Chapter 29
It was a few days later, and Tilly was in the boat room elbow-deep in a cupboard whose contents were not for the faint of heart.
Her phone rang with a call from an international number, and sitting down among dust, old buckets, and rusty paint tins, she answered.
Obviously, Inês from Portugal, Tilly wondered what she was going to say.
Inês had emailed her WhatsApp number and said she would call. The time had come. 'Hello?'
'Tilly.' Inês pronounced her name, Tee-lee, with two notes, like the start of a song. 'You are alive.'
'Inês! Hi! Yes, I'm alive. It’s so lovely to hear from you. How are you?'
'Well! I’m very well. We all are. How are you?’
‘Yes, great, thanks. How’s the business?’
‘We have had a very good few years. COVID, unbelievably, was brilliant for our business in the end. We got a lot of new customers who turned out to be repeat customers and new clients.'
'That’s such good news.'
'How are you? You are back from your travels around the world, yes?’
‘I am. I’m back in England.’ Tilly didn’t bother to go into the whole Lennixx thing. No one needed to know about that.
‘So. You have a business idea! You want our faults. Are you crazy?'
Tilly laughed and forced herself to speak slowly. 'I want your faults, yep, all of them. Well, as many as I can afford, which, to be perfectly honest with you, is not very many to start with.'
The worst they can do is laugh.
Inês chuckled. 'Four years or so ago, an English girl stood in our dump room and asked me why we hid the best cloth in the house.
I tell my husband that night. He says, what?
I say, exactly. Nobody sees it, Tilly. The buyers come, they want perfect, perfect, perfect, they pay nothing for our faults. So...'
Tilly couldn’t work out where the conversation was going; therefore she kept quiet.
'You will not buy our faults. You will take them on consignment.
You know this word? You sell, then you pay us.
For the first shipment, we will do it all via WhatsApp video unless you can come here.
You pay the shipping, that is all, and you send me photographs of every bed, and when you are rich, then we talk. Yes?' Inês cackled.
An old rusty bucket handle was digging into Tilly’s hip, fog sat soft and pearly at the little window, and Tilly squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to compute if what she had heard was correct. 'Oh, right, okay. Yes. Thank you so much. Gosh, are you sure? That’s so good of you.’
‘Of course!’
‘The other thing is that I don’t really know about labelling and all that side of it. I need to get the legal stuff sorted, plus sizes and all that. There’s a lot to think about. My email was really just to get your thoughts.'
A sigh came down the line that could have stripped paint.
'We export forty years. You think you are our first English customer? We have the capacity for bar codes, sizes, and labelling for different international markets. Remember, I told you we produce for the company in England, where everything is neutral? It’s all done by computer and an app these days. Not a problem.'
Tilly vaguely remembered being told that the factory produced for British retailers. ‘That’s right. So, I wouldn't need to worry about labelling and suchlike?’
'Insurance! You must be insured. Everything else we take care of.’
‘Oh, gosh, this is so exciting!’ Tilly could hardly contain herself.
‘Tilly, as I said, you are, what is that English saying, cakes and a picnic or something? No one will buy seconds, but we clicked for a reason that summer, didn’t we? Business is sometimes formed on feelings, I think. I say give it a go.’
‘My dad used to say the same.’ Tilly chuckled as the foghorn went off.
‘Oh, my God! What was that noise?'
‘A foghorn.’
‘A what? Where are you?’
Tilly tried to explain and gave up. ‘It’s part of the island I now live on.’
‘You English. All crazy, all of you. It’s the rain. It makes you all funny in the head.’
Tilly chuckled. ‘Possibly.’
‘I have to go. I will email you. I’ll pop my assistant in the group. You can chat about sizes and shipping and all that. Bye Tee-lee. Speak soon.’
‘See you and thanks so much.’
Staring at her phone in bemusement, Tilly replayed the conversation in her head.
She hadn’t even thought about something like a consignment.
To be fair, she wasn’t totally sure what it meant, but Mr Google was going to help her to learn.
Bottom line, she had a hundred-and-forty-year-old Portuguese linen mill on her side of the table for a business idea that had arrived out of the blue.
Her dad would have categorically said that her position was not a bad place to be.
Nodding, she smiled as the name of her new business dropped in. Foghorn had just been born.