If I knew what grading was, I might well want to minimize it, but I’m unwilling to yield the interview stage to design quite so quickly. I feel at a distinct disadvantage, caught on the hop by his unexpected appearance. Three weeks have passed since Benjamín gave up his name and promised to get in touch with him, and in the interim, I’d begun to get twitchy. I badly didn’t want to blind contract a building company out of the sprawling air-conditioned horror of Phoenix or Tucson – the sheer travel alone would have made it inefficient and expensive. Besides, what work has been done on Temerosa seems to have been done well and, God knows, I didn’t want a new lot of builders scratching their heads and gazing in mock horror at somebody else’s work with the predictable, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, call this a finished job?’

The problem was I had no way of getting in touch with Duval and Benjamín had been exasperatingly vague when questioned, pulling down on his mariachi and looking into the middle distance as though his errant foreman might appear over the horizon at any given moment, singing, ‘If I had a hammer – I’d a-hammer in the mornings . . .’ But still – I had wanted to know – where did this Duval live? Was he away on another job? And what kind of a name was Duval anyway?

In the end, though, I gave up and had preliminary plans for Temerosa drawn up by an architect who had sounded, leastways on the telephone, adequately qualified for the job. He agreed to drive down from Tucson to take a look, and turned up with both his wife and an engineer in tow, the latter spending most of the afternoon complimenting his boss on his choice of headgear. Surprisingly, the plans they’d sent had looked reasonably good. Nevertheless Duval turns each page with quiet disdain.

‘How did they get on to you in the first place?’ I ask. It’s essential that I muddle through all preliminary meetings without giving away that I am less than sure what I’m doing. I began training as an architect, it’s true, but dropping out after three years to marry Robert meant exchanging girders and foundations for flora and fauna, a mistake I have regretted ever since and one that now puts me at a distinct disadvantage. Once I have extracted a quote from him, I’ll feel more secure; until then there’s no doubt I’m an easy mark.