Weldon’s husband has the last word after break-up
Nick Fox pens verses of complaint about She-devil author as she files for divorce after 26 years
‘I feel like a dog that does everything and runs up wagging its tail and doesn’t expect to be kicked in the face’
FAY WELDON’S husband has written poetry expressing his hurt at their break up as he says he was “discarded cruelly on a whim”.
The 89-year-old author walked out on Nick Fox, her third husband, after 26 years of marriage, accusing him of “coercive control and financial mismanagement”.
But last night Mr Fox said he was left “stunned, bewildered and sad” by the claims and felt he had been treated “like a dog”. The poet and jazz musician, who managed his wife’s affairs, penned a series of poems about the split, saying he loved her for three decades and “Now he’s just her cur / To be discarded cruelly on a whim”.
The split emerged when Weldon emailed friends and family, to apologise for being “out of touch for a long time” and revealing that she had been in hospital for a large part of the last year.
“In the meanwhile, I have left my husband and am divorcing him, complaining of coercive control and financial mismanagement,” she wrote.
The “separation poems”, published on Mr Fox’s blog earlier this month, allude to “veiled threats and slanders shadowy and mean”. He wrote: “They will not let her talk to me”, comparing his situation to a “Sicilian vendetta”. The poems say his lover would not talk to him “from madness or malignity”.
Mr Fox also references his estranged wife’s most celebrated work, her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-devil, noting wryly in his final haiku that he “should have trusted the book’s title”.
Speaking from their marital home in Shaftesbury, Dorset, he told The Daily Telegraph: “This development has left me stunned, bewildered and sad. This was someone I gave my life to. We had a relationship of love and trust for 30 years. I feel like a dog that does everything and runs up wagging its tail and doesn’t expect to be kicked in the face.”
The couple met in the Eighties when Mr Fox was running a bookshop but they did not get together for around 10 years. Weldon, who has said that “my only ambition was always to be married”, had already been married twice.
She married Mr Fox in 1994, undeterred by their 15-year age difference.
She admitted that they had “terrible rows” but said that it was mostly over grammar, as he also acted as her editor.
She left the marital home in December and is staying with her eldest son Nic in Northamptonshire. Since leaving she has initiated divorce proceedings.
He said his mother was too frail to discuss the split as she was recuperating from a stroke. “It has been a very diff i cult ti me f or her,” he t old The Telegraph. He was reluctant to discuss her relationship issues, but revealed: “There had been issues contacting her friends and family for quite a long time. It didn’t really emerge until later. I think some women don’t realise they are in that situation and then when they do they haven’t got the network to get themselves out of it. I think quite often the perpetrators are not aware they are doing it. It is a bit ‘she said, he said’ and you can get sucked up in it.”
Mr Fox declined to comment on the claims, but said: “I refer you to the ninth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’. It just ain’t true and it’s unclear to me what is driving this. Probably it’s best if fiction stays on the page. I’ve done nothing and I’m being impugned and it’s very upsetting.”