A Groom With a View

by Sophie Ranald

  Fortunately, while I’d been standing there gawping like a fool, Sibongile had put down her pipette and turned around too.

  “Sibo!” the man said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you! How are you, my darling? You’re looking amazing as always.”

  “Well, hello, trouble,” she said, but the two of them hugged each other warmly. “What are you doing here?”

  He rolled his remarkable eyes. “The usual. I’m being a fake friend for tonight’s shoot. Turn up, eat food, laugh lots, pretend I’m one of Guido Falconi’s best buddies and try not to get too pissed until afterwards. And not even then, because I’m hoping they’ll book me for another episode. You?”

  “The usual, too,” Sibongile said. “Spending three hours on plates of food that the chef pretends to make in ten minutes. But I’m in luck this time, because I’m working with lovely Pippa, who’s here from London. Pippa Martin, Gabriel Meyer.”

  I desperately tried to remember how the complicated handshake worked, but I didn’t need to, because Gabriel leaned in and kissed me on both cheeks. He didn’t just go ‘mwah, mwah’ at the air next to my face, but nor, thankfully, did he slobber. I just felt his warm, dry lips touch my skin, once, then again. He smelled of honey and pine forests and leather. I felt myself blushing like a schoolgirl.

  “Come on, then,” Sibongile said. “I’ll show you where to go. You shouldn’t have come into the kitchen in the first place, you know that. I expect you were looking for food to scrounge again, weren’t you? It’s like having a street kid hanging around.” She aimed a swat at his hand and they both laughed.

  “Lovely to meet you, Pippa,” Gabriel said. “I hope I’ll see you again soon.” And the two of them disappeared into the restaurant, where a faux chef’s table had been set up for filming.

  “So how do you know Gabriel?” I asked Sibongile when she returned to her watercress spheres.

  She gave me a sideways glance and grinned. “Don’t tell me the Meyer magic is doing its work on you! That boy has more spells up his sleeve than Harry Potter, and a much bigger wand. I went out with him for a bit. We worked together on a similar job to this a year or so ago, and saw each other for a few months afterwards, on and off. He’s an actor. He’s quite good, he was in Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye at the Grahamstown festival last year. But there aren’t enough parts out there to go around, and no one wants him for modelling work because he’s such a short-arse. So he does gigs like this and works as a waiter, because of the free food.”

  “What’s he like?” I asked. I was blushing again.

  “He hasn’t got a mean bone in his body,” she said. “Sweet, sweet boy. But as a boyfriend? Disaster. He’s never had to learn responsibility, because everyone just looks at him and loves him. So he’s full of shit. Turns up late, or not at all. Forgets my birthday. Forgets we’re going out, and disappears off to Mauritius for a week because his friend’s got a job on a yacht. That kind of thing. So I kicked him to the kerb, and I don’t regret it, but I couldn’t stay pissed off with him for very long, you know? No one can.”

  Before she could tell me anything more, Guido came over to see how we were doing, and told us the camera crew was ready and we could start plating up. From the pass, I watched the staged dinner guests talking and laughing together, and couldn’t help noticing that Gabriel ate the bread rolls off both his neighbour’s plates as well as his own, and then tore through all eight courses, not leaving so much as a smear of springbok jus behind. But when at last the director gave the command to cut and Sibongile asked me if I fancied a drink in the bar, I said I was too tired. I didn’t say that for someone who was getting married in five weeks, becoming better acquainted with a beautiful, sweet boy who was trouble was clearly the shittest idea ever.

  But later, in bed, I found sleep wouldn’t come. I longed to talk to Callie but when I rang her, her phone went to voicemail, so I left a message asking her to let me know when we could have a proper chat on Skype.

  Then I brought Nick’s blog up on my phone to see if he’d posted anything new. He had.

  The loneliness of a long-distance wedding planner

  That makes me sound like a sad bastard, doesn’t it? And lonely is definitely too strong a word – Mum’s here and Iain, my best man, is crashing on our sofa for a bit, so we’ve got a houseful. But Pippa is away with work again, and it’s not the same without her around.

