Chapter 56
Walking through the Boat Shed with new eyes, Tilly gulped.
This was no longer a rose-tinted dream, nope, this was now somewhere with a purpose.
Tilly had somehow fallen into starting a new business in the place.
One, she had to make work. The building, as a place to run Foghorn, needed to get its act together.
It was strange. She’d spent a considerable amount of time at a loss, looking at the same junk-stuffed main boat room, seeing nothing but a headache, hard work and some regret thrown in for good measure. Now, with Foghorn, it had a new life as a storage and packing room.
The whole place now looked very different with its cleared shelves and lack of junk.
When she’d first walked in, the main shed area had been a graveyard of fishing paraphernalia, zinc buckets, dead computers, timber oars and old fishing floats.
Now it was a place for Foghorn to thrive, grow, take on the world.
Tilly had worked it all out in her head and followed through with graft.
On a long table by the window on the harbour side, a packing area with rolls of paper was ready to go, special little postcards she’d had made were stacked in a pile and lovely environmentally friendly bags waiting to be filled.
Tilly had envisioned it as the place where she would stand and wrap brown paper parcels while the ferry went back and forth.
And therein lay the problem. Foghorn so far had received the grand total of zero orders. Talk about a letdown.
Standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips and her hair shoved up in the hibiscus clip, Tilly baulked as she thought about all the work she’d done and how it was looking as if it was for nothing.
She’d lugged around old nets, ropes and oyster cages for days.
Taken old printers to a recycling centre, and it had taken her ages to push an old roll of carpet inch by inch out for collection.
She’d carried boxes of God-only-knew what outside to the industrial bins in Otto’s place and overall made good work of what had been an awful lot of mess.
Now, however, it felt as if it had all been a waste of time as it and she sat there doing nothing because Foghorn and its line of lovely linen had not had a single bite. Nada, nothing, zilch.
After making a cup of tea, she sat on an old timber stool she’d rescued from Otto’s yard and pondered Foghorn.
Another Tilly Bloomwood failure loomed. How had she read the room so wrong?
More importantly, why had she thought one little social media ad would do any heavy lifting?
The words from Portugal floated in and out of her mind about people not wanting the flaws and naturally dyed linens.
Yet something still told Tilly she was correct.
She just needed to find her people. How in the name of goodness was she going to do that?
Feeling very despondent, she filmed a little video of the scene out the window, the watercolour postcards intended to go in the non-existent orders, and the shelves filled with lovely linen.
Whacking on a few words and a filter, she uploaded it to her socials, closed her phone and got her notebook out, wondering what her dad would have said, thought and more importantly, done.
He’d been an expert at turning around failing businesses.
She was still sitting on the stool, turning the whole thing over, when Stanley's face appeared around the door, followed by Otto with a coil of rope over one shoulder and a takeaway cup in his hand.
He'd been in and out all week, dropping things off, borrowing a couple of things he’d had his eye on.
It was like their two properties were working together.
'There you are.' Otto stopped just inside the doors and looked around the boat room.
Tilly watched him take it in: the cleared shelves, the linen stacked in its rows, the long packing table by the window with its rolls of paper and little stack of postcards.
Everything ready and waiting. He nodded slowly.
'Blimey, you’ve done well. This place looks like an actual business. '
Tilly raised her eyebrows. 'That's the theory.'
The thing was, Otto was actually wrong. An actual business came with being busy, orders, mess and work. The Boat Shed was immaculate, untouched, not a parcel in sight, and the packing table was out of operation. Tilly saw the penny drop in Otto’s face.
'Quiet, is it?'
Tilly tried to hide her disappointment with Foghorn, keeping her tone light and breezy. 'Early days. These things take time to get going.'
'Still nothing?'
Tilly considered lying, thought better of it, and shrugged. 'None. Not one. Loads of people have had a look, and every single one of them has left without buying anything, so, you know. As I said, early days.'
Otto put his cup down on the end of her beautiful empty packing table, and Tilly watched him shift gears.
She had seen it before. The Carrington take-charge gear, engaging.
'Right, well, that's easily fixed. I know half the trade buyers in the country from the oyster side.
There's a woman who does the buying for a chain of farm shops, decent ones, the expensive sort, she'd bite your hand off for this stuff.
One call and you'd have a wholesale order by Friday that'd clear those shelves.
Or, look, if it's a cash-flow thing in the meantime, I can… '
Tilly interrupted him. 'It's fine.'
'It's clearly not fine; there's nothing moving. I'm just saying, you don't need to sit here waiting for strangers on the internet when I can do something about it. I have contacts all over the place. I can sort it in no time at all. You don’t have to worry about it.'
'Otto. It's fine. I've got it.'
Otto looked at her, and to his credit, he picked his cup back up and let it go.
'Okay. The offer's there. Come on, Stanley.
' At the doors, he paused and gestured back at the shelves with the cup, and his voice was kind, which somehow made it worse.
'It's a good idea. It just needs a push from someone who knows what they’re doing.
I can do that. Right, see you later at mine, yeah?
Shall I pick you up or are you strolling over? '
‘All good, I’ll walk. See you later.’
Tilly watched Otto walk down the jetty with Stanley as she sat on the stool in her lovely, silent, order-free packing room.
Otto’s offer had not gone down well from her end.
She hadn’t liked the look on his face. Sitting there, she tried to work out why an offer of help from a man she was mad about had made every hair on her body stand on end.
It just needs a push from someone who knows what they’re doing. Cheeky toad.
One phone call and Foghorn wouldn't be hers anymore; it would be a thing Otto Carrington had sorted for his girlfriend, the way he sorted sandbags and lifts home and getting her out of the mud.
She'd be waiting on his buyers, his favour, his world. Red flags went crazy in our Tilly’s world.
Somewhere in her head, something ticked over.
Something like a mileometer being checked.
Shaking her head to try and rid herself of the thought, Tilly told herself she was being ridiculous.
It had been something about the look on Otto’s face that she hadn’t liked, as if he thought that his job was to save her.
Pondering it and pushing the nail of her right thumb left and right on her lip, she sighed.
She wasn’t having that. Not a bar of it. At all.