VIII
1965–1971
‘I must not let them down.’
THE BULLETIN ISSUED to the press on 20 February gave few grounds for hope. ‘Miss Neal has not regained consciousness. Since surgery there has been no noticeable change, either good or bad.’1 An update three days later suggested stasis: Pat, said the hospital spokesman, was ‘still in a critical condition’.2 Back in Britain, the Daily Mirror tugged at the heart strings: ‘The Oscar-winning actress whose home life has been marred by tragedy is near death herself.’3
In a borrowed house in Hollywood, bathing Tessa in the early evening, Pat had experienced searing pains in her left temple. She called for Roald, who suspected a stroke. Roald made a series of telephone calls, all to the same number, successful at the third attempt. Within ten minutes husband and wife were in an ambulance, Pat on oxygen, heading for UCLA Medical Center. Left behind with their new Scottish nanny Sheena Burt, Theo was disorientated and Tessa, still naked and warm from the bath, desolate, hearing sirens wailing for the third time in her short life.
At a crisis of faith, Roald had arranged a meeting with the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Intrigued by water gilding, he had visited the country’s leading specialist to find out more. He wrote a story about a bet between wine buffs: ‘I was in London when I wrote it and I got hold of the address of the most celebrated wine man in the world at the time, André Simon, and I simply went to his house and rang the bell and asked if he would be good enough to read my story and check the facts.’4 In a Los Angeles bedroom, alarmed when his wife lost consciousness, Roald had done as he always did: he asked for help from the most eminent specialist he knew, in this case neurosurgeon Charles Carton.
Carton was waiting at the hospital when the Dahls’ ambulance arrived. After two and a half hours of X-rays, he examined the pictures’ evidence of subarachnoid haemorrhage caused by a ruptured aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of a blood vessel – ‘a small dot, the size of a farthing, over the left temporal lobe’, as it appeared to Roald staring at the large, wet photographs on the viewing screens.5 Then he operated, beginning at midnight. In a seven-hour procedure Carton removed blood clots from Pat’s brain, clipped the aneurysm to prevent further rupture and reinforced the artery wall. He had told Roald that without the operation Pat would die; he suggested she would almost certainly not survive surgery either; and, with the operation over, he worried that she would suffer severe mental and physical disabilities. Throughout the endless night Roald remained in the hospital, battling the Nordic fatalism he had inherited from Sofie Magdalene, sceptical about superstition but unable to pray and determined, he suggested later, not to succumb to self-pity: Theo … Olivia … and now Pat.
Ten days later, Pat was still unconscious. Roald wrote to his mother, offering her a diligent account of everything that had happened since 17 February. His version is brisk but compassionate, and Roald did not downplay his own role: ‘I called in Dr Carton … The X-raying took two-and-a-half hours. When I was called in to inspect the pictures, it was about 10.30 p.m. … I said, “What will happen if you don’t operate?” He said, “Then she will die for certain.” So I said, “You must operate at once.” He agreed.’6 Roald likened what followed to a waiting game, the visits to Pat’s bedside that began at 6.30 each morning and continued on and off daylong, until his return to the house in Pacific Palisades at eleven o’clock at night. To his mother he pointed out reasons for optimism – ‘The left side is okay. The face is unaffected and looks normal … She’s getting fantastic attention, and every possible medical aid’; he itemized concerns: aside from Pat’s own prospects, Tessa’s unsettlement. Of course, he did not mention his own response. ‘The key thing,’ he decided, ‘was not to get depressed and feel sorry for yourself. You had to rise to the challenge. Do something. Anything was better than nothing.’7
It was an expression of his sincerest belief. Doing something had saved Theo, while the impossibility of action in Olivia’s case would haunt him until death. In the operation’s immediate aftermath, doing consisted of a bedside vigil he broke only to eat and sleep, undeterred by his wife’s unrecognizability (bandage-swathed, hairless, attached to drips and tubes, motionless, silent, eyes closed in impenetrable sleep), Roald repeating and repeating and repeating, ‘Pat, this is Roald’, his only respite frequent self-affirming visits to the children’s department of a bookshop opposite the hospital: ‘when his wife was recuperating at the UCLA Medical Center,’ the shop’s owner told fellow children’s author P. L. Travers, he ‘kept us supplied with autographed copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’8 When it came, in the third week, Pat’s response was electrifying, first a squeeze of his hand, then a flickering open of her right eye; days later she opened both eyes. She could say nothing; instead she smiled: she was going to live. Roald had been sure of this outcome, or determined to be sure, despite doctors’ forebodings, a feeling Pat would claim she shared: ‘I remember seeing them looking down at me and thinking, “My heart beat won’t stop. It just won’t stop.”’9 Afterwards Roald acknowledged no sense of elation. ‘I saw the slow, mysterious recovery of a brain that had been severely insulted,’ he remembered, ‘and the steady return to consciousness of the owner of that brain’, a detached-sounding observation, like the narratives of his short stories, with their cool chronologies of ill fortune and mischance.10 Then one day Pat, like Roald a smoker, reached out a hand for Roald’s cigarette, and he allowed himself to smile. A nurse sang as she worked. Falteringly, hazarding a single note, Pat joined in. She tried to speak, but names and words were lost to her.
