“People have the wrong idea about Charles. He’s not at all formal. It sounds
silly, but I find him a very cosy person. He doesn’t want me to become a
different sort of person. He likes my independence and that I work and I’m
focused.
“You know, I’ve never had those fashionable things, ‘commitment issues’.
I’ve always been happy to be completely dependent on a man emotionally and
physically. But, maybe it’s because I’m a product of divorce, I have a
strange neurosis about being financially dependent. I wouldn’t want to be a
leech. Friends of mine often tease me and say I’m a geisha because I want to
make people happy, but I’m not someone who can disappear herself, so to
speak. I fear reliance.” I wonder if her life creates a credibility problem
for her latest book, Nigella Express. Can we believe that a woman who takes
private planes needs to dash home to whip up supper? Nigella is shifty about
her servant numbers, says lots of people help, including Hettie, “who has
been acting as my wife” during 12-hour filming days, making her a dish to
take home. But mostly Nigella cooks every evening, and doesn’t see it as
drudgery but a means to eat what she fancies. About this she is fanatical:
staying at five-star hotels, she packs a kettle and PG Tips because she
can’t wait for room service.
“Charles says to me, ‘Let’s go out to dinner, haven’t you cooked enough?’ So I
say, ‘Haven’t you hung enough paintings?’ I couldn’t have a cook. I’ve had
holidays and rented houses in Italy with cooks, which is fabulous,
particularly if you can learn something too. But I wouldn’t like it. I’m not
formal enough to want a life like that.” Although the main reason they
rarely eat out now is because restaurants are unbearable for Saatchi, a
dedicated smoker. “So we live on the pavement at Scott’s on Mount Street,”
Nigella says cheerfully. Her insouciance about his habit seems ineffably
grown-up, considering she lost her first husband to a smoking-related
cancer.
I wonder if she enjoys living with Saatchi’s art collection. She says she is
not a very visual person and occasionally asks for a painting to be removed
because she finds it depressing. But she enjoys accompanying Saatchi around
East End galleries while he trawls for new works. He’ll ask her to guess
which two paintings in an exhibition he has bought and she rarely can. But
she would never get involved in his work, “because it’s part of my
independence, I suppose, because I’ve been a child of someone famous I don’t
want to cash in on anyone else’s status.” (A close friend suggests Lawson is
keenly aware of the fate of Saatchi’s two previous wives, who did
collaborate in his work and perhaps felt ultimately consumed by Saatchi and
his empire.) But, I say, isn’t your husband more likely to face that
accusation? “Yes, he teases me and says, ‘You’re turning me into Larry
Fortensky [Liz Taylor’s construction worker ex-husband].’” Long after she
ceased to need the money, work is a way of maintaining her autonomy. And,
besides, in a life chequered with great periods of grief – Diamond died six
years ago, her mother aged 48 of liver cancer, her sister Thomasina at 32 of
breast cancer – work, whether baking a pie or writing a book, has been her
salvation, a route back to sanity and onward to contentment.
“People who think, ‘If I don’t have to get up and go to work I can just go to
lunch and get my hair done’ are going to be unhappy people. Mostly I’m
wondering, ‘How can I get this project finished by lunchtime?’, which I
think is healthy, particularly as I’m prone to brooding introspection. The
busier I am, the happier I am.” Nigella refers to John Diamond often,
casually and warmly, as part of the fabric of her interior life. “Sometimes
I will say to Bruno, ‘You’re like your daddy, the way you like clothes,’
because John was a dandy. What I think is a healthy sign is they can
remember bad things too, like when Daddy was so cross he punched the door
and it got a crack in it. And John was bad-tempered towards the end of his
life. Mimi will say, ‘Do you remember the time Daddy was really mean and he
hid my Barbie?’ If it was just the idealisation they would have lost the
reality of who that parent was. Like how funny John was.
