Zachary considered carefully. — Alex must feel as though we’re always all watching him. That must be awful. Waiting to see him do what he ought to do. Wondering why he’s expending all that brilliance of his on things that are too small for him. He must know we’re all asking why he isn’t writing.

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.

It was always a relief, pouring out her hoarded grievances for Zachary to hear. And yet when Christine had finished she was half ashamed, because they weren’t the whole truth – although Alex really was impossible and she really was afraid of him sometimes, of his cold look cast at her, shutting her out of his favour. In their early days – when his favour had fallen on her uninvited, like Jove’s shower of gold, and before she’d had Isobel – she’d felt that she could leave him easily if they quarrelled or she changed her mind. She was free! Love was his idea, not hers. Then as time passed Alex’s force had melted something resisting in her, so that she had taken on a new shape, fitting against his. But it wasn’t always his fault when things were difficult. Under the surface of their relationship she often fought against him: against his authority, which he took for granted. He was bewildered sometimes, she thought, by the twists and turns of her dissatisfaction, and how she manoeuvred to put herself in the right. Women used their pleasantness sometimes as a weapon, a subtle knife.