Ed Goodman described the spectacle of the Oscar-winning actress, ravaged and almost destroyed, as ‘pitiful’.11 Roald’s refusal – on the surface at least – to permit himself pity for his vegetative wife divided the couple’s friends. That Pat should recover and recover fully became Roald’s obsessive concern: once again, as Tessa remembered, he had engrossed himself entirely in engineering by whatever means possible the miraculous turnaround needed to preserve his family. More than any doctor, nurse or therapist, Roald dominated the hesitant steps of Pat’s recovery. That she would live, get better, walk, talk, think, act again became articles of faith for him, however long the odds. As a storyteller he would encourage generations of children, including his own children, to believe in magic; in a hospital room in Los Angeles, amid the pink marble luxury of a Hollywood mansion and at home in Gipsy House, Roald also believed. In these tense, slow, repetitive days, two battles surged: Pat’s struggle to return to life and the battle Roald fought within himself to bring about the impossible apparently through force of will.
‘Everyone is very braced by Pat’s condition,’ Roald told Sofie Magdalene when, after little more than a month, she was released from hospital, her right leg in a steel brace, a patch over her left eye to screen her double vision.12 He exaggerated. The horror Tessa had experienced, taken by Roald with Theo to see her mother in hospital after Pat came round, could not be shaken off: Roald had miscalculated in assuming that their reunion at the earliest opportunity would benefit them all, adding to Tessa’s suffering. Pat herself was far from braced: she was angry, struggling and, frequently, bored; she was prey to depression and agonies of self-pity, and drained physically and emotionally by her pregnancy. Roald was exhausted – at times carrying Pat up and down stairs – but exhilarated by his sense of purpose. When she was well enough to take stock, Pat succumbed to resentment, too. Encouraged by Charles Marsh, she had long ago forfeited any claim to dominance in her marriage, but the shared crises of Theo’s accident and Olivia’s death had shown both Pat and Roald the possibility of a less fractious togetherness. In the altered reality of her new life, Roald now her browbeating Pygmalion, was no pretence of parity between spouses.