  Still, the wedmin list is getting shorter as the day approaches and it feels as if all the big stuff is pretty much under control. Lots of our guests have been in touch asking about presents, but when you’ve been together as long as Pip and I have, it’s hard to think of anything we actually need. Mum insisted on a trip to John Lewis the other day, and the place was packed with couples going round with those little barcode scanner things, marking plates and vases and stuff. But we’ve got stuff! (All the stuff we need, anyway. As far as I’m concerned no one needs guest towels or poultry shears.)

  So apparently some people ask for cash, instead. Sometimes they even ask in the form of a poem, like this work of genius:

  Thanks for sending your RSVP

  And for asking our gift list to see.

  But we’ve got a home full of cushions and things

  A wok and a toaster and a kettle that sings.

  We don’t need more glasses, pots or pans

  But we’ve got some exciting honeymoon plans.

  To help with our holiday by the sea

  Please make a transfer to HSBC.

  Cringy, right? So we’re not going for that, either, and the gift list is going to remain a work in progress for now, at least until I have a chance to chat to Pippa about it. As usual, any ideas are welcome in the comments.

  I scrolled quickly down through the comments, some of which had included their own embarrassingly awful poems. Soon I found what I was looking for.

  “Hey you! I’m no poet (and don’t you know it?!) so can’t advise. But re the other thing. . . Have inboxed you. Bxx”

  Inboxed? What the fuck? I stared at the screen in frustration. What the hell were all these messages Bethany was sending Nick? I didn’t even know you could do that on blogs. Then I noticed the little envelope icon at the top of the page. I was sure it hadn’t always been there, but I clicked on it anyway, and I was in. There was a whole list of messages – from someone called Matt about The Amazing Archibald, from various florists and car hire companies offering their services, and, right at the top, one from Bethany.

  I’m not effortlessly competent with modern technology, like Nick is – I’ve never had a blog or even a Twitter account. It’s all I can do to programme the Sky box to record EastEnders when I’m working late. Put me in front of a blast chiller or a sous-vide machine and I’ll figure out how it works in seconds, but with most other things, I’m a total numpty. So it took me a few seconds to work out what must have happened. At some point – and I remembered now, it had been when we were on the train back from Brocklebury Manor with Erica, and I’d been too busy sulking about the wedding menu to pay much heed – Nick had used my phone to write a blog post. It must have remembered the password, and I was now logged in as if I were Nick.

  I didn’t even stop to think about whether it was right or wrong to snoop. I just clicked on Bethany’s message, and read it.

  Hello love bug (I know I shouldn’t be calling you that any more. But, old habits. . .)

  God, I know what you mean about wedding stress! It’s a tough time, it messes with your head and with your relationship. But listen, if you’re really having doubts, don’t go ahead with it. Better to cancel now than split up down the track. Trust me, I know. Call me if you want to talk. I care about you, you know. Been thinking about you a lot these last few months.

  Beff xxx

  And she’d posted her mobile number. Nick hadn’t replied to the message – I didn’t even know whether he’d seen it. But I did know that if he hadn’t, he’d see that it had been read. Before I could properly think what I was doing, I deleted it,
and immediately felt horribly guilty and ashamed. I resolved that the next time I spoke to Nick, I’d admit what I’d done, and tell him how I felt about Bethany’s new presence in his life, but I never got around to it. Even as I was lying in the strange silence of my hotel room, missing the sound of Nick’s breathing, Spanx’s snuffly snores, the rain drumming on the plastic lids of the wheelie bins below our window and all the other noises of home, things were in the process of going utterly tits up.

  I jerked awake the next morning about two hours too early, and lay in the dark for a bit hoping I’d be able to go back to sleep. But as soon as I opened my eyes, anxiety clawed at me. Had Nick seen Bethany’s message? Had he actually met her? Were Iain and Katharine still not speaking to each other? It was no good, I was awake and I might as well check Facebook on my phone and try and get some sense of connection to home. But as soon as I swiped the screen to life, I saw I had a new voicemail.

