36
The linen arrived via a courier in the back of a van. Tilly had been tracking the shipment for days with the devotion other people gave to royal weddings. She’d watched it make its way across fields, rivers, cities and seas. She’d seen it leave the mill, land in England, clear customs and go out for delivery. She'd been up since six waiting with bated breath, and when a notification finally arrived, it was from a driver called Mick somewhere up on the harbour road saying he was on his way.
Tilly had stood outside, watched him arrive and smiled as he’d chatted. With the boxes piling up inside the shed, Tilly had wondered what she’d done. Suddenly, her new small business, Foghorn, had become very, very real. After she’d signed Mick's little machine, it was just Tilly, the shed, the sound of the water and what now felt like many boxes of linen. Stout brown cardboard, banded in pairs, each one stamped with the same looping letters, near enough, that had sat in the corner of a pillowcase at the bottom of her suitcase for four years. It felt weird to see her own name on address labels.T. Bloomwood, The Old Boat Shed, Darling Island.Her name and the mill's mark on the same piece of paper. If you'd told the girl watering the lemon trees or the woman at the bar in Fiji that she’d bestanding in an old boat shed with a consignment of linen to sell on the World Wide Web, Tilly would have laughed out loud. Now, though, she wasn’t sure if it was funny.
For ages, Tilly stood looking at the boxes, wondering what to do next, feeling as if once she opened them, a clock would start ticking. Eventually, fetching scissors, she knelt down and slit the tape on the first box, folded back the flaps, and stopped breathing for a second. On first glance, everything dropped into place: it was gorgeous. Deep blue linen, some beautiful bottle green, a sludgy brown-y grey. A whole box of it, folded in tissue, looking back at her as if with a smile. Feeling ridiculous but somehow right, Tilly put both hands flat on the top layer and just held them there, soaking in the feel of the linen. She may also have said a small but very sincere prayer.
As Tilly delved, opened and explored, it seemed that the crew in Portugal knew their stuff. Each colour had arrived with its own sample product for photography and staging. As she lifted the first sample duvet cover out and shook it loose, she squeezed her eyes shut. Oh, oh, oh. It was better than the WhatsApp photos, surpassed her memories of the dump room and was an improvement on what she’d hoped for.
When she’d video-called and been shown linen from the dump room, she’d assumed that her memory had been doing some heavy lifting; now it was clear that all along she’d been correct. The colours were deep and gorgeous, the linens soft-edged, and the slubs perfectly imperfect. However, what was really gorgeous was the weight of the stuff. A lovely, serious, falling weight of real linen all the way from Portuguese hills. What was in her hands was nothing like the slippery sateen bleached white sheets she’d made beds with for years. This was cloth that meant it, and Tilly could feel somehow her intuition that it might work was onto something.
Going through the boxes like it was Christmas morning, she couldn’t quite believe it was as good as it was. Each item was snuggled in its own drawstring bag and wrapped in sustainable tissue. Every piece labelled with fibre content, washing instructions, the lot, exactly as promised. Really, there was nothing for Tilly to do but execute the rest of her plan because, for sure, the product side of it had arrived more or less perfect.
Sitting on the floor of her shed with her legs crossed, Tilly went through the sample pieces, looking for the slubs and flaws piece by piece. To be frank, they were the beauty of the whole idea. A slub on the corner of a king cover, where the loom had hiccupped, a line in one pillowcase where a blue ran a half-thread wide for the length of a hand, so faint you'd need to be told. One flat sheet where a slub wandered, just slightly and one duvet cover where a patch looked like embroidery. As Tilly ran her hand over it, the feelings she’d felt in the dump room all that time before multiplied. Beautiful old pieces of fabric literally made in the hills that felt as if they belonged on her bed. Items that would last a lifetime and get softer and softer with love and wear.
Nearly jumping out of her skin as the foghorn went off down the estuary, Tilly chuckled. Here she was with an idea for a business, now a real thing in her hands. The quality of the product was in no doubt. The key would be to translate the feelings she had as she’d delved through the boxes into pictures somehow. Quite frankly, a tall ask. Taking as many of the sample packs as she could upstairs, Tilly arrived in the bedroom with morning light pouring in off the water onto a waiting bed. Pursing her lips, she exhaled through her nose. She had some photographs to take.
37
Tilly had set herself a mission: to take photos of bedding for Foghorn as if they were going out of fashion. With that in mind, she’d tidied up her bedroom and got stuck in. No time like the present. She’d worked out that the shed’s position on the estuary made the light different depending on the time of day and that her favourite light was in the morning and late afternoon. At these times, the light came up off the water and in through the harbour-side windows, all soft and pearly and bounced itself around as if it was being paid to. Somehow, she knew that in great light, the Portuguese linen would sing.
Therefore, she’d got cracking and started attempting to put the vision of the Foghorn bed that was in her head into practice. It didn’t take her long to work out that it was easier said than done. The job was not to make the bed the way she'd made ten thousand of the things working in hospitality. It was tricky not to go into autopilot and do just that. Very quickly, Tilly ascertained that the years of bed-making muscle memory were wrong for the job facing her. Five-star hotels had required hospital corners, drum-tight flat sheets, karate-chopped pillows and perfect symmetry as far as the eye could see. The whole point of her job in the hotels had been to make a bed look like nobody hadever slept in it. The point of Foghorn was the opposite end of the stick. Foghorn’s ethos as Tilly saw it in her head was a lived-in, loved-up, comfy, home-like bed. Now she had the linen to sell the dream; all she had to do was try to conjure one up and capture it.
