A Groom With a View (17 page)

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 cappuccinos.”

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.”

“Right,” Lauren said. “So, first thing, we discredit her. She was a lingerie model, right? Anything there? Sleeping her way to the top, that kind of thing? And what about her daughter, Tanith, is it? Who’s the father?”

Guido shook his head. “No, Lauren. Remember, I was a father to Tanith for five years. This is going to be hard enough for her. I’m not having her mother dragged through the gutter press too.”

Lauren said, “But. . .” then stopped herself.

Toby said, “I’ve looked over the contract you signed with Platinum. They could can the series, but I don’t think they will. They’ll take the view that this will do the ratings no harm, and I think that’s correct. I’ve been in contact with their legal team this morning and I’m waiting for confirmation, but we can take that as read for now.”

“So what we need to do is turn this into good publicity for you,” Lauren said. “You’ll need to issue a statement apologising and explaining why you did it.”

“That’s easy,” Guido said wearily. “You know what the London restaurant scene was like back then. Or maybe you don’t. No offence, Lauren, but you’re, what, thirty-five? It was all Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay and egos and twenty-hour days and bankers snorting coke in the bogs. It was all about personality. No one would have been interested in a boy from Berkshire who could cook a bit. As I said, I needed a story. And the important parts are true. I scrubbed mussels in restaurants in Rome and was so skint I slept on the kitchen floor. And everything I’ve ever said I feel about food and cooking is true too. Everything I teach the young chefs coming through my kitchen is real, isn’t it, Pippa?” He looked at me, almost imploringly, for validation.

“It’s true,” I said.

“So we need to put together a proposal that’s going to shift the focus of this show away from you, the celebrity, and towards you, the mentor,” Lauren said. “The man who cares about young people and good causes. I’ve researched some schools, homeless shelters and conservation charities we can approach. It will mean some personal financial commitment from you, and it will mean giving others more exposure in the filming. The actor you worked with in last night’s show – I watched the unedited footage on our way over, and he’s gold. The camera loves him. We’ll book him for more hours, do a thing where you teach him to cook. Go out to schools and hospitals in deprived areas – we need to make people love you like they love Jamie Oliver.”

“Fat-tongued mockney c. . .” Guido began, but Lauren silenced him with a glare.

“And Pippa – you’ve worked with Guido for a long time. Would you be prepared to take a more prominent role in this?”

I felt like I was on a roller coaster. You know, like at Alton Towers or somewhere, when you’ve been slowly, slowly edging upwards, and suddenly you reach the top. The view is dizzying, the knowledge that you’re going to plunge downwards is terrifying, and you wish you’d got off while you were at the bottom, when there was still the option of being a coward and going for a beer and a burger instead.

“I don’t know,” I quavered.

Then Guido’s phone rang. “Eloise? Right. From Bryn? That was to be expected. I’ll let Toby and Lauren know. Not to worry, sweetheart. Ciao.”

He put his phone carefully down on the table, but it still rattled against the polished wood.

“Thatchell’s have pulled the plug,” he said.