To cheat death was not enough for Roald: he was determined that Pat would relearn to be herself. Charles Carton advised that her therapy begin as soon as possible on leaving hospital and, with customary thoroughness, Roald hired a nurse, a physiotherapist and a speech therapist (the expense of this arrangement would shortly provoke troubled references to ‘this vast household’).13 He overruled suggestions that to attempt more than an hour’s rehabilitation a day would overtax Pat and even prove counterproductive: the programme of mental and physical stimulation he put in place occupied much of her day, often to her intense frustration, sharpened by fear and tiredness. The regime was punishing, characterized by Roald’s apparent certainty of success and an attitude that upset some of Pat’s many visitors: encouragement but not sympathy and a consistent denial of grounds for self-pity. Roald’s aim was to shield Pat from ‘inertia, boredom, frustration and depression’; he had decided that ‘very drastic action would have to be taken’ if Pat were to avoid becoming ‘a bad-tempered desperately unhappy nitwit’.14 In 1960s Hollywood, this pre-war British mindset jarred. One friend described Roald as fierce and unrelenting; his programme for Pat’s improvement, she decided, resembled ‘the way one trains a dog’.15 The views of others more closely involved differed. Sheena Burt wrote to Sofie Magdalene that Roald was ‘such a strong man one feels one can carry on with his inspiration and guidance’.16 It was the part that for so long Roald had played for his mother and sisters, the part he allotted himself, Sheena’s his desired response, the equivalent of Mrs Fox’s refrain-like acclamation of Mr Fox as ‘a fantastic fox’.17
By late spring, Pat was well enough to travel and, on 17 May, the Dahls returned to Gipsy House. Like Pat, the house had altered dramatically in their absence. A magazine makeover had changed doors and floors; dark-brown walls and carpet in the drawing room had horrified Sofie Magdalene as work proceeded and appalled Roald too. Returning the house to its pre-makeover state – eliminating ‘the colour of elephant turds’18 – offered him distraction from Pat’s treatment, which Roald entrusted to a roster of volunteers, mainly friends and neighbours. They kept Pat busy with stories read aloud, word and memory games, ‘like a kindergarten child, reading, writing and arithmetic’, as if, Tessa remembered, her mother ‘was miraculously growing up at the same speed as me. I was nine, and so was she.’19 His own role at Gipsy House Roald described as ‘running the house … earning a living and above all, keeping cheerful’.20 As in Los Angeles, visitors reached their own conclusions. Roald’s cheerfulness had a brittle quality – an act of will, it sometimes seemed, rather than genuine optimism, and Pat was frequently in tears or withdrawn or truculent or abusive. She threatened suicide. She called her husband ‘Roald the Rotten’ and, at other times, ‘Roald the Bastard’ and a slave driver; in the autobiography she wrote in 1988, after the Dahls’ divorce, she admitted that she had hated his coaxing and cudgelling. Roald referred to his efficiency and busyness: ‘I’m frightfully good at blocking off one side,’ he told Valerie Eaton Griffith, who had become Pat’s chief therapist.21 The efficiency he referred to concerned his wife’s recovery from a near-death experience and the side he blocked off was his emotional engagement with this process. Pat felt herself powerless to affect his behaviour beyond angering or disappointing him. Speech continued to trouble her. At first, she could remember only a handful of words, resorting to idiosyncratic neologisms that Roald (in this case ‘Roald the writer’) noted carefully and recycled later. Like the BFG, Pat knew, or thought she knew, ‘what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff squiddled around … what I mean and what I says is two different things’.22 Roald forced Pat to work hard to find the right words, as he forced her to practise exercises aimed at restoring full use to her limbs, and discouraged friends from helping her in and out of cars, up and down stairs or steps. ‘A hundred per cent recovery’ remained his stubborn mantra: one visitor referred to a ‘need for perfection … so extreme that I was very glad I was not … anyone close to him’.23 ‘He had me working from when I woke up in the morning until I went to bed at night,’ Pat remembered. Years later, she changed her mind about Roald’s hectoring: ‘He really did do a wondrous job,’ she told an interviewer in 1996. ‘He was a very good man.’24
Pat’s baby was born in the first week of August, the Dahls’ fifth and last child, a daughter called Lucy. Roald gave Pat a ring he had bought at Sotheby’s, a classical intaglio carved with an image of Persephone, the goddess associated with spring, nature’s yearly return to life. Photographs of mother and new baby appeared in many newspapers. Readers were reminded that Pat was married to Roald; on this occasion, he was described as a screenwriter.
His work was on Roald’s mind. Six months earlier, he had envied Pat’s success. Now, though he spoke publicly about her return to acting, it was clear that, in the short term, her ability to generate her former income had evaporated. Despite medical insurance, Pat’s US hospital bills were considerable; the nurse, physiotherapist and speech therapist Roald had employed in Los Angeles had added to his expenses. In a letter of thanks written on Pat’s behalf for flowers sent at Lucy’s birth, Roald briefly let down his guard. ‘Life is a bit of a struggle, isn’t it?’ he asked rhetorically.25 Not, however, for much longer. Weeks before, Roald had received $67,500 from United Artists for a screenplay, Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling?, that he had written in the summer of 1964, after meeting a young director called Robert Altman. Altman had suggested to Roald a story after his own heart: a raid by First World War fighter pilots on a Zeppelin base on the German/Swiss border. Roald’s acceptance was casual and good-humoured: he and Altman made a rights-sharing agreement, based on Altman selling the film to a studio with himself as director. But the offer of $150,000 made by United Artists early in 1965 explicitly excluded Altman. Angrily the younger man turned it down, and Roald’s promise of $75,000 vanished. That Roald would have behaved in the same way in Altman’s position did not temper the fury of his reaction at a moment when Pat’s illness was already straining his resources. With the vigour he always reserved for financial dealings, Roald employed bigshot Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar to fight his corner, and Altman gave in. In the autumn, Roald received a second payment from United Artists – this time for $25,000 – for rewriting the script in line with its new director’s requirements, though, like The Gremlins, the project would be abandoned over the course of the year. Screened in October, a BBC2 dramatization of ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, one of the stories in Kiss Kiss, adapted by Philip Levene, writer of a new series of The Avengers, was less lucrative for Roald, but helped restore his confidence at a time when he was struggling to find material for adult stories, and indeed markets for the few stories he did complete.
