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breathe. They have their dreams. They have a destiny which their proportions, the materials they are made of, their positioning, all point towards. I simply unlock it for them. I open a door that would otherwise be closed by the preconceptions of the owner, or the designer for that matter. And it’s extraordinary how many spaces give a shout of joy when this happens.
Look!
they exclaim.
Look! This is what I want to be! This is me! C
’
est moi!
’ ”

9. Cosmo Speaks
    M ERLE ARRANGED AN appointment with Cosmo Bartonette. It was not easy; Cosmo was not the sort of person one could phone directly—and his personal assistant proved elusive. Eventually she returned Merle’s call and said that she would enter an appointment in Cosmo’s diary for the following week. “You’re lucky,” she said. “There’s been a cancellation—otherwise you would have had to wait for yonks and yonks. You can see Cosmo on Tuesday at nine, for an hour.”
    “Who does he think he is?” Merle said to Eddie. “Tuesday at nine. Yonks.”
    “Probably barmy,” said Eddie.
    “I suppose he
is
famous,” she conceded.
    Eddie appeared to have changed his mind. “You get what you pay for,” he said. “I’ve always said that. This guy is something special. You don’t get into mags like that without being something special.”
    They both went to the appointment, which took place in Cosmo Bartonette’s studio off Old Church Street. The designer was in his late thirties, dressed relatively casually but with a studied elegance that seemed entirely right for his profession: neatly pressed chinos, a woven leather belt, a pink check shirt, small gold-rimmed glasses.
    “Welcome to my studio,” he said as he led them into a sitting area at one end of a large, airy room decorated with several large Hockney prints. Noticing Eddie’s eyes go to these prints, he asked, “You like Hockney?”
    The question seemed to be about something more than Eddie’s taste in art, but Eddie did not pick up on this.
    “Yeah. A bit. Yeah. Maybe.”
    “The lines he uses are so
clean
,” said Cosmo Bartonette. “And there are no more than are absolutely necessary. Yet he captures mood so well, don’t you think? A few lines—zip, zip—and he’s got a whole mood.”
    “Those boys look like they’re good friends,” said Merle, peering at one of the prints. “Nice.”
    Cosmo Bartonette smiled. “It’s so hard to capture human closeness. Yet Hockney does it. Again, with just a few lines.”
    They sat down around a low glass table. Cosmo Bartonette folded his hands on his lap. “I hear from my assistant that you have a hotel.”
    “A house at the moment,” said Merle. “It was left to me by my uncle. He had this house on St. Lucia and we—that’s Eddie and I—thought we might turn it into a hotel. But we don’t want just any old hotel—”
    “We want something really special,” interjected Eddie. “A really classy place. No rubbish.”
    “No, no rubbish,” agreed Merle.
    Cosmo Bartonette was watching them closely, his gaze moving from Merle to Eddie, and back to Merle.
    “Well, we don’t do rubbish,” he said, a smile hovering on his lips.
    “That’s good,” said Eddie.
    “But I need to know a bit about what you have in mind. The setting. You’ve got some photographs to show me?”
    Merle reached into her bag and took out a folder of photographic prints. “These aren’t all that good, but they give a general idea of what it’s like.”
    Cosmo Bartonette took the photographs and began to look through them. “Nice,” he said. “Really nice. Not entirely unlike Mustique. I did a bit of work there for …”
    He did not finish the sentence but returned to his scrutiny of the pictures. When he had finished going through them he passed them back to Merle. “You could make something really special out of that place,” he said. “You’re very lucky to have it.”
    Merle exchanged a look of satisfaction with Eddie. “You’ll do