  “Hi Pippa, it’s Eloise. Listen, I’m really sorry to call you so late, but I guess you’re asleep so it won’t matter. I wanted to give you a heads-up on what’s happening. You need to read tomorrow’s Sun on Sunday, okay. Guido knows, because Lauren emailed him late last night. She’s on her way there now, with Toby from Marshams. Their flight lands just before eight tomorrow, so they should be there by ten. You need to cancel this morning’s filming until everything’s sorted out. I’ll talk to the people at Platinum in London as soon as I get to the office, but you’ll have to handle it at your end. Tell them there’s been an emergency. They’ll find out soon enough what it is. Okay. . . er. . . call me when you can. Hope you and Guido are okay. Cheers.”

  Lauren from the PR company and Toby the solicitor were on their way? Actually flying out to Johannesburg? What the fuck was going on? I navigated with desperate haste to the Sun on Sunday website, then realised I would have to subscribe and had forgotten my Paypal password. It seemed to take forever to input my credit card details and create a new account, but at last, I was in. I scrolled down past stories about Kate Middleton wearing a frock for the third time, some woman I’d never heard of off Geordie Shore falling out of a nightclub pissed, the Tories’ tough new stance on crime and the influx of Romanian immigrants, before I saw a picture of Guido. It was a particularly unflattering one, showing him about to eat a huge forkful of what looked like linguine carbonara. The headline under it said:

  GUIDO FAKE-ONI

  Celeb chef’s secret past exposed!

  • TV chef cashed in on Italian background – but it’s all LIES

  • “Tuscan peasant” father is a GEOGRAPHY TEACHER from Berkshire

  • “NOT SO HOT in the bedroom” – ex-lover speaks out

  I tapped the link. It took me three tries, because my finger was trembling.

  He’s found fame and made his fortune through a chain of swanky restaurants. He’s travelled the globe for his TV series, and his books sell in the millions. But we can reveal that celeb chef Guido, who boasts about his humble upbringing and the peasant tradition behind dishes like the £65 white truffle risotto served at Osteria Falconi, is living a lie. And that’s not all.

  Then there was a photo of the risotto, with a caption underneath that said: “Posh nosh? But celeb chef Guido is all hot air.”

  The Sun on Sunday can exclusively reveal that the man we know as Guido Falconi was born Guy Fallon. Far from being raised by humble subsistence farmers in rural Tuscany, Fallon grew up in a leafy village near Newbury. Dad Brian taught geography at £18,000-a-year St Francis’s school, where pupils included the sons of cabinet ministers and minor royalty. Mum Lucia was the daughter of a well-off banker from Milan, and it’s thought that Guy may have acquired a taste for Italian food on family holidays to the region.

  There was another photo, this one of a thatched cottage on a pretty, unmistakably English village street. The caption was, “Rural Tuscany or Ramston-on-Thames? You decide.” I felt sick, but I couldn’t stop reading.

  Young Guy attended the Queen Elizabeth II grammar school, where he was known more for his skills on the cricket pitch and going after girls than sautéeing steak.

  “He was always a bit of a dish,” remembers former classmate Susie Norman. “He had those big brown eyes, and he was just charming, you know? All of us wanted to go out with Guy. When I first saw him on telly, I went, ‘Now isn’t he the very spit of Guy Fallon?’ But you don’t think anything of it, do you?”

  I scrolled past the inevitable photo of Susie Norman, who was wearing a Barbour and walking a labrador.

  It was shortly after leaving school with just one O-Level that young Guy dropped off the radar, Mrs Newman remembers. “There were rumours that he’d gone off to Italy to be a ski instructor, or that he’d moved to London and become involved with East End gangsters, but no one really knew,” she told our reporter.

  It is not known at what point Fallon assumed his new identity, but by 1986 he had taken on the name Guido Falconi, remembers Maurizio Mauro. It was he who gave Falconi his big break at the flash Enoteca Mauro, a favourite haunt of rock stars and politicians like Adam Ant and Margaret Thatcher.

