A Groom With a View

by Sophie Ranald

  She accosted the waitress. “Two glasses of champagne, please. My friend got engaged last night! Can I be your chief bridesmaid, Pippa? Please? We said we’d be each other’s when we were eight, remember?”

  “I do remember. But, Callie, the thing is, even if Nick doesn’t change his mind, I don’t think we’d want to have that kind of wedding. We’ve been to so many weddings together and they’ve all been lovely but I can’t imagine us doing it. I mean, why would we? We were never going to get married at all. We’ll just. . . I don’t know. Elope or something. Or go to a registry office. Or a tropical island.”

  “You’ll still need a bridesmaid, though,” Callie objected. “Otherwise who’s going to untie the sheets from your bedpost after you’ve climbed out of the window to meet him? Or sign the register, or protect you from falling coconuts?”

  I laughed. “If I need any of those things, I promise I’ll ask you. No one else would be nearly as good, especially at the coconut bit. But seriously, it’ll be a tiny wedding, if it even happens. Microscopic. And really, like, low-key.”

  “Pippa, come on. You say that now, but just wait and see what will happen to you. How many weddings have you been to? At least a dozen in the past year, maybe more. And how many of them have been low-key? Don’t rush, I’ll give you a minute to think about it.”

  I didn’t really need a minute, but I tried to look thoughtful anyway, and finished the champagne in my glass. “Er. . . Simon and Deborah’s was quite low-key. It was in a village church, then a marquee in her parents’ garden.”

  “Low-key, my arse,” Callie said. “You told me about that wedding. You said it was fabulous, and there was a bonfire and a cake made out of cheese and all the men wore matching ties from Liberty.”

  “Only the best man and the groom’s brothers,” I said.

  “Pippa,” Callie gave my hand another squeeze, a firmer one this time. “I’m four whole months older than you and I have more life experience, and I can guarantee that you will become obsessed with this wedding. All brides do, sure as night follows day. I give it two months before you’re on the phone to me and Phoebe telling us we have to match our knickers to your table napkins. It. Is. Going. To. Happen. And now I’m off to be a lawyer.”

  She put thirty pounds down on the table and gave me another hug and a kiss on both cheeks. “Go and buy a few wedding magazines. You need to start lusting over frocks and wondering if a grand is too much to spend on invitations. And give my love to Nick. Tell him congratulations, and to beware of the bridezilla lurking in his future.”

  After Callie had gone and I’d paid the bill, I left the café and wandered aimlessly around a bit, thinking about what she’d said. I couldn’t detect even a hint of bridezilla-ness in myself. Deep inside me, a small, warm flame was glowing with excitement at the idea of being married to Nick (although I’d already decided I was going to remain Pippa Martin, thank you very much, none of this Mrs Pickford business for me). But I also felt a sense of deep trepidation. Would marrying Nick mean that things between us would change? Did I want them to change?

  And the actual wedding?

  It all struck me as an awful lot of fuss for just one day. I cook for a living and I’ve catered plenty of weddings and I’ve seen the waste of food, of drink, of money they cause, not to mention the stress and the strops. One reception dinner we did at Falconi’s involved a ten-course tasting menu for a hundred and twenty people, followed by fireworks, with an ice rink set up in the square outside, and the couple split up after six weeks.

  That wouldn’t happen to Nick and me, obviously. But the obsession that Callie had mentioned? I like to think I’m quite a level-headed person, but what if it was inevitable?

  I spotted a newsagent further along the street and went in and bought a packet of wine gums and another Diet Coke. A shelf stacked with glossy wedding magazines caught my eye, and I thought I might as well buy a representative sample, just to see if Callie was right. I sat on a bench in the park and ripped the plastic cover off the first one, and a stash of leaflets spilled out: ‘Bespoke Suit Hire for Him’; ‘Have you considered a faux bouquet?’; ‘Fancy Favours for Everyone’; ‘DON’T FORGET YOUR WEDDING INSURANCE!’

  Wedding insurance? What the very fuck was that?

