I felt like I was walking in an enchanted forest, tripping through a Scandinavian landscape of silver birch trees, ice-blue skies and snow drifts. I gazed through the silvery twigs at the lonely princess dancing on ice, platinum hair flowing behind her as she turned slowly on the glittering frozen pond. And peering further into the cavernous space, I gasped at the beautiful sight before me – the most divine pair of Jimmy Choos I’d ever clapped eyes on. They were hanging from a branch to her left. Long, spiky heels, lashings of cranberry-red glitter and a dangerously pointed toe that could take a man’s eye out with one kick.
‘Want!’ I said under my breath, almost licking the store window and spotting my reflection. In truth, I felt just like the lonely princess in the Christmas window display; I could so relate as she went agonisingly slowly round and round on the bloody circle of ice with no real purpose or destination. At least she had the prospect of a pair of Jimmy Choos, which was a damn sight more than I had just now. Yep, this was me – a lonely princess on life’s squeaky treadmill: my marriage was over, I lived alone, Christmas was weeks away and I was dreading it. I had nothing to look forward to, no one to go home for, no gifts to buy, no Christmas dinner to share, just me in my lonely princess tower – or to be more precise my little flat in Clapham. There was no prince to sweep me off my feet and no scrummy Jimmy Choos to pluck down like a ripe berry from a nearby tree either.
I was really feeling sorry for myself as shoppers rushed past me on that uphill climb towards Christmas. Everyone else was bustling around, whizzing past with presents to buy, places to go, and people to see. And as everyone lived their lives and hurried by, it seemed that mine had ended before it even started.
I was standing outside Harrods lusting after expensive shoes for a reason. Yes, I like shoes; I’m female, it’s in my DNA. But I was gazing at the Christmas windows because I was trying to pluck up the courage to enter those hallowed portals of festive excess and fabulousness. I was about to begin a two-week freelance stint as Christmas Marketing Consultant here, which I was delighted to do because it would be a lovely, Christmassy job. But like most lovely things in life – it came with a price.
I moved away from the windows and headed for the entrance. Holding my breath, I pushed through the doors and entered the glitzy Christmas interior. My mouth was dry, and my heart was performing a vigorous little dance, because here, in London, in Harrods Department Store, at Christmas, was the place where it all began. Almost twenty years before, as a young marketing assistant, I’d met the rudest, most self-obsessed, arrogant man I’d ever known – and reader, I married him.
Gianni Callidori was an Italian chef whose unusual dishes had caught the eye of a Harrods boss who’d decided to package and sell them for Christmas. And if on our first meeting anyone had told me I would fall in love with this awful man, I wouldn’t have believed them. I was in charge of making sure the right products appeared in the right spaces in the right windows, and was happily doing this when I first encountered him.
‘Take your feelthy hands off my Christmas puddings!’ was the first thing he ever said to me, and he’d yelled this in a thick Italian accent. Not the most memorable or romantic opening line, but as I was to find out, this was classic Gianni. As assistant to the brand manager, one of my tasks was to help find a prominent place for Gianni Callidori’s Christmas collection, ‘a new and exciting range of fabulous festive dishes for the discerning foodie’. I was shocked to be spoken to in this way, and I didn’t care that he’d just been featured in a double spread in Vogue and was December’s ‘Culinary Hunk’, in Festive Food magazine. All I saw was rude and difficult and I tried to ignore this grown man having a toddler tantrum, swearing at everyone and anyone about everything.
This was almost twenty years ago, and back then I hated him on sight – and sound. How dare he storm into the Harrods window where I was creating a wonderful display for his products and start shouting at me.
‘Holy horses, don’t bloody put them there,’ he had carried on shouting and demanding some kind of response, so I turned quickly round and shouted back.
‘Where the hell do you want me to put them then?’ I’d picked up two of the clementine and clove Christmas puddings from his ‘Callidori Christmas’ range and thrust them at him in what must have seemed a rather aggressive gesture to those passing by.
‘Not in the bloody sodding window,’ was his charming, and heated response. ‘They must be in dark, they mustn’t see the light,’ he’d said, grabbing a handful and clutching them to him like they were overexposed newborn chicks.
‘Oh I’m sorry, no one told me your puddings were to be treated like vampires,’ I snapped, ‘perhaps you’d like me to avoid sprinkling holy water and garlic near them too?’
‘No, there is already garlic in the bloody puddings,’ he’d snapped back, which left me a little surprised that a) he didn’t get sarcasm, and b) there was garlic in his Christmas puddings!
