Willard stabbed a finger toward the heart of its radiance. ‘Over there!’ Marianne smiled; he always thought it so important to know his way around. For him, Hell must be a new foreign city for which he had no map. Arm in arm they walked down Queen Street toward the river. He asked her: ‘When you said that – about Tony being taken from the Elbe and given to the Thames – did you know he actually lives in a houseboat?’ ‘No. That was pure . . . flux? Oh – look only! God, so beautiful!’ Above them now towered the northern abutment of Hammersmith Bridge, spiky, Gothic, crisp against the bleached sky – a contrast made even starker by the still-unwashed grime of the war years. They both stopped, no longer man and wife, no longer lovers, but a pair of architects lost in the magical space defined and caged by its tracery. Willard echoed her, ‘Will you just look at that!’ She took it as a gentle correction and stored away the phrase, a lover once again. ‘Why do we respond like that?’ he asked.