  I selected a red, black and green wine gum and put them all in my mouth at once, opened the first of the magazines and scanned the contents page. ‘Lose weight for your big day’; ‘The season’s most dramatic dresses’; ‘Our fairytale Nantucket nuptials’. The pages were full of pictures of impossibly perfect women in gorgeous frocks, fantastically elaborate cakes and cherubic pageboys. None of it looked like anything to do with me or Nick, I reassured myself. We simply weren’t interested in stuff like this – we’d do it our own way. We’d have our relaxed, low-key, small wedding, with just a handful of guests. Maybe Erica, Nick’s mother, might even decide not to come, if it was going to be small enough and informal enough? But that was probably too much to hope for.

  Still, I felt confident as I boarded the bus home that Callie was wrong. I wasn’t going to turn into some spoiled brat insisting that it must be all ‘My Day, My Way’ (which appeared to be the mantra of Lacy Garter, the agony aunt at Inspired Bride magazine). Well, I would actually want things my way, and Nick’s, because that’s what it was about: our future together, moving forward from where we’d been before. Not custom-made basques and ombré icing.

  And anyway, there was a really good chance that Nick hadn’t meant it and would change his mind. Or I would. In which case we’d just carry on as we’d been before. It was all fine. We didn’t need a wedding – we just needed to be together.

  I’d take the magazines home to Nick, I decided, along with the rest of the wine gums (all five of them), and we could read them and have a good laugh about Highland castles and croquembouches, and then talk about last night, and decide what to do. Whether we carried on as we were or went ahead with the smallest wedding ever, it would be fine with me.

  “Hello!” I called, opening the front door.

  “Hi, Pip,” said Nick. “I’m in the office with Spanx. Come and have a look at this, and tell me how it went with Callie.”

  Nick works from our spare room, where just about every inch of space is taken up by his iMac, his scanner, printer, graphics tablet and all the rest. Usually when I look over his shoulder as he works, I’m dazzled by edgy magazine layouts, modernist logo designs or sleek website treatments (when I can see anything past the furry ginger body of Spanx, Nick’s self-appointed junior designer). Now, though, I could see a complex grid of words and figures.

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “I’m doing a spreadsheet,” he said proudly. “For the wedding. I’ve got about two hundred names so far. We might have to cut down a bit.”

  “Two hundred. . .” I leaned against the door frame, clasping the glossy magazines to my chest like armour. “Nick, what on earth are you. . .?”

  “Hey, did you know we need to take out wedding insurance?” he said. “And is that Inspired Bride magazine? Awesome! Let’s have a read.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  From: nick@digitaldrawingboard.com

  To: enquiries@brockleburymanor.co.uk

  Subject: Booking enquiry

  Hello

  I’m getting in touch to find out what availability you have for weddings in the next 12 months. My fiancée and I would like a Saturday ideally, although we could consider other days, and we’ll have in the region of 120-200 guests.

  Please get in touch by email or on the mobile number below and let me know.

  Many thanks

  Nick Pickford

  I don’t want to give the impression that my average day’s food intake consists of fat-laden fry-ups, pastries and sugary confectionery – far from it. If it did, I’d be the size of a house, rather than. . . well, the size of an average London flat aimed at the first-time buyer. Luckily, working around food means that quite a lot of the time I’m thoroughly sick of
it before I get around to eating it. I know it sounds implausible, but trust me, when you’ve spent three months in meetings discussing the launch of an ostrich lasagne, another six weeks cooking and tasting countless variations of it and then three days looking at cold slabs of it on different coloured plates while a photographer complains that your tomatoes aren’t red enough and your béchamel isn’t white enough. . . Let me just say it puts Slimming World to shame.

  So my working day got off to a pretty standard start nutritionally when I bought a black coffee and an apple on my way to the office later that week. When I arrived, Guido, my boss, was on the phone.

  “No, Matthew. I don’t care if it’s Gwyneth fucking Paltrow, we’re not doing a macrobiotic menu. My grandmother would turn in her grave! Tell her to go somewhere else, or eat linguine with pesto like the other vegetarians. No, it isn’t! Turning away celebrities is great PR! Right. Ciao, ciao.

