Chapter 36
The linen arrived via a courier in the back of a van.
Tilly had been tracking the shipment for days with the devotion other people gave to royal weddings.
She’d watched it make its way across fields, rivers, cities and seas.
She’d seen it leave the mill, land in England, clear customs and go out for delivery.
She'd been up since six waiting with bated breath, and when a notification finally arrived, it was from a driver called Mick somewhere up on the harbour road saying he was on his way.
Tilly had stood outside, watched him arrive and smiled as he’d chatted.
With the boxes piling up inside the shed, Tilly had wondered what she’d done.
Suddenly, her new small business, Foghorn, had become very, very real.
After she’d signed Mick's little machine, it was just Tilly, the shed, the sound of the water and what now felt like many boxes of linen.
Stout brown cardboard, banded in pairs, each one stamped with the same looping letters, near enough, that had sat in the corner of a pillowcase at the bottom of her suitcase for four years.
It felt weird to see her own name on address labels.
T. Bloomwood, The Old Boat Shed, Darling Island.
Her name and the mill's mark on the same piece of paper. If you'd told the girl watering the lemon trees or the woman at the bar in Fiji that she’d be standing in an old boat shed with a consignment of linen to sell on the World Wide Web, Tilly would have laughed out loud. Now, though, she wasn’t sure if it was funny.
For ages, Tilly stood looking at the boxes, wondering what to do next, feeling as if once she opened them, a clock would start ticking.
Eventually, fetching scissors, she knelt down and slit the tape on the first box, folded back the flaps, and stopped breathing for a second.
On first glance, everything dropped into place: it was gorgeous.
Deep blue linen, some beautiful bottle green, a sludgy brown-y grey.
A whole box of it, folded in tissue, looking back at her as if with a smile.
Feeling ridiculous but somehow right, Tilly put both hands flat on the top layer and just held them there, soaking in the feel of the linen.
She may also have said a small but very sincere prayer.
As Tilly delved, opened and explored, it seemed that the crew in Portugal knew their stuff.
Each colour had arrived with its own sample product for photography and staging.
As she lifted the first sample duvet cover out and shook it loose, she squeezed her eyes shut.
Oh, oh, oh. It was better than the WhatsApp photos, surpassed her memories of the dump room and was an improvement on what she’d hoped for.
When she’d video-called and been shown linen from the dump room, she’d assumed that her memory had been doing some heavy lifting; now it was clear that all along she’d been correct.
The colours were deep and gorgeous, the linens soft-edged, and the slubs perfectly imperfect.
However, what was really gorgeous was the weight of the stuff.
A lovely, serious, falling weight of real linen all the way from Portuguese hills.
What was in her hands was nothing like the slippery sateen bleached white sheets she’d made beds with for years.
This was cloth that meant it, and Tilly could feel somehow her intuition that it might work was onto something.
Going through the boxes like it was Christmas morning, she couldn’t quite believe it was as good as it was.
Each item was snuggled in its own drawstring bag and wrapped in sustainable tissue.
Every piece labelled with fibre content, washing instructions, the lot, exactly as promised.
Really, there was nothing for Tilly to do but execute the rest of her plan because, for sure, the product side of it had arrived more or less perfect.
Sitting on the floor of her shed with her legs crossed, Tilly went through the sample pieces, looking for the slubs and flaws piece by piece.
To be frank, they were the beauty of the whole idea.
A slub on the corner of a king cover, where the loom had hiccupped, a line in one pillowcase where a blue ran a half-thread wide for the length of a hand, so faint you'd need to be told. One flat sheet where a slub wandered, just slightly and one duvet cover where a patch looked like embroidery. As Tilly ran her hand over it, the feelings she’d felt in the dump room all that time before multiplied.
Beautiful old pieces of fabric literally made in the hills that felt as if they belonged on her bed.
Items that would last a lifetime and get softer and softer with love and wear.
Nearly jumping out of her skin as the foghorn went off down the estuary, Tilly chuckled.
Here she was with an idea for a business, now a real thing in her hands.
The quality of the product was in no doubt.
The key would be to translate the feelings she had as she’d delved through the boxes into pictures somehow.
Quite frankly, a tall ask. Taking as many of the sample packs as she could upstairs, Tilly arrived in the bedroom with morning light pouring in off the water onto a waiting bed.
Pursing her lips, she exhaled through her nose. She had some photographs to take.