Before I could stop him, he began piling them on a table behind a turkey the size of a small child where they’d never be seen by shoppers.
‘There, you see, she needs to be kept in shade, no light, no light,’ he was waving his arms around. ‘Put them here,’ he said angrily, pointing aggressively at the table.
‘I know where I’d like to put them… and they won’t be exposed to light up there,’ I muttered. His sodding puddings weren’t selling and needed to be on display, not hidden at the back of the window. My job was at stake here.
So as he stood there, all 6 foot 4 of him towering over me with his hair all curly and tousled and his brow furrowed, I explained about ‘marketing’ and ‘visibility’ and moved his puddings back to where I’d originally put them. Then, after a few seconds, he gasped in apparent horror at my rudeness, said something about ‘holy asses’, and stormed out of the store window.
When my friend Cherry later showed me the article in that month’s Vogue with him sitting on a chair back to front Christine Keeler-style, I had to laugh. Described as the ‘enfant terrible’ of Italian cooking, he was clearly the next big thing and apparently Harrods were delighted to be selling his slightly crazy culinary Christmas. Oh God, I thought, I might lose my job over this. I fully expected to be hauled before the bosses for not hailing the king and offering to push his puddings up his arse.
‘No one wants to work with him,’ Cherry said. ‘That’s why you’re on the account, you’re new and the bosses don’t want the hassle.’
I was annoyed that I’d been handed the poisoned chalice, but wanted to do a good job because I was conscientious. What I didn’t want was to be shouted at by a rude Italian who hadn’t even had the manners to introduce himself. I told him this the following day when he turned up without warning as I titivated the ‘Christmas at Swan Lake’ window.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘And who are you?’ I responded, from behind a giant swan. ‘I’m sorry but you can’t just barge into windows and make demands about where stuff goes. You were very rude yesterday.’
‘And so were you,’ he huffed. ‘I will speak with the bloody management.’
‘Okay, you complain about me, and I’ll complain about you,’ I said, hoping he didn’t take me up on this. I was pretty sure management would be quicker to get rid of me than him; after all, I just moved the swans around – anyone could do that!
He just stared at me and I stared back, and this stand-off continued for some time, until he muttered ‘holy horses’, and swept out of the window.
I’d always been good at reading people until I met Gianni. I thought I knew what people were thinking and could often out-think them. I was used to handling difficult personalities in my job, but here was someone who was quite unreasonable. This was a double-edged sword for me, he was annoying, arrogant, his behaviour unfathomable and alienating – yet from the outset I was intrigued. He had this amazing energy, he was untamable, often unreachable, and yet after a while I somehow managed to communicate with him on some level. I worked for several weeks on his festive feasts, placing them in prominent positions throughout the store, especially the windows, attending promotion meetings and coming up with sales ideas. I referred to his range privately as ‘Callidori’s Crappy Christmas’, and had little hope of any success given the concoctions he’d produced. I would smile bravely when he popped in to ask how things were going, and when I gave him the sales figures he invariably erupted like a firework. He complained bitterly about the lack of sales and had the bloody cheek to ask me what I was doing wrong. He had the ability to send me from 0‒100 in a matter of seconds and we always ended up arguing. It wasn’t always anger that drove our conversations, sometimes we’d chat about food and whatever else was going on at the store. It was usually small talk, but it was in those moments I saw a different man, someone who was reachable. I sometimes detected a twinkle in his eye but this was often followed by him teasing me, or a full-blown row.
He was pretty impossible to work with, but I stuck to my guns and if I wanted the turkey/crackers/Christmas puddings in a certain place, and he didn’t, then I’d insist on it. Often I’d come back the next day to discover he’d moved them, and I would move them back. I didn’t always get my way, but then neither did he.
It wasn’t until I stopped working with Gianni and I was sent to ‘Dog Comestibles’, that it dawned on me that I missed him turning up unannounced and finding something to ‘complain’ about. After a while I’d realised it was all surface, and Gianni actually seemed to enjoy the combat, which had become more flirtatious as the weeks passed. I loved the way his eyes twinkled with hidden mirth, and the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, and rolled his eyes in mock frustration when I contradicted him. I had to admit I actually looked forward to him sweeping in and making ridiculous demands about placing his puddings in a prominent position or complaining about the way I was showing his panettone. And I knew he was always waiting for my outraged response, my own eye rolling under fluttering lashes (okay I flirted back, I was young). And sometimes, just sometimes, we’d catch each other mid-combat, and both laugh, shaking our heads at the other’s apparently ludicrous viewpoint. But we both knew we were laughing at ourselves, and the exciting spark developing between us.
