Christine felt negligent then, wondering if she cared that Alex wasn’t writing. She didn’t think about it much. People did seem to like his poems. Although they hadn’t been much reviewed at first, in the years since they were published they’d acquired a certain cult following. Anyway, he had seemed stubbornly perverse to her, taking on seasonal work at the post office on top of his language classes, getting up in the freezing flat at an hour when it was still dark, when it wasn’t even conceivably morning. Why didn’t he try to find a job he liked? There was something self-dramatising in his sacrifices, though stoically he never uttered one word of complaint.