  “Morning, Pippa. Good weekend? God, I’ve got a fucking shite hangover. You couldn’t get me a sausage sandwich, could you, sweetheart?”

  “Get it yourself, you lazy git,” I said, but I put my jacket back on and retraced my steps to Kaffee Klatch.

  Guido’s story is really impressive. You’re probably familiar with it from his autobiography, Searing Ambition. He’s the eighth son of a Tuscan peasant, and he followed his dream to Rome, where he spent five years scrubbing pans and mussels at various restaurants before eventually being allowed to learn to cook. He often held down two jobs at once, getting by on three hours’ sleep a night, in order to save every lira he could towards his coach ticket to London.

  Then he spent the eighties and nineties working his way up to head chef and learning English from Rosetta Stone CDs and from being shouted at. In due course he found a backer to finance the opening of Osteria Falconi in Marylebone, which went on to win first one, then two Michelin stars. Since then, the Falconi empire has expanded to nine restaurants and the brand has gone supernova.

  If you’ve got even the faintest interest in food and cooking, you know who Guido is. If you haven’t eaten at one of his restaurants, chances are you own one of his cookbooks, or at any rate you’ll have seen him on telly, cooking coconut-based curries in Guido Goes Bamboo or returning to his roots in Guido’s Italian Legacy. And even if your idea of cooking is shoving something in the microwave, there’s a good chance that ends up being one of the range of posh ready-meals we do for Thatchell’s – you know, the organic spelt risotto with natural smoked haddock and the fragrant pork loin with lemongrass and so on? The ostrich lasagne was the latest addition to the range, its launch planned to coincide with the first episode of Guido’s African Safari and publication of the accompanying book.

  Of course, it’s done Guido’s career no harm at all that he’s seriously easy on the eye. He’s tall and just the right side of chunky, keeping himself in shape by dint of ruthless, if intermittent, self-discipline and ten hours a week with his personal trainer. His hair and his designer stubble are generously flecked with silver and there are crow’s feet around his warm, smiley brown eyes, but evidently the consensus is that he’s improving with age, like a fine wine. The other day some columnist in the Daily Telegraph described him as ‘the thinking woman’s totty’.

  Thanks to the CDs and the years working in posh restaurants, Guido speaks better English than I do. But his cooking talents are nothing compared to his gift for self-promotion, and he still plays up the Italian accent when he’s talking to diners, and when he’s on telly obviously. I guess he thinks it reminds people of his roots.

  I started working at Osteria Falconi as a lowly chopper of garlic and roller of pasta. By the time Guido promoted me to chef de partie, I’d moved in with Nick. I loved the tension and testosterone of being in a professional kitchen, the mayhem and camaraderie of a busy service, the satisfaction of wiping down my station after a hectic night. But I hated never seeing Nick – well, only seeing him for ten minutes first thing in the morning and the top of his sleeping head on the pillow when I got home at night. I know it makes me a bit of a traitor to the sisterhood, but I’d more or less decided to hand in my resignation and look for a job with less antisocial hours when the Thatchell’s deal came along. Guido asked me if I fancied doing a few months in the development kitchen working on the launch of their ready-meals and I jumped at the chance.

  And four years later, there I still was. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not uninteresting. Thatchell’s are great partners to work with and more importantly have seriously deep pockets and are committed to promoting the range. And even though I sometimes find the endless whittling away at the amount of salt and saturated fat we’re allowed to use a bit soul-destroying and miss working in a proper kitchen, I know I’m really lucky to have Guido as my boss and mentor. He’s nurtured me through my whole career and given me so many chances, and I try to pay him back by working my arse off and being loyal. And fetching him sausage sandwiches, obviously.

  “So, Pippa,” he said, around a mouthful of sliced white and unmentionable bits of processed pig, “We’ve got the Thatchell’s people coming in later. They said they want an in-depth discussion about the ostrich lasagne and I suspect it isn’t going to be pretty. They’re bringing their nutritionist. They said something about there being too much butter in it. Too much fucking butter! That’s not even possible.”