Only Playboy, it seemed, kept faith with him, and then strictly on its own terms. After ‘The Visitor’, in January 1966 the magazine published ‘The Last Act’, which the New Yorker had turned down on grounds of its unpleasantness (Roald described its troubling plot as ‘murder by fucking’); the alterations it made to the story, without consulting Roald, predictably enraged him. Nevertheless, the following year, Roald accepted from Playboy a commission for one of his rare journalistic forays. ‘007’s Oriental Eyefuls’ is an arch exercise in blokeishness that begins with a conversation between Pat and Roald at Gipsy House:
‘“A man called Broccoli wants you on the telephone,” Pat said.
‘I had never in my life heard of anyone with a name like that. “It’s Archie Lockley,” I said. “Lockley. Try to say it properly.” She still had occasional trouble with names.’
This exchange is entirely imaginary, and Roald knew well who Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli was when, in 1966, Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, producer-owners of the James Bond film franchise, approached him to write the screenplay for the fifth Bond film, You Only Live Twice. It was the final twist to the happy ending of Roald’s unhappy fallout with Robert Altman over Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling? – Saltzman and Broccoli had seen and admired Roald’s Sting-a-ling script – and it proved a turning point in Roald’s life. Payments for his script totalling $165,500 (equivalent today to around $1.5 million) completed the reversal in Roald and Pat’s professional fortunes set in motion by Pat’s stroke. From now on, Roald not Pat would provide for their family financially, just as Roald not Pat had taken on the primary carer’s role towards their four children. For so long on a stop-start trajectory, the financial side of Roald’s career would never seriously falter again. Yet this change of direction, in so many ways serendipitous, was not of his own choosing. Roald’s ‘only real ambition’, he told Alfred Knopf, perhaps to save face, was to produce a new collection of stories for adult readers; he decried the Bond commission as distasteful.26 Save in Playboy, where he enthused ‘the reason [Bond is] so good, so much better than all the other comic-strip men of action we see around us is that he’s thoroughly believable’, in public he maintained this lofty detachment towards the project (in private, his enjoyment was evident: to his children he offered daily updates on Bond’s progress as he wrote; the side of Roald that had revelled in millionaires’ lifestyles in Washington enjoyed the project’s extravagance, including the Rolls-Royce sent to Gipsy House to collect script updates and transport them at speed to London). In a letter to Blanche Campbell, owner of a Los Angeles bookshop, Roald referred on completion to ‘my silly James Bond film’.27 Unable to prevent himself from boasting even in the act of denigration, he reminded her of the film’s forthcoming royal premiere.
