An Italian Holiday Read online

  To Vicki Barrass, for thirty years of fun and friendship – not to mention advice on Italian customs, language and the art of flirtation

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  One

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Claire!’

  Martin hopped around on one foot, reminding Claire of a balding heron. ‘Do you have to leave boxes lying about where people can trip over them? I nearly broke my bloody leg!’

  ‘I’m leaving in five minutes to drive to Mayfair for the lunch I’m catering.’ Claire tried to restrain herself from braining him with the box containing the tuna ceviche which was destined to be her starter. She’d already had to deal with one outraged male ego this morning when she’d asked Harry, the fishmonger, if the tuna was fresh and he’d gone ballistic. As Harry was extremely useful to her professionally, she had stroked his ruffled feathers and apologized. Her husband, she decided, was a different story. She had been the breadwinner for years now, but did he lend a hand? Offer to carry her catering boxes to the car? No, he did not. Claire decided that she was becoming a misanthropist or maybe just a good old-fashioned feminist. Taken aback, she stopped shoving plastic boxes of food into the boot of her ancient Panda. She’d never seen herself as a women’s libber. In fact, if you’d asked her thirty years ago, she’d have said she was the domestic type; forget bra-burning, she preferred hearth and home. Maybe it was life that made you a feminist. Or marriage.

  However you sliced it, and as a caterer there was nothing Claire didn’t know about slicing things, there were times when she felt men were an optional extra. She thought of one of her favourite cartoons when the wife said to the husband: ‘When one of us dies, I’m going to live in the South of France.’ Too right.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Claire,’ her friend Jan replied whenever she voiced these subversive sentiments. ‘You’d never survive without a bloke!’

  She suspected Martin thought the same.

  Anyway, for now she was going to forget about Martin – and also about their son Evan and daughter-in-law Belinda, both of whom had been ‘temporarily’ living with them for the past six months since their flat had fallen through; they had been making Claire’s life doubly difficult since she now had to prepare all her catering commissions with two more people around – not to mention a fridge overflowing with unfamiliar vegetables and revolting kale shakes. Evan and Belinda only believed in Eating Fresh. Added to which, her precious liquidizer was forever left with bits of green stuff sticking to it.

  Claire, she reminded herself, you are beginning to sound like your mother. This was such a terrifying prospect that, immediately, she switched her mind to the morning ahead. She’d never cooked for this company before, but a caterer she knew had found she was double-booked and she’d asked if Claire could take on the job. The clients were venture capitalists, obviously successful ones, based in a large house in Brook Street, Mayfair. Claire didn’t really understand what venture capitalists did and wondered if they were any different to the City types she’d done directors’ lunches for in the old days. They had mostly been harmless if pompous old farts, apart from the occasional really dangerous one with wandering hands who thought the cook was on the menu along with the crème brûlée. Amazing how enduring this breed of man was. Her mother’s generation had dubbed them NSIT – Not Safe in Taxis.

  Claire typed the company’s address into her ancient clipped-to-the-windscreen TomTom and waved goodbye to her domestic irritations. This was her favourite moment. She always left early so that she had plenty of time for breakdowns, traffic queues, parking problems or any other foreseeable disaster. One disaster she hadn’t foreseen was a driver going straight into the back of the ancient transit van she borrowed for big occasions and knocking the four carefully stashed whole salmons she was taking to a wedding onto the floor. She had managed to rescue two of them by judiciously placing cucumber slices so that they reminded her of nudists with beach balls disguising their modesty. The other two she had had to make into salmon mousse with the help of a handy freezer – she always carried her salmon-shaped mould – and, thank God, the guests had thought she was being deliberately retro and loved it. Fortunately, by the time she served the mousse, the bride and groom had drunk too much champagne to notice the change in menu.

  An hour and a half later, when she arrived at the grand Georgian house in Brook Street, there was a parking space right outside. Remembering Woody Allen in the film Sleeper, when he knew something bad was going to happen when he got a parking space outside the hospital, Claire was grateful but suspicious.