I was fairly happy in ‘Dog Comestibles’, and had become quite creative with the doggie Christmas stockings and ribboned marrow bones, but when Gianni ‘demanded’ I be returned to his festive collection, I made like I was doing everyone a favour. I pretended to be upset that I was leaving behind a life of horsemeat treats and a Christmas tree decorated with bones, but inside felt irrationally delighted. I secretly missed the play-fighting and flirting, and the days when we would just chat, like ‘normal’ people. I found him fascinating. On quiet days, he could be more pensive, less flamboyant, and talked about his family home in Tuscany, his mother’s amazing cooking and his father’s wine, made from grapes grown on their own small patch of Italian countryside. This would be sandwiched between the daily combat, him the villain and me the stroppy princess in the pantomime we played out.
‘You not always bloody sodding right,’ he’d mutter, his lovely Italian accent and dubious grasp of English creating a delicious cocktail I loved to listen to. Despite the chilly exterior, I soon realised his bark was worse than his bite. He’d sometimes thrust one of his famous Italian iced cakes at me – a beautiful box containing the most divine cake I’d ever tasted and, in my view, one of the few edible things in his collection – and say under his breath, ‘Take this home to your mama.’ I didn’t want to spoil the gesture by telling him she’d died several years before, so I would graciously accept his gift. I wasn’t going to turn down free cake! At those times, a faint smile would hover on his lips, and I could see it pleased him to give me things. This belied the rather grumpy, unfeeling image he liked to project to the rest of the world. It also made me realise there were hidden layers to this man, and I wanted to be the one to know what lay beneath – and keep it for myself.
There was always lots of bluster but Gianni never really lost his temper, just shouted and complained about everything with various swear words thrown in at random points to emphasise the strength of his feeling. As he was still struggling with English, these swear words often ended up being lists of expletives with no real context, which offended many, but I found amusing. He may have been stroppy and argumentative but I learned early on that the way to his heart was through food and I could always calm him down by asking about his ‘Nonna’s garlic bread’ or his ‘Mama’s pasta sauce’. It was only then that the real Gianni would emerge, misty-eyed for the Italian cuisine of his childhood. ‘Rich tomato sauces laced with the fresh garlic from the field,’ he’d say, ‘and the cheese, Chloe… ah the bloody wonderful Italian cheese.’
He’d left Italy at nineteen to find his way in the world, and though he’d settled in London, he said he’d never found anywhere that served food like ‘back home’.
Around this time, a TV company began to show interest in making a documentary all about Gianni, this new kid on the block who made pasta like mama used to make it. His dishes were traditional Italian, with a modern twist, and along with his cutting-edge Christmas range he was famous for his blue cheese cannelloni and lemon and walnut pasta. But during an early encounter with a food critic who’d dared to criticise the consistency of his turkey tiramisu (the consistency was the least of its problems!) Gianni didn’t like what the critic was saying so pushed his face into a large gateau and his TV career was over. He was disappointed, but as I told him back then, it wasn’t for him – he had to ignore the offers of TV fame and fancy dishes and stick with his principles of simple, Italian food. I mean, who wanted to eat turkey tiramisu anyway? Yuck!
Despite branching out into weird and wonderful ways with offal, his star began to rise and the more we worked together, the closer we became. I knew he liked me the way he baited me with cheeky comments about my outfits (when I dared to wear yellow, he said I looked like a ‘bloody banana’). I wasn’t offended, it was meant in jest and reminded me of the way the boys had teased girls they fancied at school. Clearly Gianni Callidori wasn’t as sophisticated as the Sunday supplements would have us believe. All the lovely black and white shots of him in the kitchen, or sitting cross-legged with a huge carving knife and a twinkle in his eye, were just a pose. I saw the awkward teenager and the vulnerable man hiding just underneath the surface. I secretly warmed to his rather gauche attempts to gain my attention, and sometimes I wished he’d abandon the façade and just kiss me right there behind a pyramid of his special Christmas sausages.
Cherry had spotted the chemistry between us too. ‘Whenever you’re around, the miserable sod has an almost smile on his face,’ she’d laughed. ‘It’s the only time he ever smiles.’
One morning, when I was working on a PR campaign for his Italian iced Christmas cake (the title was quite a mouthful, and the cake was the best mouthful I’d ever tasted), he wandered into the office.