Roald’s view of the weakness of Fleming’s plot was widely shared, including by Saltzman and Broccoli: ‘It’s all rather a muddle and scarcely in the tradition of Secret Service fiction,’ Malcolm Muggeridge had written, and Roald would claim he used ‘only four or five’ of the original story’s ideas.28 As shot, the film wanders a long way from the novel. How many of its innovations were actually Roald’s is unclear. Roald certainly had access to suggestions made by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter previously consulted by the producers: Harold Jack Bloom claimed that the film was in fact his work. Roald was happy to take the credit. The film’s fantastical elements and ironic self-parody suggest his imagination and his mischief, and his Bond shares his own taste for caviar. Key to Roald’s larger enjoyment, however, given his fiercely protective attitude to his work, was his conviction that director Lewis Gilbert had refrained from any changes to his script. He fared less well the following year, when Broccoli persuaded him to take on a second Fleming project: adapting the Bond author’s children’s novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. For Roald, for whom the financial incentive was potent, the experience proved ‘ghastly’, marred by acrimonious exchanges with director Ken Hughes and his own lack of any real engagement. ‘Once you get a rotten director, or an egocentric director, you’re dead,’ Roald reflected in 1983, apportioning blame squarely, as was his wont.29 Hughes rewrote much of Roald’s script, ultimately claiming it as all his own work, much as Roald had sidelined Harold Jack Bloom. The experience soured Roald’s relationship with Broccoli; it hardened the dislike of the film industry he had nurtured since the collapse of Disney’s Gremlins project. ‘They pay a lot, so you take the money and run,’ Roald said later. Like You Only Live Twice, much in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had no origin in Fleming’s story. If Hughes’s claims to authorship are correct, retrospective criticism of Roald on grounds of anti-Semitism in the characterization of the Child Catcher, the film’s villain who is not present in the novel – part of a wider criticism, which emerged later, of Roald’s anti-Semitism – appears unfounded.
Roald’s disillusionment with film-making was clear in a letter he sent Blanche Campbell early the following year. He was still recovering from a protracted hospital stay in November, as a result of worsening back pain and, with good reason, feeling self-pity of the sort he had so ruthlessly denied Pat. An operation to remove pieces of vertebral bone in order to relieve agonizing pressure on his spinal cord had failed to heal; in its wake emerged bowel problems that revealed a fistula in the lower colon, which necessitated a second operation. In the middle of the crisis, unanticipated by Roald, Sofie Magdalene died at the age of eighty-two, on the fifth anniversary of Olivia’s death. Too ill to attend her funeral, Roald was well enough to understand the extent of his devastation at the loss of the woman who, more than Pat, had remained his emotional buoy. ‘I’ve been having a rough time,’ he wrote with characteristic understatement.
Just got out of hospital. Two spinal operations for a massive disc that paralyzed the left leg. Much better now and I’m beginning to walk again and to get back into shape. One good thing – it stopped me writing movie scripts. When I start again, I’m going to try to do either stories or another children’s book. Charlie [and the Chocolate Factory] & James [and the Giant Peach] were published in England 4 weeks before Christmas. Both have been the juvenile best sellers since then. Charlie has sold 12,000 in 3 weeks, and James about 8,000. I must try to write another – if only I can gather the energy.30
Among his mother’s effects was a very large cactus that Roald placed in the greenhouse in which he kept his collection of orchids, another of the private enclosed spaces he had craved from boyhood. About this offbeat memento was a curious poignancy.
As so often, Roald was energized by success – not, in this instance, the commercial success of both recent films but belated publication in the UK of his two full-length children’s books. Again, serendipity played its part: the father of one of Tessa’s school friends had noted her absorption in a book that turned out to be an American edition of James and the Giant Peach. The father in question, Rayner Unwin, was the major shareholder in the publishing company George Allen & Unwin and a near neighbour in Little Missenden. Although aware of Roald’s well-deserved reputation for being difficult, Unwin agreed to issue James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in November 1967 in an unorthodox deal of Roald’s making that would subsequently make him very rich indeed: in place of the usual advance-then-royalties contract, the publishing house promised Roald 50 per cent of all receipts. The Magic Finger would shortly follow. Meanwhile, in the States, Knopf’s accounts department calculated that, from sales of James and Charlie, Roald was owed almost $1 million; there were also much smaller payments due for Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You. Fan letters from American children, to all of which Roald tried to reply, arrived at a rate of more than fifty a week. No longer would the novels’ irascible author be able to describe juvenile fiction as ‘uneconomic’. At Gipsy House, Roald built a swimming pool: it was another of the markers of success by which he set such store. Increasingly concerned to safeguard his income from the Inland Revenue, he began to evolve a scheme by which Knopf would pay him a proportion of his US royalties in the form of a modest income, while the remainder accrued on account. In doing so, he set a time bomb ticking.
