'Right. Before either of you panics, I'm fine, well, fine-ish, but I’ve had a bit of an accident. I have had an incident involving a rope swing, a tree root and a gorse bush. I jumped off the swing like I was nine, but my legs didn’t like it, and I face-planted a hedge. I somehow got myself covered in spines, my arm was bleeding, and I passed out in a lane...'
She paused, looked at the bandage on her arm and carried on.
'Here’s the bit you're going to enjoy. Have a laugh, girls, have a laugh, my friends. I am on form. Guess who found me? Yep. Mud Man. He spotted me lying face down on a footpath checking Google Maps, told me I was a sandwich short of a picnic, and then, when I fainted, he picked me up. This is becoming a genre, ha.’ Tilly chuckled. ‘He put me in his car, took me to his house, called an Australian doctor who lives up the road and looks like he fell off a surfing calendar. Anyway, the doctor patched me up, and Mud Man drove me home and told me not to do anything else stupid. So, that ismynews for the day. I am the gift that keeps on giving at the moment. I've now been rescued twice by the same man. I would like to state for the record that I am a strong, independent woman, yeah right.'
Tilly chuckled as she sent the message and then, remembering the picture on the windowsill, followed up with more. 'Also. There was a photo of a woman on his windowsill. Dark hair, green coat, on a beach. He said "my wife" as in my wife's family is from Ireland. So there we are, thereisa wife. That’s the end of that then. It's actually a relief, if anything,because now the fireworks can be officially decommissioned and I can get on with my shed in peace. So that's good. Great, really. Hurrah.'
Pia replied first. 'Okay, one, thank God you're alright. Two, re the wife: Tils, where was she though? You said yourself, no ring. I'm not saying anything, but you’ve not physically seen a wife, right? Also, an Australian doctor who fell off a surfing calendar? I'm getting on a plane. Send photos of the arm and the doctor.'
Jasmine's message arrived twenty minutes later with the sound of a hairdryer in the background. 'Tils, honestly, only you. Keep the dressing dry and take painkillers. Concentrate on the shed and the shed only, and the business idea you texted about earlier, because I reckon that has legs. Sorry, I’ve got to go; I have to glue a moustache on a man in forty seconds. Rest the arm.'
Tilly listened to both messages and made herself a hot water bottle. Jasmine was always right, which was annoying, but maybe Pia had a point. Something about the way Otto had acted hadn’t screamed that he lived with someone. Tilly wasn’t sure why she thought that Otto was single. Leo had also acted that way. Not that it meant anything because Tilly didn’t care anyway. Of course not.
25
Pottering around at home after the swing incident, Tilly had looked around at the mounting list of jobs to do in the shed and more or less collapsed. To be frank, the accident had knocked the wind out of her sails, and the last thing she was up for was more cleaning. Sipping whisky-less tea on the sofa, she decided to check her finances for the millionth time and get the ball rolling on the linen bedding idea. She’d drafted an initial email when the idea had first popped into her mind, but there it had remained.
The more she’d thought about it, the more she’d felt as if the linen idea might be a winner. Her dad had always moved quickly on an opportunity or idea, and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Therefore, she got to work on drafting an email to Portugal. It was much trickier than she’d thought it was going to be. The trouble was working out what kind of email it even was. Too business-y and it would land wrong or not at all. This wasn’t a wholesale enquiry as such, more a dabbling really. Making it a business-type proposal probably wouldn't even make it past a spam filter, and that would be that. Too warm was worse in a way.Remember me? Lovely. Can I have your linen for a great price?If Tilly played it too familiar, it would be just like thosepeople who only ring you when they want to borrow something. Don’t we all know that person on the end of the phone?
Therefore, Tilly had spent a lot of time pondering, typing, and deleting, rinse and repeat. Eventually, after a few attempts, she’d made more tea, gone outside and watched the ferry crawling across the estuary to give her brain a bit of a breather. In the end, she’d decided not to try to be clever but to be honest and tell the truth.
Dear Inês,
I don't know if you'll remember me. Tilly, the English girl who looked after the quinta the summer the pool pump broke, the one you taught to make caldo verde the proper way. I have thought about you lots while I've been travelling.
I'm writing because I'm finally doing the thing my dad would have wanted me to do, which is thinking about my own business. I'm in the process of purchasing an old boat shed on a little island off the south coast of England. I can hear you laughing from here. Anyway, my idea is to sell beautiful linen bedding, not the perfect kind. The kind you kept in the back room. Do you remember when you took me on the tour? I never forgot that room. I thought the cloth in there was the loveliest in the whole mill, and I never understood why it hid at the back. While I was travelling, I spent years making beds in my job, but also with a couple of your pillowcases that somehow made it into my laundry. Nowadays, they are so soft and lovely and almost like an old friend. They are now on my bed here in the Boat Shed. Basically, that’s the idea - soft, worn, loved bedding in lovely deep colours. Everything sort of imperfectly perfect.
What I am proposing is that your seconds are made up into UK-size bedding. It would be a tiny run to start with. I am thinking of very small numbers. I would set up awebsite and do ads on social media for marketing. I hope you don’t find this too presumptuous. Anyway, I’d love your thoughts. Obviously, it might not be worth your while. Would love to hear from you and hope you are all well.