‘Morning,’ I said brightly, ‘look at the poster we’ve made.’ I stood up and held up the glistening photo of the delicious cake. Gianni had explained to me that Italian icing is made with egg whites and is essentially a form of meringue, and the light, fluffy texture against two layers of deep, warm velvet chocolate chilli sponge was truly a match made in heaven. I knew this because he’d given me a whole cake to ‘take home to my mama’ earlier that week and I’d eaten it all in two days. It was delicious; the sweet heat made my jaw ache in exquisite pain and the lacing of alcohol in the delicate crunch of sweet icing turned each mouthful into Christmas heaven.
‘This is my favourite product in your range,’ I said, my arm now aching from holding up the poster for his approval, waiting for a response. Gianni didn’t really respond, he was being his usual self, not saying very much, just looking at the photo with a shrug.
‘This iced cake reminds me of you,’ I added, catching his eye.
‘Me?’ he said, with a frown.
‘Mmm the frosty icing makes me think of your frozen heart.’ I was goading him, wanting a reaction. But what I didn’t tell him back then was that I knew the sweetness of chocolate and the warmth of the chilli were also there underneath his frosty exterior.
He stood a while, without taking his eyes from mine, obviously thinking about what I’d said.
I wondered if perhaps I’d gone too far. It was a joke, but he was a client and it may have been a little too near the bone.
Eventually, he dragged his eyes away from mine and looked at the poster, before returning to me, unsmiling. ‘And I think you might be the chilli that warms up the frosty icing and my cold heart.’
I hadn’t expected this and felt a surge of chocolate chilli run through my veins as he leaned towards me. I looked at him as he lifted his hand and touched my cheek with the tips of his fingers. We both looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, and it dawned on me that finally something was happening here. But as I braced myself for a kiss, he pulled away and said ‘Good work Chloe, I like the poster.’
I’d been confused by his rather abrupt departure. Was he shy, a little embarrassed about taking things further with me, or did he simply see me as a colleague to tease and nothing more? I didn’t see him for a few days after that and was more disappointed each day when he never appeared to admonish me or cause a rumpus about his pretentious Christmas cardamom puddings. As I created pyramids of his puddings and helped the window dresser set Christmas dining scenes with all his crazy stuff, all I could think of was the way his fingers felt on my cheek. Again and again, the thoughts swirled around my head: why had he just walked away, and where was he now? Had my surprise seemed like rejection, or had the spark between us scared him? Even if he wanted to, could this outwardly cold man thaw whatever was in his chest?
I continued on with my work, trying not to think of him but seeing his face in every reflection of the Christmas store windows, imagining every man walking past on the bustling streets was him.
Then, just when I thought it wasn’t going anywhere after all, and it had merely been a moment between us that had passed, something happened. It was Christmas Eve and I was finishing off the January sales campaign for when we returned after the holidays. All around me the air was tingling with other people’s excitement, but I’d spent the day trying not to cry because my little cat Freddie had run into the road and been killed by a car the previous evening. I was so upset I didn’t want to be in work, but as I was merely an assistant, I’d got the short straw and doubted anyone would give me compassionate leave for a cat.
That morning, Gianni came thundering in complaining about some trivial matter. It was bad timing, I was too distraught to be pleased to see him and though he was ready for friendly combat with me, I couldn’t respond in my usual way. When he started shouting about how his smoked paprika mince pies hadn’t sold, instead of saying ‘I’m not surprised, because they are awful,’ I just burst into tears. I was devastated about my little cat Freddie but strangely relieved to see Gianni, which had brought all my emotions to the surface. I had this almost irresistible urge to put my head on his chest. I longed to lean on him, and have him put his arms around me and tell me in his lovely Italian voice that it would all be okay. But he was cool at the best of times and I had no intention of throwing myself at his frosty mercy. Even through my tears I saw his face drop, he stopped shouting and his huge shoulders slumped – he had absolutely no idea what to do with a crying woman.
‘I sorry, so sorry, I was teasing with you…’ he was saying.
‘No, no, it isn’t you,’ I said and explained about Freddie. As I looked up from my tears I saw such tenderness in his eyes it almost stopped me in my tracks. He continued to stand by me for a few minutes as I sobbed, looking at me awkwardly, his arms at his sides. Eventually, I dried my eyes, looked up and he’d gone, clearly unable to deal with the emotion. I decided not to care, I wasn’t wasting my time or emotion on someone who couldn’t feel, he couldn’t cope with those feelings, so I carried on working and tried to push him from my mind. But when I came to leave for home that afternoon, I stepped out into the dark, rainy street and bumped right into him walking into the store. I gasped in shock, and started to laugh, it was a strange and embarrassing combination of delight at seeing him and fear at feeling so vulnerable around this man. I knew in that moment, I really, really liked him.
‘Ah Chloe,. . .
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