Since we’d arrived in Johannesburg, we’d been to what felt like dozens of restaurants, but in reality was probably about fifteen. I’d eaten so much I felt permanently on the point of exploding. I’d had the bright idea of Instagramming every single plate before I started eating, otherwise I’d never have remembered it all. It had taken five days and two internal flights, but I was finally beginning to settle into a rhythm and feel like I was actually taking things in rather than just allowing them to flood over me.
Behind me, I heard Guido’s phone ring. Sibongile and I rolled our eyes in unison.
“Sì?” he snapped. “Florence, what is it now? I’m extremely busy. Yes, in Franschhoek. Yes, it’s in the Cape. And tomorrow we’re flying to. . . Florence, this is not the time to have this discussion. I’ve told you how I feel.”
He went outside, but we could still hear him shouting. “I’m working, Florence! Working! I’m not out here for fun. I don’t have time to plan a romantic holiday with you, and I certainly don’t have time to listen to you when you’re like this. I’ll be back next Tuesday and you’d better have calmed down by then. What? Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.” He ended the call and stomped back into the kitchen, muttering, “Jesus Christ,” under his breath.
This had been going on since we arrived, with Florence becoming increasingly histrionic and Guido becoming more and more impatient with her. He’d had to interrupt several meetings to take her calls, and earlier that morning I’d rescued a pan of coriander, cumin and nigella seeds that he’d left toasting over a low flame seconds before they charred beyond recognition.
“Is he always like this?” Sibongile whispered.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ve never travelled with him before. Bonkers, though, isn’t it?”
“One thing’s for sure,” she said, “if she’s trying to get him to make some sort of commitment, she’s not doing it right.”
I thought fleetingly of Katharine, who’d waited so patiently for Iain’s proposal, and wondered whether she’d told him about her suspicions, and how he’d react if she did. I wondered whether the Myla lingerie, the Pandora jewellery and all the rest were wrapped up and waiting for her under their tastefully decorated Christmas tree. I hoped so, and resolved to call her and find out how she was. Then I looked up again at the sun-washed mountains and Katharine and her problems, cold, rainy London, and most of all Nick and our wedding seemed very far away.
“So,” I said to Sibongile. “Tell me about this calamari steak thing.”
“You use the whole body of the squid in one piece,” she said, “flatten it a bit, cook it quick-quick, and it’s beautifully tender. Usually it’s served with garlic butter – very retro – but I was thinking we could do something a bit different. . .”
And we spent the next two hours experimenting with different flavour combinations and accompaniments, and by the end of it we had a dish that was, as Sibongile put it, “To die for, doll!”
When Guido tasted it, after ending yet another angst-filled call from Florence, this time apparently apologising for her earlier rant, he did his finger-kissing schtick and said, “Pippa, sweetheart. You. Are. On. Fire.”
It was true. I was cooking better than I had for years. The weather, the ingredients, the views and most of all the new challenges were inspiring me to take risks and have fun in a way I hadn’t done when I was working on the Thatchell’s range. I’d slipped into a bit of a rut, I realised, and I was loving being booted firmly out of it.
But, of course, it wasn’t for ever. Soon we’d be back in London, I’d be back on posh ready-meal duty, and Tamar would be wanting her job back. Perhaps it was time to think about looking around for something else, once the wedding was out of the way. Now that Nick was working for himself, we might be able to co-ordinate our time a bit better.
It occurred to me as I cleaned down my bench, scrubbing away at the splatters of squid ink, that I’d pretty much shelved my ambitions in the past few years. If you’d asked me when I was twenty where I saw myself in ten years time (as Guido had done, in fact, when he interviewed me), I’d have said I wanted to run my own restaurant, or at the very least be head chef somewhere with a serious reputation. But somewhere along the way, I’d lost that hunger. I’d wanted to be with Nick more than I’d wanted anything else – no matter what Erica might think – and I’d left something important behind along the way.
“Why are you looking so gloomy, Pippa?” said Guido, snapping me out of my reverie.
“Just thinking about stuff,” I said. “Nick. The wedding. Work.”
Guido said, “I think we’re done here for today. Let’s get back to the hotel and I’ll buy you a drink.”
An hour later, I’d showered and changed into a summer dress, and we were sitting outside on the terrace. Flourishing magenta bougainvilleas surrounded the turquoise swimming pool, which reflected the full moon in its water. I was taking great cooling swigs of a G&T and Guido was making rapid inroads into his second beer.
We ran through our plans for the next three days and the intimidating list of things that still needed to be done, and Guido said again how happy he was with my work, making me feel all shy and pleased.
I said, “I’m having a great time. I’m really loving this – the work for Thatchell’s is fascinating but this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”
Guido laughed. “This is the easy part. When we’re out here again in January filming, there are going to be days when all you see is the inside of a makeshift kitchen in the middle of nowhere, and it’s tiny even before they put the lights and camera equipment in, and you can’t get from the bench to the chiller without tripping over cables. When we were filming Guido Goes Bamboo in Vietnam, Alex – you remember him – didn’t sort some mussels properly and we were all as sick as dogs. And there was only one toilet. It’s not all luxury hotels with pools.”
