Sally. Freya North

      ELEVEN

      When can love begin? And can you fight it? When does love begin and when should it? But can you fight it?

      Richard fell in love with Sally that morning at the Zoo. In a moment. He was as sure as his walk that he was in love with Sally Lomax. He felt peaceful and content about it. And happy. Secure. He didn’t bother to pontificate on what love is or should be, whether it was possible or realistic to feel love and know it after just a few meetings, meetings in which physical desire had, after all, played a dominant part. Sally had never stopped to think whether she might fall in love with Richard, too busy was she making sure that he didn’t fall in love with her but was instead subsumed by lust for her. Richard certainly lusted after her, but now he lusted out of love. Sally was blind to that love, she judged her happiness and success solely on the rigidity, endurance and explosion of his penis. Consequently, she completely neglected any exploration of her own subconscious, devoting all energy to new and invariably more outrageous seduction situations.

      But, Sally, you are so lovable, togged up in your old Swan Lake tutu and turning up at Richard’s a mere two hours after you had left one Sunday night. Who could not love a girl who pulls her man into the ladies’ toilets to give him a blow job after an overlong Belgian film? Or guides his hand under her skirt beneath the table of a dinner party so he can discover she has on no panties. And Sally, your eyes are artless and provide a short cut into your soul; Richard has gazed at them, beyond them, often. Your smile is so full and real and alluring. He sees your face, Sally, in ecstatic rapture as you climax under him, on top of him, on his hand, on his mouth. He watches you and he feels he could burst with desire.

      But he watches you when you do not know it. He observes you as you watch the News and he sees your face crease in anguish for war victims, for beached whales, for families of the murdered, for the women who were raped. And he gazes at you for hours while you sleep, he watches you while you stare out of windows at nothing in particular. What he sees, he loves. Laughing at penguins. ‘Gracious Good Lord’. He sees the tears film over your eyes at the close of a play, the end of a film, as you finish a novel. Richard watches you all the while, but you don’t know it. Richard is in love with you but you don’t see it. You will, you will. And then how will you feel?

      Richard wanted to sing his joy from the roof-tops, to swing from the steeple and proclaim it, to climb trees and laud it. Instead, he informed Bob quite casually over their customary post-workout swift half.

      ‘Where are you spending Christmas? Want to come for lunch? We’re also having a New Year’s Eve bash, can’t decide whether to have a theme or not. You know, come as a painting, come as a film. I could just see you as a Degas ballerina!’

      ‘I am in love with Sally Lomax.’

      ‘And he just said it, no prompting?’

      ‘He just came right out with it, I hadn’t even mentioned her.’

      Bob had ensured that it had indeed been a true and very swift half indeed and not the usual excuse for a two-pinter.

      He could not wait to tell Catherine. It really was ground-breaking news. It really was the most extraordinary occurrence.

       Richard is in love. Gracious, old Richie boy in love and declaring it. No more ‘she’s all right’s, now it’s ‘she’s the one’. He’s found her! At long bloody last, he’s found her. And he seems so sure. And he seems, 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.