Lexi laughs. ‘We’re not mad beasts,’ she says, as he bends to kiss her.
‘I know, Squirt,’ he says.
‘I’ve grown an inch this summer,’ she says.
‘I know.’
September and October have been wildly busy what with the children back at school and Teddy’s iron will coming up against the sweet but equally implacable iron will of her first big school teacher, Miss Murphy.
I’m hectically busy on my blog which is called The Best You Can Do and looks at recipes for when you’re down and has my thoughts – my actual thoughts on life, the universe and everything, rather than fake thoughts.
OK, not all my thoughts.
We all pile into the car and head for Sandymount.
Once there, Lexi runs down the beach with Posie, who likes running, while Liam is left to make do with Magic, who looks as if she wants her own pony and trap to take her further down. Teddy is collecting giant stones into piles and keeps saying, ‘Get these on the way back, Daddy,’ in her usual imperious tone.
It’s a beautifully warm day for late October and I’m wearing a filmy red floral dress Scarlett got for me on one of her vintage shopping trips.
I would never have tried it on because it’s clingy but she says it really suits me.
I also have a small rucksack in case of showers and plenty of poo bags because Magic and Posie think that little offerings from their bowels are what the world is waiting for.
I am happy on so many levels. Happy because I have my beautiful family and my career is going from strength to strength. Or, to use a different phrase, levelled out after a lot of turbulence.
Everyone has bad days and now when I do, I say so. And it’s given me a whole new outlook on life. Turns out lots of people are like me too: convinced we have to be fake happy to get by when after all, whose life is perfect all the time?
I think of my new happiness as a gift: a gift I had to earn by going through pain in the first place. I think about this a lot in the mornings when I walk the dogs because they came into our lives by accident, and have brought us so much. Pain came into my life by accident via what happened to me in the garage, and yet it’s brought me a strength I never knew I had. It’s a strange sort of gift – one that has to take root and grow. But it’s part of me now, part of the family.
My new TV show, shot at speed after I did so much press and publicity after the article about my being mugged and how I recovered from it appeared, is nearly top of the TV ratings, there’s talk of it being bought in the US and it has been bought in the UK. Thanks to more help for me and Lorraine, my cookery book,Recipes for Happiness, is to be worked on also at high speed and because I am getting really good at saying no these days (thanks, Mildred!), I say yes only to the press things I’d like to do.
‘Why did you call her Mildred?’ is what Dan wants to know when I come clean to him about my inner voice.
We talk a lot more since the early days of my coming clean about lying to him but there’s still a tiny wedge between us, to my mind.
‘I can’t explain it,’ I say.
‘Should I call you Mildred in bed?’ he then jokes, pulling me onto the bed and pretending to moan ‘Mildreed, Mildreed, you excite meee,’ so loudly that I try to put a pillow over his face and we both explode laughing.
I cherish these moments: when I think we’reusagain, the way we used to be.
He’s not laughing now. He looks serious and I feel slightly sick.
It’s a long time since we’ve all managed a walk like this.
The kids are all a bit away from us and only the dogs are close by.
‘It broke my heart that you hadn’t let me help,’ he says suddenly, looking into the distance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mutter.
Is this it? He wants a divorce? Is this how it’s done? Soberly and calmly with the kids running on ahead. Noplate-throwing or screeching about how I’d lied to him.
I never thought it would be us. I’ve tried so hard to make things right these past months but I didn’t try when I should have. When I was working so hard at being Freya: Wonder Woman and not letting Dan in.
Nobody’s Wonder Woman. We’re all mortal, all doing our best, trying to carve out time for relationships in the mass of school and work and have we run out of loo roll, again?
We were so good in bed and I thought that was thedeal-breaker for men. If you weren’t matched sexually, you were kaput.
