Tilly felt a lump form in her throat and swallowed it down. ‘I’ve gathered.’
'He hasn't even set foot in China Darling for years,' Shelly added as the tram slowed, the bell ding-dinged, and a few passengers got off. Tilly watched them go, grateful for the momentary distraction, but Shelly was not a woman to be deterred by a tram stop. She leaned in, one hand on a brass rail, swaying with the rhythm of the carriage. ‘You go for it is what I say. Go for your life.’
The tram dinged its way past the bakery, and Tilly, scrabbling for higher ground, went for a change of subject. 'Nice day for it, isn't it? The weather’s been so lovely.'
Shelly rang the bell for the next stop, ding-ding, brisk and cheerful. 'Yes, it has been. Lovely weather for a new relationship. Ha! Remember the thing about Darling. Nothing's a secret around here and everyone has your back as long as you play your cards right.'
Funnily enough, Tilly had already worked that out for herself. She continued to laugh and played the whole Otto situation down. 'It's not a secret. There's just nothing much to tell. We've had a few dinners. It's early days.' Tilly out and out lied. There had been more than a few dinners and a lot of time horizontal.
The tram rumbled up Darling Street as the lovely, kind banter continued. Smiling from ear to ear, Tilly gave back as good as she got, attempting to sound breezy and as if she didn’t care that much about this new relationship that had knocked her sideways. Her attitude said that similar things happened to her every day of the week and that she was completely carefree and unbothered by the whole thing. That couldn’t have been further from the truth.
There was one thing Tilly most certainly did not mention to the two pairs of eager ears on the tram. That things were happening to her heart. Some things a girl kept for herself.
52
The grand opening of Foghorn involved one person and one person only: Tilly. Initially, she’d had a few ideas about doing some sort of launch but had thought better of it. No one really knew or really cared. Foghorn was little more than a load of images, a few hours of work setting up a website, a payment gateway, and a consignment of drop-dead gorgeous linen from Portugal. Tilly had decided early on that the first few months would be suck it and see and so far she’d not seen anything because the site wasn’t yet live.
The store, as she’d set it up, had been password-protected as she’d fiddled with bits and bobs and done her best to make everything right. Now it was as good as her limited skills were ever going to make it, and she and it were ready to rumble. Pressing a button to remove the password protection, Tilly waited for the little banner to change, and suddenly she was off.Your store is live.
That, however, was it. No cutting of a ribbon, opening of a door, ringing of a bell. Chuckling to herself, she realised that she should have tried to time going live with the Foghorn itself going off. Somewhere out there, beyond the hazy Darling blue, the entire population of planet Earth could now buy a duvet coverfrom a shed on Darling Island. There was one problem: no one knew it. Which was, of course, the next job on Tilly’s list of things to do.
For sure, good old Google had initiated a lot of wisdom on Tilly regarding how to get Foghorn out there in the world. It had a great deal to say about online advertising, very little of it in words that Tilly could make head nor tail of. Therefore, she’d spent a long time working her way through articles along the lines of:advertising your small business doesn't have to be scary!
The thing was: it was just that, very scary from someone who knew nothing about online marketing oranymarketing at all. Campaigns, audiences, conversion windows. A thing called a pixel that wanted to be put inside her website like a tracking thing. She made notes and went around in circles until she came to the conclusion that it would all make sense in the end. As she’d felt her way around digital advertising, she was feeling as if she’d already hit a roadblock in all things Foghorn. However, she tried to remain positive and reiterated words her dad had always said:Tils, you have to put money in the machine.
The machine, in this case, being social media. Loading picture upon picture onto Instagram until she had a bit of a presence and a good story, she’d popped up a sponsored post and hoped for the best. For the advert itself, she’d used a beautiful image of a layered bed and added a simple caption.
Every piece has a story. Some of them show.
Foghorn. Luxurious, natural, hand-dyed linen bedding from Darling Island.
The first day of the website being live, nothing happened other than seventeen million refreshes via Tilly. She’d also beenchief in charge of correcting way too many typos. Everything she'd read about digital ads had informed her that nothing would happen until the advertising machine kicked in as it learnt and that it took a day or two to do just that. Apparently, it took a while to find the audience it needed to. No problem. Tilly had planned accordingly and had made herself get on with other things and not look at the money she felt as if she was blasting against a wall.
That hadn’t lasted long and she’d found herself checking and refreshing almost constantly. The trouble was that the bells and whistles of the website dashboard came complete with a little graph of live visitors, which continually updated. Unfortunately, in Foghorn and Tilly’s case, the graph was a flat blue line along the bottom of nothing. For hours, Tilly checked in between keeping herself busy and every single time the same thing came back with not a sausage or a human in its sights at all.Visitors: 0. Orders: 0.
Afew days later, Tilly had forced herself not to check the graph hourly but had let it be. Now, she was going in for the kill to check. Yeah, not great, but at least the line was no longer flat. The graph had twitched or blipped, as the case may be. Four visitors and then seven, then climbing to nineteen. Nineteen actual people, somewhere in the back and beyond of England, had looked at the Foghorn ad in their idle scrolling and clicked. The graph told Tilly that they had pottered around her shop, read about the dump room via the About page, but that was where it had ended. Every single one of them had left without buying anything.Visitors: 31. Orders: 0.
By the evening of the third day, the numbers had grown, along with a deafening silence from the order department. Sixty-some visitors now, the machine doing its job, money going out day by day, but still zilch. Sixty visitors had resulted in not a single sale.
Tilly was more than disappointed, even though she told herself it was very early days. Maybe Inês had been correct all along.No one will buy seconds, are you crazy?Maybe the deep natural dyes and misweave that she'd hung the whole brand on were saying notsignaturebutdamaged. Perhaps the photographs, linen, story and actual idea of it all were good but would never, ever convert.
At the end of the day, the question was whether a stranger would put their card number into a website run by someone they didn’t know after falling in love with a linen sheet. Tilly shook her head as the answer was sitting right there on the graph in a flat blue line. Not looking that promising.
Feeling despondent, the waiting that had been quite the presence in Tilly’s life came back to make her acquaintance with a vengeance. She didn’t want to make friends with it in the slightest but right at that point, she didn’t have a whole lot of choice.
53
It was a Friday, and it had not begun promisingly in Tilly Bloomwood’s world. She was up to her elbows in the far end of the boat room in an area she’d been avoiding since the day she'd arrived. Quite frankly, with its piled-high shelves and stacks of junk, it felt perilous. A cavern of old nets, oyster cages, coils of rope and old retail paraphernalia. Tilly had finally run out of every other excuse and waded in. She had cobwebs in her hair, a smear of something on one cheek, and was sitting on the floor surrounded by what looked like the entire contents of a maritime museum's skip. Taking a break, she was sipping tea and wondering what in the name of all that was holy she'd been thinking of taking on the shed when her phone, balanced on an upturned bucket, lit up and buzzed. The Catherine wheel fizzed.
Otto:Morning. You up?
Tilly looked down at the cobwebs all over her dungarees. She was up, dressed, and elbow-deep in the boat room.
Tilly:Living the dream. You?
Otto:Up north, still at this conference. Three hundred people who all want to talk about water temperature around the UK. Shoot me.
Tilly:Sounds riveting. Are you the most interesting man in the room?