  “Guido was young, but he had talent. I never questioned his background. His Italian was perfect,” says Mr Mauro.

  Maurizio clearly wasn’t important enough to warrant a photo, but Florence certainly was. The next two pictures were of her. In the first, she was wearing a black dress and looking sombre. “‘Italian stallion’ betrayed my trust, says glamour-model ex”, said the caption. In the next picture, she was posing in a see-through leopard-print peignoir, apparently remembering, “How not-so-tasty Guido was no Latin lover”.

  I couldn’t bear to read what she had to say, so I skipped to the end of the article.

  Guido is currently soaking up the sun in South Africa, filming his latest bogus blockbuster Guido’s African Safari. Will the cheating chef be blacking up to add authenticity to the show? He could not be reached for comment.

  Dry-mouthed, I turned off the screen. The only way this could be worse was if the website had allowed comments on the piece, but they hadn’t – presumably because they were worried about being sued. Then I realised that this meant they were confident that what they had printed wasn’t libellous, so it must all be true. And it could only have come from Florence.

  Over the past seven years, I’d seen Guido lose his temper countless times. I’d seen him hollow-eyed with exhaustion when he’d arrived at the office after finishing service at one of the restaurants three hours before. I’d seen him get through a tasting with Thatchell’s when he had norovirus, and only just manage not to throw up until the client had left. But I’d never seen his self-belief so much as dented.

  He was my mentor, my champion – but he wasn’t what I thought he was. As I straightened my hair and trowelled on what I hoped was a glossy, professional veneer courtesy of Laura Mercier, I tried to identify moments when Guido had seemed insincere or artificial, but I couldn’t. And, I realised, it was because he wasn’t. Whatever fiction he’d created about his start in life, he was still the person who’d taken me into his kitchen when I was a hapless, overconfident junior chef and taught me all he could about food, about how to inspire people, about how to build a brand.

  As I was putting on my shoes, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar UK mobile number.

  “Hello?”

  “Pippa Martin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hello, Pippa,” it was a woman’s voice, unctuous and confiding. “My name’s Anna, I’m calling from the Daily Star. I wonder if you. . .”

  “No comment,” I said. My phone almost slid out of my hand, my palm was so sweaty. If the press were already ringing me, they’d be hounding Guido. I turned off my phone and stuffed it into my bag, along with a notepad and pen, my room key and a huge wodge of tissues from the box in the bathroom. Then I went along the corridor to the palatial suite where Guido was billeted, and knocked on the door.

  “It’s only me,” I said. “I think we should order a couple of cap
puccinos.”

  An hour later, we were seated around the meeting table in Guido’s suite. Lauren had her laptop open in front of her, and Toby had a stack of files that I guessed must contain our contracts with Platinum Productions. Guido had a bottle of water. There were deep furrows in his cheeks and his designer stubble looked a lot greyer than it had the previous night.

  “So,” Toby said. “Clearly we have a situation here. First off, is the story true?”

  “Of course it’s true,” said Guido.

  “All of it?”

  “Sure,” Guido said.

  “And. . . the rest? I’m sorry to ask this, I know it isn’t easy. But what you had written in your autobiography, in Searing Ambition, about your career?”

  “True too. Apart from the beginning. I went to Italy when I was seventeen, after my mother died. I learned to speak Italian, I worked in restaurants. It was all I’d ever wanted to do. But I had to leave my background behind, and to do that I needed a new story. So I made one up, and it was a good story.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said. “This is a PR disaster. But we can turn it into a PR triumph, because that’s what we’re good at. First off, Florence. I take it this has come from her?”

  Guido nodded. “We split up, just before I left London, and she said I’d regret it. She has known about all this for a while. She found my birth certificate and some pictures I’d kept of my father – stupid. She held it over me for a while, threatening to go public, otherwise we wouldn’t have stayed together for as long. But in the end I couldn’t stand any more of her. This has come as a shock to me, of course, but it’s not as surprising as you might think.”