The element of self-congratulation that came to colour his next novel, Fantastic Mr Fox, had been earned in a remorseless decade, and it was no coincidence that Roald chose this moment to embark on a story about a family successfully fighting for its very survival. In the Foxes’ life-and-death struggle with Boggis, Bunce and Bean, set under a beech tree at the top of the Gipsy House orchard, victory emerges from Mr Fox’s resourcefulness and generosity and the family’s willingness to pull together. ‘What fine children I have, [Mr Fox] thought. They are starving to death and they haven’t had a drink for three days, but they are still undefeated. I must not let them down.’31 Mourning Sofie Magdalene, still devastated by Olivia’s death and physically battered, Roald at last felt able to confront the future with less belligerent confidence. ‘The outside is full of enemies … but now, my friends, we have an entirely new set-up,’ announces Mr Fox at the story’s close. There is much cheering and, from Mrs Fox, a simple statement of admiration and gratitude: ‘MY HUSBAND IS A FANTASTIC FOX.’32 Earlier in the novel she has already said something similar. On that occasion, in a response worthy of Roald himself, ‘Mr Fox looked at his wife and smiled. He loved her more than ever when she said things like that.’33
Like most self-fictions, Fantastic Mr Fox contained its measure of wishful thinking. Pat had never conformed to Mrs Fox’s pipe-and-slippers-fetching ‘little woman’ model of wifehood and, like their mother, Roald’s ‘fine’ children, especially Tessa, were less biddable than the little Foxes. Tessa’s predictable unhappiness was of long duration, beginning with the trauma of Theo’s accident. A year after the accident, Roald had taken Tessa to leading child psychoanalyst Anna Freud, but he resisted Freud’s advice of family therapy: none of his friends, he claimed in Tessa’s account written after his death, could ever write again ‘after they had had all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes’.34 Untreated, compounded by the horrors of Olivia’s death and Pat’s strokes, Tessa’s traumas made her exacting and miserable, but Roald was as reluctant to discuss his daughter’s unhappiness with her as he was to talk about his own feelings, incapable then, as always, of responding to suggestions of emotional neediness.
He was also preoccupied by his relationship with Pat. Within a year of Pat’s accident, Roald was wrestling with his marriage’s future. Pat was not a different person from the woman Roald had married. Rather she had become an exaggerated version of her former self, and the traits that were magnified were those that appealed least to Roald: her narcissism, which Tessa has claimed her parents shared, self-indulgence, strident anger – ‘I can’t calm down,’ Pat told the New York Post in 1973 – lack of intellectual interests and theatrical qualities dismissed as ‘actressy’; she herself claimed she had lost any sense of nervousness, the ability to consider abstractions or to dream.35 Again Roald took advice from Geoffrey Fisher that, as before, apparently offered meagre solace. Roald’s feelings were uncomfortably conflicted. ‘I love her,’ he wrote to a close friend about Pat, ‘I’ll never leave her. But I have to live with her all the time, and you would go round the bend within a couple of hours.’36 It was a dispiriting prospect and almost certainly unworkable.
Confused, Roald misjudged a project that may have been intended to unite husband and wife. He set out to make his own vehicle for Pat, bought rights to a first novel, embarked on the screenplay, found a producer and a director and made a deal with a production company linked to MGM. Roald boasted that his adaptation of Nest in a Falling Tree was his best to date; he had added to the heroine’s back story by making her, like Pat, a former stroke victim. Joy Cowley’s novel was tense, even chilling. In Roald’s hands, it acquired some of the hallmarks of his short stories: dollops of melodrama, a preoccupation with sex, flashes of humour. The results were uneven, despite the quality of Pat’s performance. Not for the first or last time, Roald blamed everyone and everything else. Pat derived little pleasure from the experience: she was convinced she overheard director Alistair Reid maligning her. Roald described Reid as a ‘very nasty little man’; to Roald’s first biographer, Jeremy Treglown, Reid described Roald as ‘a bully, a big, overpoweringly enormous guy. He would make [Pat] repeat things in front of people, and treat her like a child.’37 Released in the States as The Night Digger in May 1971, the film garnered poor reviews; it was not released in Britain.
Did Pat reflect on the story Roald had chosen for them to tell together? Cowley’s novel is a claustrophobic account of a spinster daughter compelled to care for her demanding invalid mother. Roald appeared unaware of grounds for discomfort on Pat’s part. Pat would argue that she had already glimpsed the precariousness of her marriage.