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having come straight from work for a spot of coaching. It gave me quite a surprise, actually, when she walked along the back of the indoor court with Brett Sutton, the Club coach, because I wasn’t expecting to see her there. I didn’t know that she’d arranged the lesson, or more likely she’d told me and I hadn’t taken in it. That’s become a worrying habit of mine lately: people talk to me and I go through the motions of listening and responding, but when they finish I realize I haven’t taken in a single word, because I’ve been following some train of thought of my own. It’s another type of Internal Derangement. Sally gets pissed off when she twigs it — understandably — so when she waved casually to me through the netting, I waved back casually in case I was supposed to know that she had arranged to have coaching that afternoon. In fact there was a second or two when I didn’t recognize her — just registered her as a tall, attractive-looking blonde. She was wearing a shocking-pink and white shell suit I hadn’t seen before, and I’m still not used to her new hair. One day just before Christmas she went out in the morning grey and came back in the afternoon gold. When I asked her why she hadn’t warned me, she said she wanted to see my unrehearsed reaction. I said it looked terrific. If I didn’t sound over the moon, it was sheer envy. (I’ve tried several treatments for baldness without success. The last one consisted of hanging upside down for minutes on end to make the blood rush to your head. It was called Inversion Therapy.) When I sussed it was her down at the tennis club, I felt a little glow of proprietorial pride in her lissome figure and bouncing golden locks. The other guys noticed her too.
    “You want to watch your missus, Tubby,” said Joe, as we changed ends between games. “By the time you’re fit again, she’ll be running rings round you.”
    “You reckon?” I said.
    “Yeah, he’s a good coach. Good at other things too, I’ve heard.” Joe winked at the other two, and of course Humphrey backed him up.
    “He’s certainly got the tackle. I saw him in the showers the other day. It must be a ten-incher.”
    “How d’you measure up to that, Tubby?”
    “You’ll have to raise your game.”
    “You’ll get yourself arrested one day, Humphrey,” I said. “Ogling blokes in the showers.” The others hooted with laughter.
    This kind of joshing is standard between us four. No harm in it. Humphrey’s a bachelor, lives with his mother and doesn’t have a girlfriend, but nobody supposes for a moment that he’s gay. If we did, we wouldn’t wind him up about it. Likewise with the innuendo about Brett Sutton and Sally. It’s a stock joke that all the women in the club wet their knickers at the sight of him — he’s tall, dark, and handsome enough to wear his hair in a ponytail without looking like a ponce — but nobody believes any real hanky-panky goes on.
    For some reason I remembered this conversation as we were going to bed tonight, and relayed it to Sally. She sniffed and said, “Isn’t it a bit late in the day for you lot to be worrying about the size of your willies?”
    I said that for a really dedicated worrier it was never too late.
     
    One thing I’ve never worried about, though, is Sally’s fidelity. We’ve had our ups and downs, of course, in nearly thirty years of marriage, but we’ve always been faithful to each other. Not for lack of opportunity, I may say, at least on my side, the entertainment world being what it is, and I daresay on hers too, though I can’t believe that she’s exposed to the same occupational temptations. Her colleagues at the Poly, or rather University as I must learn to call it now, don’t look much of an erotic turn-on to me. But that’s not the point. We’ve always been faithful to each other. How can I be sure? I just am. Sally was a virgin when I met her, nice girls usually were in those days, and I wasn’t all that