After a lot of work, a few choice words and some huffing and puffing, the vision in Tilly’s head slowly came to fruition as she worked. Layer upon layer of sludgy linen topped with berry red pillowslips, gorgeous dress cushions in coordinating shades, a thick, heavy valance skirting the floor. Once she’d foofed to her heart’s content, she stood back, narrowed her eyes and nodded. Right away, she loved it because in front of her was the thing she'd been trying to put into words ever since she’d initially pulled the pillowslips out of her duffel bag.
With morning light pouring across the rumpled linen, every little fold and slub showed and every crumple added to the expensive, lived-in, but somehow not, classy feel she’d been going for. The whole bed wooed as if it were cajoling someone to get in. So far from a nondescript regulation hotel bed, it wasn’t funny. Not a catalogue bed, posed, dead and perfect, but a bed that said it was from a life. The bed you wanted to climb into at the quinta, at your gran's when you were poorly, or on the first night of a holiday in an old shed by the sea.
As Tilly realised she was onto something, her dad’s words to strike while the iron was hot rang through her head, and she took about four hundred photographs from lots of different angles. Kneeling on floorboards, standing on a chair, and lying flat on her stomach in the doorway all in the purpose of nailing a good shot. The more she worked, the better the bed began to look, and as she really got into it, the more Tilly felt as if she was onto something.
The actual loveliness wasn’t the only thing going on in the room. It seemed that our Tils had somehow acquired a new skillwithout even knowing it. How about that then? Tilly wasn’t too bad at taking photos and styling beds. In fact, as she scrolled through what she’d snapped, it was almost as if she’d been made for it. Perhaps years of servicing hotel rooms had actually been a great experience for her after all. It seemed that maybe she was good at this. Not have-a-go good but good good straight out of the gate.
Taking a while to work out that the photographs were not a fluke, and it wasn't beginner's luck, Tilly nodded and raised her eyebrows. It wasn't that the linen was doing all the work, either, gorgeous as it was. It was years of walking into fancy bedrooms at seven in the morning and putting them right. Tilly realised as she stood and took photos that she knew what a bed looked like from a doorway, where the eye went first, knew what a pillow did wrong, the difference between rumpled-inviting and just plain unmade. Unbeknownst to her at the time, she’d been on an apprenticeship in all things bed, and now that journey in learning had found itself a lovely new job at a company called Foghorn.
The last photo of the morning, taken on a whim with the light going flat and Tilly running out of steam, was the best of all. The shed’s old iron bed layered up with stacks and stacks of beautiful old linen, a mug of tea on the side, a pile of books on the bedside table, a vase stuffed full of some branches from a tree outside, relayed everything about the image of Foghorn Tilly had in her mind.
As she used her finger and thumb to zoom in, she waswellpleased with herself. Styling the bed had not been a walk in the park, but the results were much better than Tilly had anticipated. All Foghorn needed now was an online home, and it would be ready to put itself out there, or as it were, to bed.
38
Since Tilly had learnt that Otto was not in possession of a wife, she’d thought way too much about the oyster night. Much of it had involved being in a flap. Mostly the flap was caused by what it even was that he’d asked. She’d gone back and forth so many times that part of her had plumped for not going at all. Then she remembered the fireworks that had made themselves known the moment she’d clapped eyes on him, and by God was she going to go. Wild horses wouldn’t have kept her away.
Whether it was a date or not, as the case may be, there was no doubt that the mere thought of being in the vicinity of Otto had led to a lot of consulting with Tilly’s non-existent wardrobe. That’s when things got tricky. She’d tried on a pastel blue strappy dress about six times, paired her white jeans with a green silk shirt and her espadrilles. Nothing worked, and nor did the sight of what looked back at her. Her black trousers with a white shirt made her look as if she still worked in the five-star hotel, and mostly she felt dumpy, past her sell-by-date and tired around the edges. All in all, Tilly reiterated that she needed to raise her wardrobe game and then some.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have a clue about what she wanted to look like when she turned up at the oyster night. She knewexactly the look she wanted. That was the easy bit, and she had a vision all set in her head. A look that had been with her whilst wrapped in tropical heat, fans whirring overhead, surrounded by jungles of lush deep greens. Tilly had travelled with her vision for long enough: an English summer afternoon, all pretty tea dresses, little cardigans, leather sandals, tassels and Pimms. The sort of Sunday afternoon where one sits at a cricket match on a lawn chair plonked on the grass with not a care in the world. As if you’d just thrown on a casual breezy dress and not made any sort of effort at all. The problem was she had a severe lack of tea dresses, and she needed a mammoth effort to scrub up well.
Nothing in Tilly’s wardrobe fit the bill in the slightest. The dress she'd worn to Lucie's gathering didn't cut the mustard, and the strappy sundresses designed for tropical heat now felt bizarrely out of place. On a mission to find something to wear, she'd walked to the tram, got off near the bakery, gone into a local boutique and walked out again because of the prices. She then followed a similar routine in another shop and more or less decided that the white jeans would have to do. Tilly did not have spare cash to throw at an outfit.
Deciding to head to Darlings for a nice coffee, a few minutes later, she pushed open the door. Evie, the owner, smiled. 'Hi again. How are you? Doing well?'
'Yes, thanks.'
Evie pointed to a table about halfway down the side alongside floor-to-ceiling shelving groaning with small coffee bowls. 'Coffee for one?'
'Yes, please.'
'Basket?'
Tilly realised that you didn't ask what was on offer in the basket. You got what you were given. It was a local custom that was going to take some getting used to. 'Love one, thank you.'
