Five Wakes and a Wedding

by Karen Ross

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘But I don’t understand why your roof is any of my business.’

  ‘It’s a single structure that covers both properties.’ Sybille Newman frowns at me as if I’m being deliberately obtuse. ‘Ned and I have lived here for twenty-three years, and even when the betting shop was downstairs, back in the nineties, there was trouble with the roof.’ She leans on my reception desk and adds, ‘We’ve had it replaced twice, but now there’s water leaking into our living room again every time it rains. We’ve got a good jobbing builder who’s been patching it up, but we shouldn’t have to be doing that at our own expense. Not when it’s supposed to be a shared cost. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the purlin’s rotted. And there’s a ticking noise coming from the rafters that keeps us awake every night. Woodworm probably. Or beetles.’ Sybille smiles slyly. She seems almost pleased at the prospect. ‘So I’ll get some roofers round to supply estimates and let you have copies.’

  ‘Okay.’ I presume she wants me to pass them on to my managing agent.

  ‘And you need to complain to the council about the restaurant smell. Not that they’ll do anything about it.’

  There’s something about the way she says this that makes me think Sybille Newman enjoys being a victim, that she’s the sort of woman who is happy only when she’s got something to complain about. I’ve already got a feeling that no matter how hard I try to be a good neighbour, nothing I do will be ever good enough.

  Our conversation seems to have run its course and I’m wondering if I should walk Sybille to the door when she says, ‘I take it your stock will be arriving soon?’

  I’m not planning to carry a supply of coffins. The shop’s too small. But it’s a weird question.

  Sybille continues, ‘Ned intends be your first customer.’

  Ned? Didn’t she say her husband’s called Ned?

  I’m still working on the implications of that sentence when she continues, ‘Ned’s always got his nose buried in a novel. I presume you’ll give him a discount. The old bookshop always did. So sad when they closed. Business rates went through the roof. But don’t let me put you off.’ Sybille has noticed my startled expression. ‘I’m sure you’ll make a huge success of Happy Endings.’ She says this with an almost-sneer that suggests precisely the opposite. ‘There’s plenty of children around here, and it’s so important to get them reading at an early age, stop them frying their brains with electronic gadgets.’

  ‘Yes, reading’s important,’ I agree. ‘But actually … Actually, Happy Endings isn’t a bookshop.’

  ‘Not a bookshop?’ Now it’s Sybille who is perplexed. ‘Everyone’s been saying that’s what’s opening. If it’s not a bookshop, then what is it?’

  ‘A funeral parlour.’

  ‘A WHAT? Really? That’s totally unsuitable. No-one asked Ned and me about this. I’m sure we were entitled to be consulted. My husband’s health is very fragile, and having an undertaker’s downstairs … Well, it’s hardly going to cheer him up, is it?’

  With that, the woman turns abruptly on her orange heel. At the door, she shoots a baleful look in my direction.

  ‘Poor Noggsie.’ She says it as if she’s spitting a pair of marbles from her mouth. ‘He was always so helpful about the roof. He’d be spinning in his grave if he knew about this. About you.’

  Funeral Number One

  ††††

  In Memoriam

  PETER JAMES NOGGS

  1933–2019

  ††††

  The vicar looked nervous, Gloria thought. And understandably so. Everyone present in the church had known Noggsie, whereas few of them, including Gloria herself, knew the vicar, who seemed to be an earnest young man, clearly overwhelmed by the many famous faces staring back at him.

  A final rustle of his papers, and the vicar began. ‘Peter …’ he said. ‘How strange to call him Peter, when all of us here knew him as Noggsie. He was the beating heart of our community for as long as any of us can remember.’

  Primrose Hill royalty had turned out in force to pay their respects, and were now sitting in clusters surrounded by many of their less recognisable neighbours. A tribute to the fact Noggsie always treated everyone exactly the same, celebrity or not. To him, the famous customers were just ordinary people who happened to be doing a bit of shopping on their local high street. And there was nothing celebrities liked more than being treated as ordinary people – at least when they were off-duty and on their home turf. As a result, a surprising number of high-profile diaries had been cleared, with filming schedules rearranged, recording sessions postponed and fashion shoots put on hold. Even Tottenham Hotspur had to manage at training that morning without their most famous striker.

  Outside the church, private security, police and paparazzi hung around in their separate tribes. Passers-by stopped to see what was happening and any number of teenage truants – almost exclusively female – tried unsuccessfully to blag their way inside.

