Idiopathy

…’
    She hung up, then sat down on the floor and pressed at the sides of her head with her palms and asked herself why, for once, she couldn’t just accept what she wanted and be glad, instead of pushing it away and then waiting for it to return.
    It was OK, she told herself. In a couple of minutes she would call him back. Just as soon as she’d been able to convince herself she didn’t care.

‘L ove you darling. Could you pass the milk?’
    ‘Course I can baby. Here you go. Love you.’
    ‘Love you too.’
    They had, Daniel thought, crossed all accepted boundaries of decency.
    ‘And the juice?’
    ‘Sorry baby.’
    ‘Thanks sweetie.’
    ‘My pleasure sugar.’
    They munched their cereal. Daniel fretted over the headlines; Angelica pored over a paperback called
The Self-Help Habit: How to Put Down the Books and Get on with Your Life
. After a while, she looked up at him and smiled.
    ‘Love you,’ she said quietly.
    ‘Love you too,’ said Daniel. ‘More muesli?’
    Asked how it had come to this, Daniel’s explanation would, he knew, have differed quite noticeably from Angelica’s. Angelica would have called it a breakthrough. She not only
would
say but in fact
had
said, to Sebastian and Plum and one of their sallow-faced right-on friends, that it was like a new relationship. Not that there was anything wrong with the previous relationship, of course, but as everyone knew, a relationship was only as good as its growth, and this was major growth.
    Daniel wished this were true. Not in an idle, wouldn’t-world-peace-be-a-wonderful-thing sort of way, but in a concrete and decidedly pained way. He wished it were true not just for Angelica’s sake but also for his own, because if Angelica’s explanation was true, it would mean that his explanation was false, which would mean he really was the brave, generous, emotionally open and fearlessly loving person Angelica thought him to be, and not at all what he knew himself to be: a cynical, scared, duplicitous shit.
    It would have been easy to say that things had begun to unravel with Katherine’s phone call. Indeed, it would have been so easy to say this that Daniel had, for some time, toyed with the idea of
actually
saying it: of arranging Angelica on the scatter cushions one evening and telling her that Katherine had called and explaining to her in slow, even, unchallenging tones, that this had stirred up a lot of shit for him, and that he needed some time to process it, and that Angelica mustn’t worry, because this wasn’t about her, it was about him, and he was absolutely certain he would deal with it and all would be well. This would have been the mature response and would, he knew, have been greatly appreciated by Angelica, who would have at least admired its honesty. The problem, though, was that it wouldn’t have been honest at all. Up to the part about stirring shit up, it was pretty accurate, but after that it was essentially a patina of falsehood. Daniel wasn’t at all confident he could deal with it, and he was twitchingly uncertain that this didn’t have anything to do with Angelica. Dishonest as Daniel may have been, even he flinched at the prospect of accruing spiritual and romantic brownie points by pretending to be honest. Lying was one thing, but lying in such a way as to find yourself being praised for your honesty was, he thought, entirely another.
    A better approach would have been to say nothing, a technique in which Daniel was well versed, and which had served him quite reliably when coupled with his other favoured strategy of carrying on as normal. Daniel was, or so he liked to believe, very good at carrying on as normal. He knew this because he’d carried on as normal through some distinctly un-normal times, such as the latter stages of his relationship with Katherine; his affair; even Nathan’s odd behaviour and eventual disappearance. Why not, he thought, carry on as normal now?
    The difficulty, which had become apparent the moment he descended the stairs and used the expression Wrong Number to Angelica, who had believed him so immediately and with such absence of hesitation that he instantly felt staggeringly guilty, was that he could no longer be entirely sure what normal was.
    He peered over the top of the paper and studied Angelica as she studied her book. She caught his eye and shot him a little smile, then mouthed something that was indistinct due to having some muesli in her mouth, but which, going out on a limb,