In Bed With Lord Byron

moving slowly through my heart and into my stomach.
    ‘What if I were to ask you again, Lucy?’
    I giggled and poked his chest.
    ‘You,’ I said, joking nervously, ‘you manipulated me with all this. Proposing to me while I have the perfect chocolate in my mouth. You know me too well.’
    ‘Well, isn’t that why we belong together – because we do know each other too well?’ Anthony asked, smiling, though his eyes were serious.
    I felt tears in my eyes and I burst out: ‘I’m frightened. We have such a wonderful friendship. What if we ruin it? What if in five years’ time it all goes wrong?’ I bit
my lip, knowing this wasn’t the sort of thing you were meant to bring up at this sort of moment. Great, Lucy, I thought, just blow the mood completely.
    But I had spoken my true feelings.
    ‘Lucy – if we crash and burn, we do. But we have to go for it, don’t you think? Because I think we might just soar.’
    He kissed me again and hugged me tightly, and I closed my eyes, tears running down my cheeks and mingling salty with the chocolate on my lips, and then, finally, I gave him my reply.

And a Half . . .

Exactly one year on, Anthony and I are getting a divorce.
    No – I’m just kidding. In actual fact, dear reader, we’ve only just got married.
    It took longer than I had thought to obtain my divorce from Casanova – the fact that no record of his birth could be found caused a number of complications. And then, I admit, I
still
had one or two flutters of doubt about tying the knot . . .
    I suppose one of the reasons I’d always disliked the idea of marriage was that I’d always seen it as a set formula. You know: two people get together in their twenties, they both
have great jobs, they marry, they have a kid, the woman gives up her job, they have more kids, they get bored, the man has a mid-life crisis and an affair with his secretary and they get divorced.
I thought I had to tick all the boxes or else I was somehow defying social convention, and the marriage wouldn’t be real. But after I moved in with Anthony, and had been living with him for a
few months, I realised that you don’t have to end up playing by the rules. You can make up your own rules. Anthony, having learnt his lessons about jealousy, doesn’t stop me having male
friends, and I don’t stop him having female friends. Sometimes we take weekends apart. We make sure we have space, so that we can still be ourselves while being together.
    Our wedding was divine. Casanova – with whom we are still in touch – offered to officiate, but we politely declined. Instead we went for an old-fashioned vicar, complete with glasses
and yellow teeth and messy black hair, with an old-fashioned ceremony in a lovely church. I shall never forget how wonderful it was to walk down the aisle. I had been up all night, churning with
nerves, but the moment I stepped into the church, I felt as though a great weight had been lifted off me. I saw the sunlight slanting through the stained-glass windows, as though ushering me on. I
saw Anthony standing at the front, like the light at the end of a tunnel, with a shy smile on his face and a slight frown on his forehead, his eyes bright with love, and I knew then that marrying
him wasn’t going to be restrictive or a noose around my neck: that he was going to set me free.
    Our vows went very well. Every so often I looked at Anthony and our eyes locked and I had to bite my lip because I felt as though I was going to burst into laughter out of sheer joy. And we were
only interrupted twice by the screams of our daughter.
    I forgot to mention that we had a daughter. She was conceived the night Anthony proposed to me in Paris. Anthony jokes that because I had just eaten the best chocolate in the world, I passed my
bad genes on to our daughter and have created a monstrous chocoholic. And I admit that it is true that she does seem to scream longingly whenever I’m eating a bar . . .
    Being pregnant was a little frightening. But my experiences in Roman times with Ovid and Tiryns had taught me a lesson. I swept aside all my doubts about whether I was ready to be a mother; I
just appreciated what a great gift a baby was, and when she was born, it was the happiest day of my life.
    We called her Ophelia Chloe Lyon-Brown.
    Anthony and I have just returned from our honeymoon in Paris. We actually took Ophelia into the chocolate shop there and she stopped screaming and went all gurgly and quiet. Anthony