So that was the reason for Alex’s sudden and ignominious departure three years before.
As the evening wore on, Guido’s stories became even more scurrilous. He told me about roping in a group of Thai ladyboys as extras in Bangkok when the models who were supposed to be playing the glamorous guests at a dinner failed to turn up. He told how he’d had a narrow escape from the paparazzi in the red light district in Amsterdam, and about the time he got sold a wrap of baking powder by a dodgy dealer in New York, and I began to understand why Florence got a bit twitchy when he was filming on location. By this stage I’d had a few drinks myself, and felt emboldened enough to ask him more about their relationship, as we ate meltingly delicious springbok carpaccio for our starter.
“Do you think you’ll marry her?”
“Marry her? I doubt it, sweetheart.”
I drank some wine. “Do you love her?”
“Florence is a very beautiful woman,” he said. “She understands me, and she knows where the bodies are buried.”
He hadn’t really answered my question, I thought. Then I realised that he had.
“And what about you?” he asked. “Not long now until your wedding. Nervous?”
“Not about the wedding,” I said. “Nick’s got it all under control. Maybe a bit too much under control. He’s gone a bit mad with it all. But it’s going to be a very special day. It’s what he wants.”
“And afterwards?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking about that today. I was wondering. . . when Tamar goes on maternity leave. . . Were you thinking of getting someone to cover for her?”
“There will be another television series, hopefully,” he said. “Platinum Productions have said that if this does well, they’ll pitch another to Channel 4. Maybe America next time. And if Thatchell’s extend their range, there will certainly be more work there than you and I can cope with. So we’ll need to get either another Tamar or,” he paused, “another you, if you’d like to do more of the television work.”
“Guido, I’d love to,” I said. “I’m in my element here.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s yours if you want it, Pippa.”
I was thanking him with embarrassing gushiness when my phone rang, and it was Callie to talk about the hen night. When I had finished chatting to her and returned to our table, Guido had ordered grilled pineapple with mint gremolata, and the mood had reverted to businesslike. We made plans for the next day’s work and drank coffee and after a bit I started to yawn uncontrollably, and made my excuses and went to my room.
Even though I was alone, I felt a bit furtive when I opened Nick’s blog on my phone. Checking it had become a bit of a habit, a compulsion, like biting my nails. He posted something on it just about every day, and he’d built up a little community of followers who laughed at his posts, gave him advice and shared their experiences with one another. And even though he and I had spoken on the phone almost every night – well, three out of five nights – I was conscious that our conversations had mostly been about me, my work, the exciting new world that was opening up to me. When Nick talked about the wedding, he talked to other people. It made me feel uneasy, jealous even, of the relationships he was building up with these online strangers.
Today’s post was about the wedding photography.
So, today I met up with Eliza, who’s going to be recording the big day for posterity. This is the only aspect of the day that I’m dreading. Obviously we’re going to have photographs of the wedding, and I’m sure they’ll be great, but. . . I look like a chud in photos. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. Even when I was a kid, I was always the one at the back of the class photo caught with my face all scrunched up, about to sneeze. And as an adult, I always look like my head is too big - like, way bigger than everyone else’s head. When I try to smile I look like I’m gurning, and when I don’t I look like someone’s died. So Eliza is going to need some serious Photoshop skillz to sort me out!
How did your wedding pics turn out? Are there any you really rate or hate, and why?
There were loads of responses, many of them with photos attached. I scrolled down through them: men in morning suits with top hats like Iain had worn; men in dinner jackets and ordinary-looking suits with any number of different-coloured ties and waistcoats and buttonholes. A couple in skiing gear at the top of a mountain, looking happy enough to fly back down it. Arty images of brides in wedding dresses, flatteringly posed and lit. It was one of those that made me pause, scroll back a bit, and zoom in. Nick hadn’t commented on all the photos, but he had on that one. He’d written, “Blimey! You look gorgeous, although to be fair the photographer did have pretty good raw material to work with.”
The woman was wearing a dress so plain and perfectly fitting it had to have cost a fortune. She was standing in a stone archway, half-turned away from the camera, looking down at the simple bouquet of lilies in her hands. Her tousled blonde hair concealed her face, but I could see from the curve of her forehead and cheek how beautiful she was – and how familiar.
“This is my favourite wedding photo. I hate the camera too, as you know – I didn’t even realise the tog was taking this one, which is probs why it’s my favourite! It turned out a lot better than my marriage did, rofl. B x.” And then I understood.
The first time I saw Bethany, I didn’t really see her, if you see what I mean, because of Nick. There were loads of people in Borderline that night ten years ago, a hundred at least, but he was the only one that mattered. Bethany was there, though. She was there because her band, an all-woman post-punk outfit called ‘Grrl, Banned’ had played the first set, and she’d stayed because she was Nick’s girlfriend.
I like to think that if I had known about her, I’d have said no when Nick rang me a few days later and asked to meet for a drink. But he didn’t tell me, when their set finished and we had a shouted conversation over the music about how amazing it was to see each other and what we were doing now, and I gave him my new number and told him he must call me, he must promise he would.
