Sally. Freya North

well, just so bloody happy! And I knew it, I knew it, didn’t I? I could see it a mile and a half off and now he can see it too and he’s as happy as fucking Larry.

      Outwardly, Catherine was delighted. Secretly she was just a little dismayed. It had been nice to have Richard generally unattached, to know that she was perhaps the most important woman in his life. She loved it that he spent much of his time with them, being charming, good-looking – and hers, in a way. For as long as she had known him, he had never been short of female attention. He had always brought them over to Catherine and Bob’s for Catherine to dissect later over a lengthy phone call. And when such liaisons had inevitably come to grief, he had always enjoyed a healthy post mortem with her. They exchanged Vogue for GQ. They often lunched together and shopped together – Richard provided the perfect mannequin for Catherine to outfit her shop-shy husband. For Catherine, Richard was the older brother she never had, and for whom she would gladly swap her younger one (whose passions were fired almost solely by motorbikes). Now Richard was in love and intuition told her it very well might be The One. Sally Lomax she liked though she was but a friend of a friend’s. Catherine was inquisitive to see if Richard-in-Love differed in any fundamental way from the Richard she knew and adored.

      ‘Let’s have them to dinner. No, how about Sunday lunch? This Sunday. Go on, Bob, phone. Phone now!’

      And so the four of them lunched together on Sunday, and on other Sundays. They all dined at Richard’s too, and went to the theatre, and walked on Kenwood, and went to exhibitions at the Serpentine. They decided together that the New Year’s Eve party would be a masked ball. Sally conspired with Catherine to make their outfits on her sewing machine and, with inordinate pleasure, they refused to help the men in any way with theirs. The women became more than the partners of their partners, they became friends. Catherine was delighted that Richard was just the same only more so, more animated, more charming, happier than ever she had known him. Bob liked Sally but rarely spoke to her one to one. Sally didn’t really notice Bob, Richard was her project, he was not. The more time the four of them spent together, the more Richard spoke to Bob in private about Sally. But he never told Sally. He never said the ‘L’ word to her though he used it frequently with Bob. The word was never empty but always saturated with conviction.

      Sally called him Richie, and to him Sally was Sal. Bob and Catherine never tired of shooting each other knowing smiles and conspiratorially raised eyebrows when these diminutives, forbidden to all others, were used. Catherine tried using it once with Richard but his wince was sharp. Richard would remain Richie to Sally alone.