A Conspiracy of Friends Read Online Free PDF

met in a bar, appeared in the corner of the grounds, surrounded by sea-grape trees, to be covered in an astonishingly short time by bougainvillea, and eventually to disappear, not to be missed because nobody had ever used it. With the house came a run-down marina and chandlery, which he put under the control of an enterprising local manager and which prospered greatly.
    The uncle was a man of literary tastes, a voracious reader who expounded at length, to anybody who would listen, on the damp fate of books in the humid Caribbean climate. Merle was quite unlike him in this respect; she read virtually nothing other than the occasional beach novel, some breathless account of romanticyearnings or the racy couplings of hedonistic twenty-somethings. She wanted very little out of life except for one thing: a man. It did not particularly matter, she thought, what sort of man might be allocated to her by Fate; the only important thing was that he would be there, to be looked after and guarded from the depredations of other women who were not in the fortunate position of having a man. It was a curious, somewhat limited view of life, but not without a trace of dim nobility. Merle did not envy what others had; she bore few resentments; she did not wish to despoil the world in any way. All she wanted was a nest.
    Eddie suited her perfectly. She regarded him as uncomplicated, and had indeed described him as such to her friends. “With Eddie,” she said, “what you get is what it says on the tin.”
    “That’s something,” said her friend, before adding, enigmatically: “The trouble with my ex was that he didn’t have a tin.”
    Merle was not sure what this meant but sympathised nonetheless. “Pity, that.”
    Eddie was content for Merle to look after him, and this quickly became her main concern. In this she manifested a selflessness which, had it been applied to a worthier project, would have seemed positively virtuous. The energy she poured into making sure that Eddie was well turned out, that his clothes were neatly folded and put away after he had tossed them down on the floor, was every bit as intense as that of the most devoted of nuns tending to the poor and sick. Her dedication was certainly as great even if its beneficiary was less meritorious. Not that Eddie himself regarded this as anything less than his due. He revelled in the attention shown him. It was, he thought, a stroke of the most extraordinary good fortune that he should find a woman like Merle, but it was nonetheless fortune that he had somehow always believed would come his way and he felt was, in some unexplained way, also his due.
    Merle met Eddie shortly after he had moved out of CorduroyMansions. She was then living in London, in the Primrose Hill flat that belonged to her uncle, which he had offered to her when he began to spend most of his time on St. Lucia. Merle had a job helping a friend who ran a retro clothing shop on the Portobello Road. It was not well paid—in fact, the friend sometimes forgot to pay her at all—but it suited her very well as it enabled her to indulge her interest in clothing and at the same time to hone her quite exceptional skill at selling things.
    This talent enabled her to persuade people that the clothing they were trying on was exactly the thing for which they had long been searching. Merle’s power to do this was almost hypnotic.
    “That is definitely you,” she would say. “No, seriously, it looks just right. And you look fantastic in it—you really do. You owe it to yourself to buy it, you know.”
    Flattered in this way, and compelled by the suggestion that the purchase was somehow a tribute to themselves, the customers would do as Merle prompted and purchase the item. Of course there were consequences, mostly in the shape of disappointment on the part of the customers over the fact that they had bought such manifestly unsuitable garments, but these came later, in the cold light of home.
    After the death of her