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to mark the apotheosis of her career. Unfortunately, there was no Mark to the moment – he was in Hong Kong and she couldn’t even phone him because of the time difference. With no husband to cuddle up to, Alice intended to get justifiably drunk on the company credit card and stay out ridiculously late.

      ‘Mr Mundy,’ she said whilst leaning around their round table topping up her team’s glasses, ‘Mr Mundy, you are a dickhead.’

      ‘Thank you, Miss Heggarty,’ Saul acquiesced, chinking glasses and sharing a raised eyebrow with the fashion editor and advertising manager.

      ‘I mean,’ Alice qualified, ‘if you’d only come off your freelance high horse and join the mag as staff, you’d be up there awarded Editor of the Year.’ The fashion editor and ad manager nodded earnestly.

      ‘That’s kind of you,’ Saul said, pausing to applaud a woman on stage receiving her jag of perspex for being Specialist Editor of the Year, ‘but I’ve told you, I don’t want to trade my freedom – my access to variety – for commuting, office politics and a lump of plastic.’

      ‘It’s perspex!’ Alice retorted. ‘It’s sculpture!’

      ‘Sure,’ said Saul, ‘but if I did Adam full-time I’d have to relinquish all my other work. And I’m a loyal bastard.’ He clapped with everyone though he had no idea of the award just won.

      ‘But me pay top dollar,’ Alice said in a peculiar Japanese accent.

      ‘Your dollars can’t buy my desire for diversity, Alice,’ Saul said, tonguing the words theatrically. ‘I spend more time on Adam than on any of my other commitments. But I like my tutti-frutti life. I like dipping my finger in a fair few pies. ES mag versus the Observer, T3 versus GQ. MotorMonth versus Get Gadget. I need variety.’

      Another award was won, this time by a former colleague of Alice’s so she wolf-whistled through her fingers – a raucous skill amusingly at odds with her sartorial grace and sleek deportment. ‘Desire for diversity?’ she balked, turning again to Saul. ‘finger-dipping?’ Alice wagged her finger at him. ‘Your need for variety better not go beyond your professional life, Mr Mundy.’

      Saul laughed. ‘I may flirt my working way around publishing circles – but at play I’m working on being all Thea’s. In my mind, in my heart,’ he said, ‘I’m all hers.’

      ‘Promiscuous by pen is fine, promiscuous by penis – not!’ Alice declared, rather pleased with that and wondering if she could regurgitate it in print. Not for Adam, obviously. Lush, perhaps.

      ‘Has it escaped you that your first wedding anniversary also marks my first year with Thea?’ Saul said defensively.

      They chinked glasses.

      ‘To Thea,’ Saul drank, ‘I couldn’t love her more.’

      ‘I love my husband, I love my job, I love my posh house, I love the plants I can’t pronounce in my garden,’ Alice proclaimed with regular sips, ‘I love Adam. I love Thea. I love you!’

      ‘This isn’t the Oscars,’ Saul laughed.

      ‘It’s the champagne,’ Alice rued, ‘it makes me emotional.’

      ‘Switch to water,’ Saul suggested.

      ‘Bugger off!’ Alice retorted, topping up everyone’s glasses.

      Mark flew back from the Far East and was immensely proud of Alice’s Launch of the Year award, so much so that he persuaded her to bring it back home from the office at weekends. Until one weekend when he was abroad on business and Alice didn’t bother. His excessive travelling and deal-mongering paid dividends in the form of a large and timely bonus. He whisked Alice off to Prague for their first anniversary and replaced Alice’s shopping-channel paste earrings with genuine diamonds. Only larger. And set in platinum. She’d bought him a papier mâché globe because the girls on Dream Weddings reminded her that the first anniversary is paper. Alice was overwhelmed by Mark’s gift. In fact, she was a little taken aback.

      ‘I feel too young for such fuck-off rocks,’ she confided to Thea, ‘like I’ve sneaked my mum’s for dressing up. Only my mum doesn’t have diamonds even half this size. I have to keep them in a safe when I’m not wearing them or else they’re not insured.’

      ‘They’re stunning,’ Thea marvelled, privately thinking that, despite their dazzle, they were almost too big to be attractive or actually look real.

      ‘They’re serious,’ Alice assessed. ‘The fun of the fakes was that they were cheap tat. A joke where I had the last laugh. Do you want them?’

      ‘Sure!’ Thea said. ‘Which ones?’ she added.

      ‘Where can I take you?’ Saul asked Thea, a few days before their first anniversary. ‘Cartier? TopShop?’

      ‘Memory Lane,’ Thea answered decisively.

      ‘Is that some spa in Barbados?’ Saul half joked.

      ‘Primrose Hill,’ Thea laughed. ‘I want to retrace our steps.’

      ‘Christ, you’re soppy,’ Saul said.

      ‘I just want to walk hand in hand on Primrose Hill!’ Thea protested.

      ‘And if it’s raining?’

      ‘We’ll get wet.’

      ‘Can’t I whisk you off to Babington House or somewhere, in a top-of-the-range Jag?’ Saul all but pleaded.

      ‘You don’t have a car,’ Thea reminded him patiently, ‘you have a scooter.’

      ‘Actually, that’s where you’re wrong. I’ve been given said Jag for the weekend – to take for a spin and assess for MotorMonth.’

      ‘What colour is it?’ Thea asked, slightly tempted.

      ‘Racing green,’ Saul shrugged, ‘cream leather.’

      ‘But I want to go to Primrose Hill to our bench,’ Thea said with a petulant pout Saul couldn’t resist.

      So they compromised. They drove the mile or so to Primrose Hill and paid-and-displayed for two hours at great expense. At the top of the hill, Saul pulled out a roll of Refreshers and a family-size pack of Opal Fruits though it said Starburst on the packet. For Thea, the gesture was far more romantic than a country hideaway accessed by sports car. As an expression of her gratitude, she took off her jumper, and with no bra beneath her T-shirt, her nipples stood to Saul’s attention, reminding him instantly of a year ago, when she was up there, all cold and hungover. He stroked her arms, giving her far stronger goose bumps than the November air.

      Thea gazed at him, marvelling to herself that she hadn’t noticed the slate-grey flecks to his irises. ‘I love you, Saul Mundy,’ she said.

      ‘Happy First Whatever,’ he grinned, ‘Happy Us.’

      When did you stop qualifying your age with and a quarter, or and a half, or and three-quarters? Thea continued until she hit her teens. In her mid-twenties, Alice was still in the habit of saying ‘next year I’ll be …’ which, according to the time of year, enabled her to add up to two years onto her current age. However, the precise notch in the scale of their thirties soon seemed of little concern to others, it was the age of their relationships which generated interest now. Though both Alice and Thea had loved their first year with Mark and Saul, they were impatient for their first anniversaries to give their relationships status. As soon as Alice had passed the six-months mark, she took to saying she’d been married ‘almost a year’. Thea spoke in terms of seasons rather than months. She’d say she and Saul had been together ‘since last autumn’ – which, by the following summer, seemed a distant time indeed. Thea did theorize to herself that November probably qualified as winter,

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