He did call, and we met up on Sunday, my day off work, at a riverside pub. It was late summer, the leaves just beginning to turn golden, but still warm enough to sit outside with our jackets on, collars turned up against the breeze, sipping lager and telling each other about our lives.
I described my shitty room in the house I shared with three other chefs and a girl who was trying to break into modelling, and made him laugh with my accounts of how we were all permanently skint, but still managed to find enough spare change for cheap red wine on our nights off, even if it meant not buying food or even loo paper. He told me that Deathly Hush was doing okay, they had loads of gigs lined up but the longed-for record deal was proving elusive, and Iain was thinking about trying something different, like starting a design agency, which was after all what they’d both trained to do.
Then there was a bit of a pause in the conversation, and Nick said, “So, are you seeing anyone?”
I blushed. The truth was, I hadn’t actually had a boyfriend since him. I’d had a long succession of one- and two-night stands, but I’d stayed resolutely single, determined not to have my heart broken again.
“Not right now,” I said. “You?” I was confident that his answer would be no too, because otherwise why were we here? Surely he could feel the same, incredibly powerful sense of connection I felt, the sense of coming home?
But he said, “It’s kind of complicated.” And then he told me about Bethany. Bethany, who played in a band and loved football and sounded like the coolest of cool girls.
They’d been going out for about a year, he said, on and off. The on was because he really liked her – he didn’t have to say it, I could tell by the look on his face when he talked about her, a kind of hurt that made me twist inside with jealousy, and at the same time wrap my arms around him and make it all better. And the off was because Bethany was, as he put it, a free spirit. It didn’t take much questioning to learn that this meant she was chronically unfaithful.
“Why do you put up with it?” I asked.
“I don’t,” he said. “I tell her it’s over, but then she comes back and tells me she loves me and she’s sorry, and I end up forgiving her.” He shrugged. “What a mug.”
“So, like, right now, is it on or is it off?” I said, emboldened by three pints of Stella. “Because, Nick, the thing is, when I saw you the other night, I felt. . .”
“I know,” he said. “I felt it too. And as of now, it’s off. The other night, when I saw you, I ended it.”
He wasn’t lying – Nick’s never lied to me, as far as I know, in all the time we’ve been together. So we started seeing each other again, just casually, testing the water, seeing whether what we’d had when we were teenagers could be made to work again, in our new, grown-up lives. We met up for drinks a couple more times, we saw a movie and afterwards he came back to my shared hovel and had coffee, but he didn’t stay the night. And I believed him when he told me that Bethany had come back yet again, wanting to be taken back, and he’d said that this time it wasn’t going to happen, because he’d met someone else. I believed him because when he told me about it, he also told me he’d slept with her.
“I’m so sorry, Pippa,” he said. “I’ll totally understand if you want to call it off. It was a shitty, stupid thing to do. It’s inexcusable.”
He’d called me at work, asking to see me about something important, and I’d met him during my break from work in a branch of Caffè Nero on the Strand. The table where we sat was so tiny our knees were touching, and the room was so crowded I couldn’t move them away, so I stood up, leaving my coffee unfinished.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s inexcusable. Now I’m going to go back to work.”
And I did. Nick didn’t contact me, apart from a text saying again that he was sorry. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him. We hadn’t actually been going out, I reasoned. He hadn’t cheated on me, as such. And I missed him. Those few meetings, dates, whatever they’d been, had brought back such a torrent of longing for him, a tap that, once opened, couldn’t
be turned off. I waited a week, then another, to see if I’d stop thinking about him, stop missing him, stop longing for his touch and his smell. But I didn’t, so I gave in and called him.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s give this a go, if you still want to.”
I spent that night at Nick’s flat, and never really left. For the first couple of months we were together, I was on high alert all the time, constantly worried that she was going to invade our life like some tousle-haired, Converse-wearing Visigoth and steal Nick back again. I combed the flat obsessively for reminders of her, and found a handful of photographs, a demo CD for her band, and a stash of her Calvin Klein toiletries in the bathroom, and threw them all in the bin as soon as they came to light.
And I snooped. Looking back, I can remember the shame I when I accessed Nick’s email to see if she’d contacted him, picked up his phone if a text message arrived when he wasn’t in the room, to see who it was from. But she never did contact him, and as the months went by I began to feel more secure, more confident that I was the one Nick wanted to be with, and eventually, I reached the point where I simply stopped worrying about her.
There were a few moments, like when we were packing to move to our new home, and I found a gorgeous silk scarf crumpled up at the back of a drawer, still bearing a hint of scent, and realised it must have been hers (and consigned it to the charity shop bag without a backward glance). When Iain told us he’d heard that Bethany had moved up to Edinburgh, and Nick said, “Oh, really?”, and I wondered if he was just pretending to be indifferent or really was. And when her wedding photos appeared on a mutual friend’s Facebook feed and I couldn’t resist looking at them and spending a few minutes torturing myself with her effortless, cool beauty. But apart from that, I barely thought of her, and I had no reason to believe that Nick thought of her either, until now.
A Groom With a View Page 13
