living,” he told Dirk Bogarde, “but she’s hooked on it.”95 Now, when the two of them were together, the atmosphere was often poisonous. Christmas 1980 was particularly bad. Ophelia found it “unbearably tense,”96 while for Pat it was “depressing” and “grotesque.” Roald was colder than ever and her own children seemed particularly distant. The grim holiday celebrations culminated one evening in the revelation that Roald was seeing Liccy again. Pat was “frantic.”97 It was clear to her now that she had to get away. She phoned Sonia Austrian in New York, who invited her to come and stay until she had decided what to do.
That night, Pat remembers, she whispered in Roald’s ear as he was sleeping that she wished he were dead. The next day at the airport the whole family came to see her off. As she went through the gate, she looked back over her shoulder and saw Roald roaring with laughter. It was “the most horrendous sight of my life,” she wrote. “He looked like Satan. I did not turn back again.”98 Ophelia however felt that her mother’s description was probably colored by her own mood and recalled instead how “distressed” and “unhappy” her father had been.
Eventually, after a year of bitter soul-searching, Pat found some sort of comfort in the monastery in Bethlehem and, encouraged by Tessa and her new husband, James Kelly, she agreed to file for divorce. She felt hatred toward Roald, bitterness toward Liccy, and desperation at the thought that her marriage was about to end. The stroke had “robbed her of her past.” Now her anchor in the present was being removed. She was scared she would end up a “fucking bag lady.” Acknowledgi
ng that there had never been “any real affection … no real love” in their relationship, she admitted that what hurt her most was the fact that Roald had been disloyal.99 In 1982, she told one journalist: “The fact that I am about to have a divorce is really hideous for me … I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”100
She bought an apartment in New York on the Upper East Side overlooking the East River. In early July 1983, in a London court, almost thirty years after they were married, Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl were granted a divorce based on uncontested and unspecified complaints about Roald’s behavior. Neither was present. Pat still maintains she was “screwed”101 financially in the divorce settlement, but that this was her lawyer’s fault more than it was Roald’s, who later more than made it up to her. That Christmas, she returned to Gipsy House and took what belongings she wanted. About to take a picture that Olivia had painted, she hesitated, remembering how griefstricken Roald had been at her death. She decided to leave it for him.102
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