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Recently, however, he had developed an odd relationship with illness. He spent quite protracted periods of time believing he was becoming unwell.
    ‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ he’d say, making vague gestures at his throat or nose, his presentation largely asymptomatic. ‘I’ve got a funny … you know … like a sort of …’
    ‘Like a sort of hypochondria?’ Angelica would inevitably say. ‘Like a sort of deluded-type feeling?’
    ‘No. Like a
sensation
, a sort of
sensation
in my throat. I think there’s something going round.’
    On the verge of succumbing as he so often claimed to be, it was surprising how infrequently Daniel tipped the scales into observable disease. His relationship with illness was flirtatious; only a particularly attractive ailment could tempt him into bed. When it did, he reacted with all the high-flown sense of occasion one might expect from a man who was constantly yearning-and-putting-off.
    ‘No, no,’ he’d say, huffing another fistful of snot into a tissue and tossing the resultant goopy wad onto the heap of others he kept as a quantitative record of his malaise, ‘it’s definitely not a cold. Because my stomach feels weird and that suggests to me that it’s more …’
    He wondered what had become of him. In all the time he’d been with Katherine he’d been ill once, twice at most, and even then with great reluctance. He’d prided himself on his resilience. At his previous place of work he’d kept a copy of Field Marshal Montgomery’s famous sign on his desk:
I’m 99% Fit, Are You?
Odd, really, given how generally diseased his entire relationship with Katherine had been. Perhaps, he thought, you never really shut disease out; merely shunted it into new areas of your life.
    On this occasion, Daniel had succumbed to something that wasn’t quite flu, since it was accompanied by a level of fatigue and lower back pain that were not, in Daniel’s conception of flu, a normal part of the experience. Responding with his usual immediacy as soon as it became clear this was going to be a genuine bout of ill health, he’d taken to his bed and remained there for close to seventy-two hours, getting up only sporadically for such necessities as toast, orange juice and trips to the toilet. By day three he was in a satisfying funk. The bed reeked; he was greasy and unshaven; his dressing gown had become a grim second skin.
    Disappointingly, despite these heavily vaunted external indicators, Daniel also seemed to be showing every sign of recovery, and the thought was beginning to occur to him that the thing might have run its course, and that he should probably start thinking about getting up and making himself halfway human again before Angelica got genuinely impatient and frustrated rather than just teasingly so. Given that he and Angelica had invited friends round for dinner (or, more accurately, Angelica had invited
her
friends round for dinner), he was under a certain degree of pressure to recover, and much as he resented this, it seemed preferable to an evening spent listening to their echoing laughter downstairs.
    Daniel liked being ill. He regarded it as luxurious, almost decadent. He spent so much of his life being organised and well presented that he had come to regard illness as one of the few times he had permission to let himself go. He drank only occasionally, and although he had experimented with drugs in the past, largely supervised by Nathan, whose capacity for illegal intake was boundless and troubling and, to Daniel, faintly seductive, he had never really been the type to develop any regular habits of chemical relaxation. Indeed, the only time he was ever particularly tempted was when Angelica, as she often did, announced that she didn’t need drugs to have a good time, prompting Daniel to wonder if he might need drugs to have a good time around people who didn’t need drugs to have a good time.
    His convalescence had not, however, gone according to