  She paid the parking charge with her phone and carried her boxes carefully inside. Margie, the previous cook, had tipped her the wink that the clients were bored with the usual conservative fare and fancied something a bit spicier, hence the tuna ceviche, followed by chicken piri-piri and the ever-popular bread-and-butter pudding, made with Italian panettone instead of Mother’s Pride – a touch of Nigella ooh la la.

  She was busily plating up the ceviche in the tiny galley kitchen, Radio Four on her headphones, when the office manager put her head round the door. ‘Glad to see you’re so ahead of yourself,’ the woman congratulated. ‘The last cook was so slovenly we had to fire her.’

  ‘Right.’ Claire squeezed out the last of the limes thoughtfully. Margie hadn’t mentioned anything about being fired. How very weird. Maybe she was embarrassed. Word spread fast in the catering world, often about appalling clients – bad payers, or customers who treated you as if they were Henry the Eighth and you some menial serf.

  Claire went back to You and Yours and the topic of whether or not you had invested your pension wisely – or, in her case, not at all, since she’d never had a job that paid enough. She wasn’t going to think about that. She’d just have to go on working till she was a hundred.

  She could hear the sounds of people beginning to arrive and had a final check: fizzy and still water on ice; white wine, though they wouldn’t drink much of that. She finished plating up the tuna ceviche, sticking her finger naughtily in the pungent dressing – just the right mix of chilli and lime – then popped the chicken piri-piri into the warmer and assembled the mini bread-and-butter puddings ready to finish off until they were fluffy and irresistible.

  Her final touch was to write out the menus by hand. Her fourteen years in private schools might not have left her with much in the way of educational attainment, but at least she’d been taught her perfect italic writing.

  Claire got out her trusty fountain pen and began to write.

  Angela looked around the shop with satisfaction. The atmosphere was just as she’d hoped when she’d first had the idea to start a clothes shop.

  The whole look was inviting, almost like slipping into someone’s sitting room – Persian rugs dotted around, bookcases with ornaments, tables with pots of her favourite bright red moth orchids, and, most vital of all, smiling assistants who actually seemed pleased to see you.

  If there was one thing Angela loathed it was shops with forbidding white spaces and daunting salespeople who looked down their noses as if they were assessing whether or not you were worthy to cross their sacred threshold. The location was great too. St Christopher’s Place was near enough to the crowds of Oxford Street, but funky and inviting, full of happy office workers overflowi
ng into the pavement cafes, glad to be away from their desks. In fact, it was almost like Paris.

  Angela smiled. She could still vividly remember the moment in Hong Kong when she’d tried on a dress in a little back-street shop and couldn’t stop stroking it – rather embarrassingly, since the owner was watching.

  ‘Nice fabric,’ the little man had insisted, stroking it too. ‘Come from bamboo. Very soft. Softer than silk even.’

  The dress was like a very long sweater with a scooped neck and long, tight sleeves and Angela knew she didn’t want to take it off. Ever.

  It was ridiculous but she felt somehow enveloped in softness, almost like a caress. The mad, silly words a hug in a dress came into her head, though Angela had absolutely no inkling that she’d just come up with the slogan that would make her famous.

  She’d been working for a bank at the time and had worn nothing but tailored suits, certainly nothing with even the hint of a caress. After her dramatic conversion in Hong Kong, she’d researched the clothes market thoroughly and decided that there was enough interest in relaxed and wearable fashion to take a punt, so she’d handed in her notice and started Fabric. Her colleagues all thought she was mad.

  Of course the hug dress was only the core of the collection. Long, flattering tops that covered your bum followed, fine-knit cardigans, capsule wardrobes based on luxurious comfort as well as style and all of them flattering to the over-forty woman. By a stroke of luck she hit the gym explosion and her clothes fitted well with women’s more casual lifestyles. Her ninety-year-old mother would never have worn anything like this, but then that was the point. Women’s lives had changed. Angela added a line of wrap dresses which the fashionistas might declare to be as dead as a dodo but which sold like Harry Potter in paperback. As did the many-coloured pashminas – another item despised by the fashion gurus but beloved by the customers – and lovely exotic silk scarves – which gave her an excuse to keep travelling to India and Morocco.