  A couple of years ago, Guido was slated in an article in the Daily Mail shaming chefs for the disgracefully high calorie content of some of their signature dishes. If I remember correctly, our osso bucco was dissed for having enough saturated fat per serving to last a prop forward a week, and the tiramisu packed about nine hundred calories per serving. We called an emergency meeting with our PR people, and they advised Guido to declare unrepentantly that these dishes were treats, to be consumed on special occasions only and then offset by several days’ hard work herding goats in the Appenine foothills. This approach worked for a while, but Thatchell’s had become increasingly twitchy recently, sending doom-laden emails warning us about government traffic-light labelling systems and taxes on junk food.

  Guido and I might chunter about it in private, but he is as malleable as gnocchi dough when faced with Zelda, the Thatchell’s nutritionist, a rail-thin, immaculately groomed woman in her late thirties who wields her nutritional analysis software to deadly effect. We mustered our forces well in advance of the meeting. Tamar, who works with me on recipe development but is more focussed on the books and television stuff, Guido and I carefully arranged bottles of water and platters of fruit on the boardroom table, together with piles of plates, forks and napkins ready for tasting the reduced-fat, reduced-salt, reduced-flavour lasagne.

  Thatchell’s marketing manager Bryn and the terrifying Zelda arrived early, as they were wont to do, but we were ready for them. I gratefully disappeared into the kitchen to prepare the plates of food for tasting, but even through the closed boardroom door I could hear Zelda bollocking Guido.

  “The Thatchell’s customer chooses ostrich because of its nutritional benefits and ethical credentials,” she said. “It’s a lean meat, high in essential amino acids and trace elements and of course is organically and extensively farmed. Our shoppers care as much for the environment as they do for their waistlines. Which is why it is absolutely imperative that we reduce the saturated fat content in this product.”

  “Sì, sì,” Guido agreed. “We have worked on the recipe. It is superb, delicious – yet so low in fat and salt. We have used skimmed milk for the béchamel, extra virgin olive oil has replaced the butter, yet the flavour is exactly like my mamma used to make for me when I was a boy in Tuscany.” I heard a sound that could only be him kissing his fingers. “Pippa will bring it for you now to taste.”

  Right on cue, the microwave pinged.

  By the time I left the office that night, I honestly felt like I never wanted to see, taste or talk about food again. But as soon as I walked through the door I knew that Nick was having one of his cooking nights – there was a st
rong smell of frying onions wafting through the front door and Guns n’Roses playing at full volume.

  I walked through to the kitchen. Nick hadn’t heard me come in, so I was able to stand in the doorway without him noticing. He was wearing a comedy apron with a woman’s naked torso on it, which I’d given him last Christmas along with a Nigel Slater book as a not-so-subtle hint that he needed to do his share of the cooking (I’m not sure which of them did the trick, but the desired effect had apparently been achieved). His eyes were closed, and he was playing air guitar on a cheese grater.

  “Oi, Axl,” I shouted over the music. “What’s for tea?”

  Nick’s eyes snapped open. He turned the volume down and wrapped me in a tight hug, still holding the grater.

  “Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Mac and cheese. With onions in it, and bacon. Because everything tastes better with bacon, right?”

  “Everything tastes better with a large glass of rioja,” I said. “Mind if I go and watch EastEnders?”

  “Off you go,” he said. “I’ll bring you your wine. Okay to eat in an hour?” As I turned around, he thwacked me on the bottom with a wooden spoon.

  “So,” he said later, as we sat at the table surrounded by the remains of our meal (in case you don’t already know this, I can confirm that mac and cheese is greatly improved by the addition of bacon and of course given added savour when cooked by someone who isn’t you), “I spoke to Mum today.”

  “Did you? What, in Liberia?” Nick’s mother is a nurse specialising in ophthalmic surgery. She works for a charity in West Africa, training other nurses to assist surgeons with cataract operations in remote areas of the region. It’s incredibly noble, important work and I admire her greatly for doing it. I also happen to think that remote West Africa is the best place for Erica.