Chapter 32
Tilly was sitting on an upturned crate in the boat room, ready for a call from Portugal.
She'd been clearing out again all morning, and the room around her looked like a jumble sale.
Nets in piles, ropes all over the place, the clinker boat sitting in the middle of it all.
Wiping her hands down her dungarees, she propped herself by the harbour-side window where the signal showed two bars, held her phone up and waited.
Right on time, her phone buzzed, and she answered.
Inês's face filled the screen, and then swung to reveal a young woman with a clipboard and a smile.
'Tee-lee! This is Beatriz, my assistant. We’ll show you what we have, and you will choose. Yes? We are in the dump room as we discussed. Lovely to see you.'
'Hiya! Yes, lovely to see you, too.'
The phone on the other end turned around, and Tilly smiled.
There it was, the dump room more or less identical to how it had been when Tilly had walked into it previously.
Four years and half a planet later, and exactly as she'd always seen it in her head.
The little back room in the hills, racked floor-to-ceiling, bolt after bolt after bolt of the most gorgeous linen ever.
Even through a phone screen, the colours did something to her, and she knew somehow that her idea was a good one.
Deep berry reds stacked next to bottle greens, sludgy blues, a grey like the estuary at low tide, even the purples were nice.
Beatriz walked slowly along the racks, and Tilly, wedged by a window in an old shed on the other side of Europe, drank the whole lot in.
'You see?' Inês's voice floated from off-screen. 'All still here and according to my regular buyers not getting a look in. So, tell me what you want out of this lot.'
Tilly scoffed. What did she want? Pretty much everything.
All of it would do. Every last flawed, slubbed, wandering inch of the place.
What she could afford to ship was another conversation entirely.
'Can Beatriz go back to the reds? The check one, second shelf and also the plain deep berry ones.
Gosh, the colours are so lovely in all those different hues. The dyes are what I remembered.'
Beatriz obliged. The phone came in close on a heavy linen in the deepest berry red full of slubs, and Tilly felt the click go off again, the same one from the pillowcases.
Clicks were what her dad had built a whole life on.
She could see her vision right there in the dump room among the piles and piles of linen. The imperfection was Foghorn to a T.
'They’re all hand-dyed with natural dyes, which is why the hues are different.' Inês noted. 'Hmm, this green would be nice with them and one of the blues. Yes, they are lovely up close.'
Tilly nodded. 'Ooh, yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about. I've made ten thousand white beds, Inês, and spent ages thinking about the opposite.'
'Okay, well, it could work. I don’t think you’ll know until you try. While we’re here, show me where you’re going to photograph the bedding. In my experience, that is what always makes or breaks it. How you market this will be what sells it.'
Tilly winced at the thought of broadcasting the shed, but got up and made her way up the stairs to the bedroom.
As she walked in, the light and the view were just right.
'I don’t want it to be staged beds and a made-up room.
I want it to be real, sort of crumpled and lived in.
Are you getting me? This is all I’ve got to work with.
' Tilly walked the phone to the window and turned it to the water, where the estuary was all soft and pearly, the hazy blue stretching away to the mainland.
Right on cue, a little boat crossed through the middle like it had been hired for the occasion.
'Oh, aww, yes, hmm, I see.' Inês sighed.
'That's the light I'll photograph it in.'
'Okay, okay, okay. Yes, I see what you’re seeing.
Tee-lee! That is more like it. That view is fantastic!
I get it. Right, Beatriz will pull out the ones you’ve noted, take some more pictures and send a list later.
We’ll have it made up in no time on a tiny order like this.
We can turn this around in a few hours. We’ve got full staffing here at the moment.
All you’ll pay is the shipping and insurance; that is all.
If you want samples, we can express them to you overnight, but really, what you see is what you get. '
Tilly had already seen in real life how lovely the linen was. That part was not in doubt. 'Photos and lists should be fine.'
'Tee-lee, when the English are all sleeping in my faults, we will laugh.'
'We will.'
'We’ll get this going from this end and then start the order when you say go. Sorry, I have to get going now. I’ve got a meeting. Thanks, Tee-lee.'
'No, thank you. Bye, I’ll wait to hear from Beatriz later, then.'
Once the call had ended, Tilly went back down to the boat room, surprised at how easy the whole bedding thing was turning out to be.
Goodness only knew if it would work, but the beginning hadn’t been too hard.
Sitting back down on the crate, she opened the banking app and looked at her savings, most of which had come from the divorce settlement.
The quiet little sum that had crossed the world with her and most of which was spoken for, earmarked for Margery's account, sat there waiting. Swallowing, she wondered if she’d be better off back on the mainland in a nice, safe, little flat on a new estate somewhere with a normal, regular old job like everybody else. Nah, not happening. Been there before.