Regards,
Tilly
Four read-throughs later, Tilly couldn’t decide whether to send it or not. It was very rambling and not really a business proposal at all, not that she really knew what one of those entailed. Did it also sound rather presumptuous and cheeky? An email out of the blue asking for something. Her dad's words plonked into her head.If you don’t ask, you don’t get. The worst they can do is laugh.
Speaking to the empty shed, Tilly made a face and nodded. ‘Worst they can do is laugh. It really won’t be any skin off my nose. They can only say no.' Send.
Wondering if she’d even get a reply, Tilly raised her eyebrows and looked at the long line of tiny tabs on the top of her laptop signifying her deep dives into all things bedding and linen. Where in the name of goodness had this whole thing sprung from? Last time she’d checked, she knew nothing about starting a linen business or reallyanybusiness, though for sure she’d spent a long time investigating them.
As she pondered, she realised that in a funny sort of way the idea had been sitting at the back of her mind for the whole time she’d been globetrotting. Not the actual linen itself, more the fact that once the honeymoon period of travelling had worn off, she’d really missed the comfiness of her own bed. Staring at her inbox, Tilly shook her head. Funny old world. Here she was again, waiting. This time for something that had the possibility of being really, really good. We shall see.
26
It was the next day, and after a good night’s sleep and a redressing of her wounds, Tilly was more or less fine. Peering out the window at the sky, which unbelievably had suddenly taken on a strange grey, almost purple look, it appeared as if the storm was on its way. The swift change in the sky’s colour had taken her by surprise, as had gusts of wind that started to seriously rattle the windows and doors.
Not really taking much notice, Tilly was more interested in getting on with yet another job on her long list of things to get straight in the flat. The kitchen, it had to be said, wasn't great, and it was her mission to make something of it. Margery and Bill's cleaning skills hadn't been at the fore when they'd left the property, let’s put it that way. On the first day, Tilly had made the best of it via a quick clean, but now she was going in for the kill. This was mask-on, rubber-glove-in-position territory. Armed with black sacks and determination like no other, Tilly was ready and able to get rid of most of the contents of the cupboards and to clean like a mother.
Kneeling on the kitchen floor with her head in a cupboard, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a loud sound blasted through the building. She'd heard a lot about it, but it was thefirst time she'd actually heard the Darling foghorn go off, and didn’t she know about it. According to things she'd read, Darling was one of the last places in the country using both satellite navigation and a horn to warn of fog. In light of what she’d just heard, the storm was most definitely on its way.
Inching out backwards from the cupboard as a long, loud blast went again, Tilly walked down the stairs, went through the boat room, yanked open the door and peered up at the sky. Not a spot of fog in sight as far as she could see, just menacing-looking clouds. Plenty of wind, though and a light drizzle had started. Going back in, she double-checked the bolts on the doors, went around and checked the windows and got back to the job in hand. Three binbags later and having thrown out packets with best-before dates ten years prior and finding all manner of things, including out-of-date anchovies, old packets of dried soup and a biscuit tin that had seen better days, Tilly was over it.
As she continued with the job, every now and then, the foghorn continued on its merry way, blasting here and there, every time nearly making her jump out of her skin. In a way, however, it was actually quite romantic if that was your sort of thing. Harking back to older times without phones, satellites and machines doing things for everyone all the time, it brought with it notions of days gone by. To Tilly’s ears, the boom came with a message to get inside, light a fire, make a nice warm brew and stay rugged-up all cosy and safe. Worked for her and was precisely what she intended to do.
By the time the foghorn had gone off for something like the eighth time, Tilly had stopped jumping and got used to it. Outside the window above the kitchen sink, the sky had changed again to a black-purple tinged with electric blue. It was similar to the kind of sky on a tropical island that made the staff collect the sunbeds and tie up the parasols. On Darling, it appeared that people were doing the same. As she peered from the deck, Tillynoted that the owner of a building a few doors down was pulling in an awning, a woman from the chandlery was taking in a display of rope and buoys, and The Pride of Darling was coming in on what could be its last crossing of the day. A man on a small sailing boat in the marina was checking and rechecking bolts on doors with his jacket hood up, and somewhere further along the harbour road, a shutter banged.
Tilly turned back to the last cupboard and got on with it as the wind really started to pick up. Every few minutes, it gave the building a rattle, the old windows in their frames making a strange sound and the foghorn adding its two penn'orth on top. Tilly, on her knees with her top half inside a wall cabinet above the worktop and a black sack on the floor below her, carried on regardless. Out came a tin of something that had expired in 2014, a bottle of soy sauce that had gone the colour of tar, half a box of cornflour, a packet of dried pasta with a hole in the corner and a small colony of something she was not going to look at too closely. Into the bag went the lot of it. Her dad had always said that if in doubt, clear the decks so that you could see what you're actually working with. Tilly had learnt the lesson well.
With a playlist blasting and the wind and foghorn keeping her company, Tilly was on a roll. The more she cleared, the better the kitchen got, and as she could see the improvements little by little, the more she wanted to keep going. That was the thing about cleaning, it had its own momentum. You cleared one shelf, and the shelf next to it looked worse by comparison, and then that one and the next and before you knew it, you were on your fourth bin bag and the kitchen smelled of nothing but Flash, elbow grease and satisfaction.
