Kay Saatchi: I'm no victim

Kay Saatchi has spoken for the first time about her divorce from the advertising guru Charles Saatchi in a revealing interview in Tatler, headlined Who Wants to Be a Domestic Goddess Anyway?

She is photographed dressed up in a French maid's uniform with fishnet stockings and high heels.

"I may be many things but I am not a victim," she says. "Napoleon once said, 'Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.' I Scotch-taped that into my diary."

Kay, 49, was granted a decree nisi from her husband in August last year on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. News broke of the "very close" relationship between Mr Saatchi and the real Domestic Goddess Nigella Lawson in March 2001 within a month of the death of her husband, John Diamond, from cancer.

Talking about her new life without Charles, she reflects on her new sense of freedom and the simplicity of her life. She tells how she can now eat popcorn in bed with her daughter Phoebe, and can spend "my last nickel on Rothschild lilies". She is also able to be her own boss.

"I'm certainly not a domestic goddess any more, and thank God for that. But, gosh, it's embarrassing being sacked."

Kay met her future husband at the Modern British show at the Royal Academy in 1986. She went in to dinner to find herself seated opposite him, an experience she describes now as like a rabbit caught in headlights. Saatchi proposed two days later, but they did not marry until three years later in July 1990.

Kay reveals the private jet taking them to Florence for their honeymoon was delayed by four hours and her new husband refused to speak to anyone, including her. "I suppose I had stopped being a lover and had become a wife."

She later recalls another change in their relationship when she gave birth to their only child, Phoebe, in 1994. "When she was born, once again I felt that he distanced himself from me...another shift: I had gone from wife to mother."

Kay, who hails from Little Rock in Arkansas, recalls the last years of their relationship as lonely and says how she spent her 40th birthday, which fell on St Valentine's Day, alone. During her 15-year relationship with Saatchi she helped to hang and to curate more than 30 of the shows at the Saatchi gallery.

The interview also contains what some may think is a veiled warning to her love rival. "He has always been a man of crushes - cars, clothes, artists - and his near evangelical pursuit usually wanes."

It has clearly been a difficult year for Kay, who confesses she has recently taken up smoking. Mr Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, who has two children by John Diamond, have established themselves as one of London's most high profile couples. The pair live in Eaton Square where only last week it was revealed that builders turned off the freezer unit which led to the meltdown of Self, of his most expensive works of art by Marc Quinn. Saatchi divorced his first wife Doris in 1990.