London: Nigella Lawson has finally emerged in public — alone, and no longer wearing the wedding ring given to her by husband Charles Saatchi.
TV chef Lawson, 53, left the marital home on Sunday when shock pictures emerged of advertising guru Saatchi, her second husband, grabbing her by the throat during a restaurant meal.
He initially protested innocence of any wrongdoing, claiming a “playful tiff” had been misinterpreted, but then accepted a police caution for assault. His evidently troubled wife was nowhere to be seen until Wednesday, when she was spotted on a street in London’s Mayfair district.
There was no sign of her wedding ring, which she had been wearing when she was pictured in her husband’s grasp outside Scott’s restaurant in London two Sundays ago.
Saatchi, 70, claimed she left the Dh80 million family home in Chelsea to avoid public attention “till the dust had settled” after the disturbing photographs of their row were published a week later.
But the removal of her ring, and his acceptance of a caution, suggests a deeper rift.
Lawson looked pale and worried as she spoke animatedly on her mobile phone in the street on Wednesday.
She appeared to have lost weight, and was wearing knee-length boots, a blouse, trousers and little make-up.
One onlooker said: “You could tell she had had a few stressful days. She looked light years away from the gorgeous, voluptuous woman you see on the TV.”
As she spoke on her mobile, Lawson wandered the street outside the serviced apartment she is using as a bolthole.
The flat costs up to Dh56,000 a week and is run by private members club Soho House.
Yesterday she was visited there by her younger sister Horatia, who refused to discuss Lawson’s marriage.
Lawson, daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Lord Lawson, married Saatchi two years after her first husband, journalist John Diamond, died from throat cancer in 2001.
In 2007 she discussed Saatchi’s mood swings, describing him as “an exploder”. And eyebrows were also raised at the revelation that he professed little interest in her sumptuous culinary creations, preferring to dine on cereal.
Onlookers who saw him grab her throat in the restaurant incident said she had left in tears. Saatchi has made no further comment.
But it emerged that he had joked flippantly about wife-beating in his book, Be The Worst You Can Be - Life’s Too Long For Patience And Virtue, published last year.
In it, he posed the question: “Did you know that the phrase ‘rule of thumb’ came from a law once used in England which forbade you from beating your wife with anything wider than your thumb?”
His answer was: “No I didn’t. Why are you telling me this? Is it simply because I live in England, or have you heard that I am a ferocious wife-beater?”
Sniping at females in the supposedly humorously grouchy book, he also wrote: “It’s OK for little girls to whine. They are practising to be women.”
He may be hoping that another of his “jokes” in the book proves not to be prophetic. Discussing his two divorces before meeting Lawson, Saatchi — said to have a fortune of up to Dh600 million — wrote: “Wives make excellent housekeepers.
“They always manage to keep the house. Boom boom!”
