'Fine.' Tilly smiled. 'I am a bit. It’s just that he’s my neighbour and I have to face him come what may.'
‘It will be fine if you put it to bed now.’
That was the problem: essentially, Tilly didn’t want to put it to bed, she wanted to hopina bed. However, Otto’s message had taken the wind out of her sails. ‘I’ll message him now.’
46
Tilly had pretended not to think about the handsome man who worked next door and how she’d nigh-on thrown herself at him. Instead, she’d got on with her new business. Said business had a name, a product, an Instagram account, lots of really good images, but no website and that needed to change. As she’d got down to the nuts and bolts of creating a website for Foghorn, what had surprised her was that building a cookie-cutter website from the ground up hadn’t taken her very long at all. She’d followed her nose with the principle of making everything as simple as possible, and it had served her well as she’d dabbled in software, website building and the ins and outs of writing one’s own code.
Mr Google had assured her that these days anyone could build a website in under an hour. It had taken a lot longer than that, but overall it hadn’t been too painful, and Tilly had nailed it. She’d chosen a theme, hated it, chosen another, made a logo and added her terms of business. She’d discovered what a favicon was, registered for payment thingies, learnt about postal zones and couriers. A VAT question had sent her down a rabbit hole she’d not emerged from for a long time, but all in all, it hadbeen a whole lot easier than servicing a long row of first-class rooms and beds.
She’d learnt lots, including that variants were used when one duvet cover came in three sizes and that there was a word for everything. By the end of it, Tilly felt as if she’d actually achieved something as she’d squinted at her laptop screen and saw Foghorn looking back at her. Way to go, Tils, way to go.
The thing that hadn’t been quite as easy was telling the story regarding the notion of Foghorn that lived in her head, but she’d given it a good try.
Foghorn began in a back room of a linen mill in the hills of Portugal, where the most beautiful cloth in the house was hidden away because of its flaws. A slub here, a wander in the weave there, a dye a half-shade too deep. I stood in that room and couldn't understand it, because the flawed pieces were lovely. A slub is where you can see the making. A stumble in the weave is the loom's signature.
Years later, after making up thousands of perfect white beds in hotels around the world and never once wanting to climb into any of them, I found myself in an old boat shed on a foggy little island off the south coast of England, and I knew exactly what to do. Foghorn is that back room, brought home. Heavy, honest linen in deep colours, made to be washed a hundred times and kept for years, softer with every single one.
At Foghorn, every piece has a story. Some of them show.
The About page had taken the longest. She'd tried to be truthful and, reading it back for the umpteenth time, she supposed she had been. There was one line she'd taken out and put back in about six times, and in the end, it had stayed.A bedwasn't meant to look like nobody had ever slept in it.Four years of hospital corners said otherwise, but there you go. Foghorn was not a hotel.
Clicking through the whole site from top to bottom one last time, Tilly noted that it wasn’t going to change the world, but for a first attempt it wasn’t bad. It all worked quite well, and the pictures looked, if she said so herself, rather lovely. There was really only one thing left to do, and that was to go live.
The shop sat behind its password, tucked up safe where nobody could see, judge it, or, more to the point, not buy anything from it. All Tilly had to do was press one button, and Foghorn would be out there in the world, open for business, hers, but she kept chickening out. Honestly. What was she like? She'd crossed the planet on her own, walked out of a marriage, faced down a Darling storm and lugged a shed's worth of nets down a jetty, and here she was too nervous to launch Foghorn’s website.
Worst they can do is laugh, Tils.Trying to keep her dad’s words in mind, Tilly decided to wait a few more days. Give Foghorn a little bit of time to settle in.
47
The next morning, Tilly woke up with the whole Otto situation sitting square on her chest before she'd even opened her eyes. Telling herself not to think about it because she had way too much to do, she decided to get up, get dressed and go for a walk down by the water before she got on with her day. After washing her hands and face, pulling on her jeans and a jumper, she made a coffee, then slipped her feet into her wellies by the back door and set off along the road sipping her coffee and admiring the scenery. With the tide right back, leaving a wide, gleaming stretch of sand, she gulped in the gorgeousness of Darling. Tinged with the scents of the coast, salt and seaweed, it was that sort of bright, fresh, cool English morning she’d missed when in warmer climes.
Purposely avoiding anywhere even remotely close to Otto, she took a long loop by the estuary up to the ferry and back through a narrow lane, bringing her back down towards the Boat Shed. It was just as she was nearly back home that she spied Otto coming the other way with Stanley. Feeling the Catherine wheel give itself a whizz, she reminded herself sternly to be cool, casual, friendly and breezy. She was very much an independent woman in control of her own life and emotions, thank you verymuch. Deciding to just say hello and get the initial awkwardness over and done with, she went in for the kill. 'Morning!'
Otto's head came up, a funny look crossed his face, and then he straightened and smiled. 'Morning. You're up early.'
Tilly barrelled straight on with the carefree attitude regardless of the fact that her mind was back on the sofa doing gorgeous things. 'Lovely morning, isn't it? The tide's right out.'
'It is.' Otto glanced back over his shoulder. 'It’s the best time for the beds, first thing on a low one. The pickers can get it all done before the day starts.'
'Right. Yes, it makes sense. How are the cages?' Tilly nodded and beamed as if she were interested in the oysters, the tide and the beds. She didn’t give a damn about them. She was only interested in him and very much wanted to be back on the sofa with him.
'The cages?'
Standing there in her wellies, Tilly willed herself not to feel awkward. Here they were, discussing the tide and the cages and the loveliness of the morning, when previously he had been on her sofa, and she’d had her hands up the front of his shirt, kissing him as though her life had depended on it. Gulping, she felt her face go red as she recalled what had happened. She’d run her fingers through his hair and done all sorts, and clearly he wasfullof regret. Here they were talking about oysters as if they were a pair of strangers at a bus stop. Feeling as if she wanted to scream, all of a sudden Tilly felt her hand go up in front of her, her eyebrows shoot skywards, and her head shake. 'Actually, sorry, I'm not going to do this. Nope.'
Otto frowned. 'Do what?'
'This. Talking about the weather and the tide.' Tilly waved her hand vaguely at the estuary. 'I’m not going to stand here and make small talk with you as if the other night didn't happen. I've had years of pretending things were fine when they're not, andI haven't got the energy for it any more, to be honest. No, I just haven’t. So, I'm just going to say that I had a lovely time and then you left and followed up by sending me a text about a tide, which, I'll be honest, did rather have me wondering whether I'd dreamt the whole thing or made an absolute fool of myself, or both. Clearly, it was the latter. So, before either of us says one more word about anything, I'd quite like to get it out in the open. Actually, no, not out in the open, well, yes, sorry, what I mean is, let’s just forget about it. I’m fine to move on. You don’t need to avoid me. These things happen. It’s fine.'
Otto made a face. ‘Right.’
Tilly felt her heart going like the clappers. Internally, she cringed and wanted to cut and run, but she was pretending to be all grown-up and pragmatic. It was clear by the look on Otto’s face that she was about to be very gently and kindly agreed with. Oh, the humiliation.
Otto sucked air in through his teeth. 'The truth is, I left because I didn’t want to ruin anything.'
'Oh.' Tilly side-eyed.
