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me.”
    Merle leaned forward and planted a kiss on his cheek. “What about the ring?”
    Eddie nodded vaguely. “Yeah, a ring.”
    “Shall we go and choose one?”
    Again, Eddie shrugged. “Whatever.”
    Merle had hoped for a more romantic response, but it was not to materialise, and they moved on to the next subject without further discussion of the ring. This conversation had taken place in the middle of a wider discussion of what to do about the house on St. Lucia. The marina and chandlery were doing well and needed no decisions taken; the house, though, required attention, or at least some view to be adopted as to its fate. Eddie had suggested turning it into a hotel, an idea Merle had originally greeted unenthusiastically but which she was now beginning to find more attractive.
    “A hotel’s the answer,” said Eddie. “But we should keep a few rooms for ourselves—a flat at the back maybe, or in the grounds. Get somebody in to run it. A manager.”
    Merle liked the sound of a manager. “A manager,” she said, savouring the reassuring qualities of the word. “Yes. Like the man who looks after the marina. A manager would be a good idea.”
    Eddie expanded upon this. “He can manage the place, you see.”
    Merle nodded. “That would be good.”
    “Hire the staff. Pay the bills. That sort of stuff.”
    “Important,” said Merle.
    “Yeah. And then we can check up that he’s managing right.”
    “We’d have to do that,” agreed Merle. “You want a good manager.”
    “We’d get the best,” said Eddie.
    The management structure having been decided, they passed on to the issue of decor and ambience.
    “It should be classy,” said Eddie.
    “Of course.”
    “If it’s classy,” Eddie went on, “then you get the right sort of people staying there. No rubbish.”
    Merle thought he was right. “We don’t want rubbish,” she said. “They can stay elsewhere.”
    “Yeah. Not at our place. They can stay down the road.”
    “So, what … feel are we looking for, Ed?”
    Already Eddie had an idea. “We need an angle,” he said. “We need to get somebody to tell us what people are looking for, know what I mean? If we know what people are looking for, then …”
    “Then we can give it to them,” supplied Merle.
    “Yeah. So we need to get a—”
    Merle was thinking ahead. “A designer. I read an article in one of the mags about this guy who designs restaurants and hotels. It said he was the best there is. And he’s here in London, I think. We could ask him. I’ve still got the mag.”
    She fetched the magazine—a bulky, glossily printed publication with advertisements for perfumes and fashion—and paged through it.
    “Do you like this?” she said, holding up a picture of a large diamond ring. “Only joking!”
    “One thing at a time,” muttered Eddie. “This designer guy …”
    The article was located. It was an interview with a man called Cosmo Bartonette, described at the head of the page as
London’s sharpest design eye
. “I call myself a
design eye
rather than a
designer
,” said Cosmo. “It sounds the same when you say it but the difference stresses the true nature of my calling. You have to have an eye for design.”
    Merle read this out to Eddie. “You see?”
    “Yeah,” said Eddie. “Carry on.”
    “ ‘I start from the basic premise that there is nothing there. I look at a space and then I
subtract
. I call this the cleansing process—rather like eating a
trou normand
before the meal begins, rather than halfway through. I cleanse my palate, so to speak. I exclude the items that the client already has—because they clutter the room. Then I allow an alternative to emerge—organically.
    “ ‘People have said to me that the hallmark of my approach is to allow the space itself to do the work. And I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s as if I interrogate the space and get
it
to tell
me
what
it
wants to have within it. Spaces are not inert. They