  Angela caught sight of herself in one of the long mirrors she insisted they had everywhere – she hated shops where you had to wander round for hours before you found one.

  The face that looked back shocked her. Despite her carefully tended blonde bob, the clever clothes and the bronze beaded necklace judiciously chosen to disguise the crêpey neck, she looked old. Worse than that, she looked hard. Unwillingly she remembered the line in Nora Ephron’s wonderful essay on ageing – that it took longer and longer every day just to look like you.

  Well, maybe it was a good thing she was hard. She was going to need to be. Three years ago she’d sold a large stake in Fabric to a venture capitalist in order to give her the money to open more shops and expand her business online. The expansion had been a great success with six more shops in prestigious locations and booming Internet sales. Fabric had been so successful, in fact, with her name constantly in the press, that she’d been approached by the popular TV show, Done Deal, to be one of its business moguls.

  Angela glanced at the expensive watch her success had enabled her to buy. It was half past twelve. At one o’clock she and her deputy, Drew, were due at a lunch at Woodley Investment’s smart offices in Brook Street.

  Mayfair was where the venture capitalists liked to be, marking the difference between themselves and the old-fashioned City boys.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Drew asked, emerging from their upstairs offices.

  ‘What do you think they want?’ Angela asked him. She and Drew had been summoned to this lunch by their investors without any advance warning.

  ‘Come on, Angie,’ Drew replied with a grimace, ‘you must have some idea. I don’t suppose it’s good. When you get into bed with the devil you expect to get scratched.’

  ‘Scratched is OK. I just don’t want to get swallowed whole.’

  Angela said goodbye to the smiling sales assistants and they went outside to look for a taxi. There were always loads waiting round the corner near Selfridges. In fact, there were loads of taxis everywhere since the invasion of cheap Uber minicabs. She glanced back at the shop. ‘Filling up nicely with lunch-break shoppers,’ she commented happily.

  ‘Do you ever stop, Angie?’ Drew’s voice held the merest tinge of criticism.

  ‘No. Never. It’s my business.’ She looked back at him, weighing up whether or not to take offence and decided against it. She might need his support. ‘I’ve given Fabric my all. It’s been everything to me. And it hasn’t let me down so far.’

  On the spur of the moment, Angela ignored the line of hopeful black cabs and waved down a bicycle rickshaw from the row of tatty machines with their gaudy fake-velvet seating and ramshackle plastic roofing.

  ‘What on earth . . . ?’ Drew demanded. ‘They’re a rip-off for tourists. Shouldn’t you be playing the business tycoon? Famous star of Done Deal?’

  ‘To hell with that.’ Sometimes she wished she hadn’t signed up for the show at all. Especially as she’d been cast as the blonde ball-breaker.

  Grinning at the madness of her choice of vehicle, she climbed into the back.

  ‘Aren’t you that lady on the telly?’ The rickshaw driver studied her. ‘The scary one who’s nasty to everyone and never lends anything?’

  ‘That’s me.’ Angela laughed. ‘Why? You don’t want to expand your business, do you?’

  ‘Not me. I’m a student.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Business management.’

  Angela laughed. ‘Good luck with that. I’m not always scary. As a matter of fact, I just do things by instinct.’

  ‘Your instincts must be pretty hard line, then.’ The young man delivered this with such a big grin that it was hard to be offended.

  ‘Even the rickshaw drivers are scared of you,’ whispered Drew. ‘So you follow your instincts, do you?’ They were bowling down Oxford Street at an alarming rate for a bike-powered vehicle. Bravely, Drew tried to take her hand. ‘Like getting involved with your second in command?’ He and Angela had, very ill-advisedly in Angela’s view, been to bed together a couple of times. To be frank, she’d been surprised that at her age anyone still wanted to go to bed with her.