“The scar of having lost a parent is not something measured out in the few
years after. And I don’t want it to affect Mimi’s relationships with men
badly. They remember me happily married to John and they see me happily
married to Charles, so give or take the average domestic, their model of
marriage is basically good. They were the ones who really pushed for me and
Charles to get married. Because from their point of view it formalised their
relationship. They can say ‘my stepfather’, rather than ‘my mother’s
boyfriend’.” But time has not dulled her anger at those three cruel, early
deaths. “It gives me a rage about the horribleness of the world, though
obviously not out loud. I was quite rude to the rabbi who did John’s
funeral. He was trying to do, ‘We must be accepting.’ And I said, ‘I’m not
having that, I am very angry and I’m not having a service that looks like it
is all OK.’ There’s a poem that John found, some Jewish thing, when my
sister died. It’s not a good poem, but nevertheless has resonance and it
says, ‘I am not resigned, I do not approve.’ Everyone tries to put a good
spin on death and disease; that’s what I find so difficult. You just want to
hit them.” Her mother and sister’s deaths made her harder, she says. “I’m
not very nice about old people. When people say I’m feeling sad because my
granny died aged 92 I think, ‘Big deal’. I think that less as my father [the
former Chancellor Nigel Lawson] gets older, though no one could accuse him
of dying young.” Part of her mania for work, she believes, comes from a fear
she herself might not live a long life. She is 48 in January, the same age
as her mother, Vanessa Salmon, an heiress and sometime actress, when she
died. “I worry a great deal about the children and what would happen if I
die young.” But since she has observed too often the alternative to growing
old, age holds little fear. “I had a mother who was very caught up in her
looks. She was very grateful to die young so she didn’t have to get old.”
The only time her mother did not fixate about her weight was on her death
bed.
Nigella, by contrast, refers to herself as “greedy”, a word most women fear.
She makes much of her immense appetite, chiding me at lunch for taking a small
portion, although hers isn’t much bigger. Eating figs for pudding, she
shoves them in her mouth with Laurentian libido. I wonder how huge her
hunger is, and how much she eats because she likes to think of herself as
voracious and sensual, spell-binding qualities in a beautiful woman.
Perhaps because she witnessed, through her mother, beauty’s curse, Nigella
wears her own carelessly. I can’t imagine any other woman imperilling her
figure by accepting (and winning) a bet to eat 20 pickled eggs in ten
minutes, as Lawson once did. Maybe only the truly gorgeous know they needn’t
try. Today, Nigella’s hair is straggly, she wears little make-up, but her
face is sweeter than the rather glassy smiles she can sometimes pull in
photos. And it is free of the lines of middle years: a 30-year-old would
wish for such skin.
“I have a friend whom I love dearly who hates getting older. And I say to her,
‘Why do you look at yourself?’ I caught a look at my thighs the other day
and I thought, ‘I must never look at them again!’ I have the legs of a
shot-putter gone to flab.
“But now I do something I thought I’d never do – I exercise!” She announces
this with such triumph, I anticipate a revolutionary regime. “I drop Bruno
at school by cab and then I walk back.
“I’ve put on a bit of weight filming the series, but I keep my weight far
higher than most women would be happy with. It helps that I’m with someone
who loves every dimple and wobble. When I think I must lose a bit here and
here [she pinches the top of her legs and bottom], he says, ‘But these are
the bits I like!’ If I lose a bit of weight, he says, ‘You’re looking
gaunt,’ and I say, ‘Please don’t say this in front of people, they’ll think
it funny.’” Lawson’s dedication to Saatchi in her latest book reads simply,
“To Charles:
thank you, thank you, thank you.” She is still at the hopelessly-in-love
stage, barely able to utter a sentence that doesn’t contain his name. But
she is too shrewd and proud to allow the great collector to hang her on his
wall. “I do make jokes to Charles sometimes – I call Bill Murray the third Mr
Lawson,” she says. And with that Zoe announces the arrival of a dressmaker
and the Domestic Goddess, horrified she will go into a fitting commando,
retreats to her she-shed to rummage for pants.
Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson is published by Chatto & Windus
on Thursday. Click
here to buy the book for £22.50.
Today, and next week, Nigella will be appearing in a series of exclusive
videos on Times Online, revealing the secrets behind some of the recipes in
her book, plus more exclusive recipes in times2 next week and online (timesonline.co.uk/nigella).
Nigella Express starts on BBC2 on Monday