  ‘Come on, Drew, we’ve been through this. They were moments of madness. Not a good idea to mix business and emotion. Besides, you’re too young for me. Remember Rider Haggard’s She?’

  ‘Before my time.’

  ‘Mine too. He was Victorian, actually,’ she pointed out wryly. ‘He invented the original She-who-must-be-obeyed. Played by Ursula Andress in the Hammer film. She was really called Ayesha and she was immortal. A nice young man falls in love with her and she tries to make him immortal too. Only it all goes wrong and she becomes two thousand years old – before the poor lad’s very eyes.’

  ‘I’m not a lad. I’m forty-five.’

  ‘When you’re my age that’s a lad.’

  ‘So it’s all been worth it, then?’ She could hear the hurt in his voice as they turned left into Bond Street.

  ‘What has?’

  ‘You, Angela. No husband. No children. Not even a dog.’

  Angela had to fight against slapping him. How dare he?

  She was so angry that she didn’t notice passing her favourite Jo Malone store or the blue plaques for both Jimi Hendrix and Handel.

  ‘You may need my comfort after today,’ Drew announced ominously. They were arriving outside a perfect Georgian gem of a building a few doors down from Claridge’s. As usual the paparazzi were gathered outside the Queen’s favourite hotel, as they often were, to photograph not Her Majesty but Alexa Chung, or Daisy Lowe or Karlie Kloss coming out of yet another celebrity lunch.

  Drew helped Angela out of the rickshaw and glanced up at the perfect proportions of the exterior. ‘The venture capital boys love this old-school stuff to disguise the fact that they’re a bunch of spivs,’ he announced.

  ‘A bit harsh, since they paid me a very nice sum for their shares then left me alone.’

  ‘Till now,’ was his portentous reply. ‘They’re not called Vultur
e Capitalists for nothing, you know. They’re not interested in what they invest in, only their returns. Look at that lot who lent to the shoe diva. She said they didn’t know a stiletto from a Cornetto. Come on. They can only tear us limb from limb.’

  The inside of Woodley Investment’s HQ was, if anything, grander than the exterior. A flunkey took Angela’s coat and ushered her through a large hall with daunting black and white tiles which led to an even bigger staircase, just like the one Scarlett O’Hara came down, carpeted in deepest red with an ornate black iron banister. A flower arrangement stood on the hall table – so vast that it must have taken two men to carry it in. The whole was lit by crystal chandeliers.

  ‘The Sun King would have been at home borrowing from this lot,’ whispered Drew.

  A willowy young woman dressed in edgy black, with sleek dark hair, appeared almost out of the panelled woodwork. ‘Good Morning, Ms Williams. Mr Northcott and Mr Fisher will join you in one moment. If you’d follow me.’

  Angela was suddenly conscious of her rickshaw-blown hair. ‘Do you have a Ladies’ room first?’

  ‘The nearest is in the basement.’

  Angela skipped gratefully down the luxuriously carpeted stairs. It was very much the kind of Ladies you found in a gentleman’s club, huge and unmodernized, speaking of old-fashioned class that didn’t need stupid Italian taps or silly-shaped basins to proclaim its status.

  Angela adjusted her lipstick and brushed her hair. Ten minutes in the open air had brought a tinge of colour to her cheeks. She leaned in towards her image and informed it, in the familiar words from the TV show: ‘Come on, Angela. It’s a done deal.’

  From the far side of the room the diminutive Filipina attendant, who must have been hiding in the loos, jumped out. ‘I know it is you when you leave your coat!’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘You amazing! You don’t take no nonsense from nobody!’ The attendant glanced around as if she knew she was behaving out of line. ‘Could you give me autograph?’ She pulled a sheet of paper towel out of the machine and handed it to Angela.

  ‘What’s your name?’