  Jamie Oliver and James Corden were seated three pews in front of Gloria, suited and booted, heads close together, cook and comedian whispering for all the world like a pair of overgrown schoolboys. Probably, Gloria thought, discussing recipes for Cornish pasties. At the front of the church, Chris Evans and Nick Grimshaw were bookending a pair of elderly women both wearing black hats that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a state funeral.

  Gloria felt a ripple of movement behind her and turned in time to see Mary Portas – her recognisable-at-two-hundred-paces auburn bob a little longer than usual – arriving in time to swap ‘Good mornings’ with Harry Styles.

  But no sign of rock-god Jake Jay. The man who’d won more Grammys than anyone on the planet was said to be back in rehab, this time at a facility somewhere north of New Mexico, accessible only by helicopter. Maybe Robert Plant would show up instead, and treat everyone to a verse of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

  Double Oscar winner Kelli Shapiro was also conspicuous by her absence. She had sent her regrets – accompanied by an arrangement of peonies the size of Kew Gardens – and the word was that she was in Geneva, waiting for the scars of a neck lift to heal, rather than suffering from the sudden and unfortunate bout of food poisoning that was her official reason for failing to attend.

  Gloria was surprised to see Eddie Banks had been prepared to sacrifice the sunshine of Monte Carlo – along with one of his ninety tax-free days in the United Kingdom – to attend Noggsie’s funeral. Bit of a surprise that he dared show his face at all, given the havoc his double-decker, nine-thousand-square-feet basement dig-out was causing along Chalcot Square. Banks and his giant underground extension had been the talk of the Primrose Hill Easter Festival the weekend before. Everyone knew the man was richer than God, but could it possibly be true that he’d instructed the builders to line the walls of his new chill-out zone with solid gold sheeting? Rumour also had it he’d offered his neighbours a week on Richard Branson’s Necker Island by way of an apology for the noise, the dirt, the disruption and the damage caused by his building project, but they weren’t to be bought off so cheaply, and were holding out – politely but with vicious determination – for the title deeds to luxury lodges at a Banks development in the Lake District. Gloria knew that piece of gossip was well-founded. Her parents were among the neighbours.

  The Primrose Hill of her childhood had been a different place. Back then it was just another anonymous London backwater, albeit one with a bohemian edge, and the family had moved there only because her father’s fast-track junior banker’s salary wouldn’t stretch to a house in Hampstead.

  Just look at it now. Home to so many of the best-known people in Britain. And, increasingly, overseas owners who boasted to their friends about their charming home-from-one-of-their-other-homes in a neighbourhood that had grown stealthily into Britain’s answer to Beverly Hills. Gloria, however, retained her affection for the Primrose Hill she had once known, and especially for Noggsie, whose General Hardware Store had been a local landmark for
longer than she could remember.

  As the years passed, Noggsie’s business had survived and thrived. Car showrooms, coal merchants, computer shops, curry houses, coffee shops … butchers, bakers, bookshops, betting shops, builders’ merchants … dry cleaners and drapers … fish-and-chip shops, furniture shops, florists … laundromats and lending libraries … glaziers, greengrocers, Apple Stores … Their custodians came and went, but the General Hardware Store was a permanent fixture, a family business that continued undaunted by the changes happening around it, rather like Ian Beale in EastEnders, which was one of Gloria’s many guilty pleasures.

  This time last year, Noggsie’s shop was still a much-loved anachronism, its green-tiled façade a shabby yet proud island in the present sea of Michelin-starred restaurants, cupcake shops, art galleries, pampering places, frock shops, interior designers, more cupcake shops (mostly gluten-free; some of them also vegan), wine bars and – briefly – a pop-up shop that specialised in miniature replicas of fairground attractions whose price tags might reasonably have been thought sufficient for the full-size originals.

  Noggsie himself had remained in excellent health for eighty-five of his eighty-six years. ‘It’s the work and the customers that keep me going,’ he insisted whenever Gloria or anyone else asked whether it wasn’t time he relaxed and took it easy. ‘Besides, if I weren’t here, who else would sell you a couple of curtain hooks or half a dozen nails?’ In Noggsie’s opinion, blister packs were the work of the devil. No matter what you needed, from a kettle to a casserole dish, from a single tap washer to a wooden toilet seat, the chances were high that Noggsie had it in stock.

  He had been a kind man, too. ‘Hear you’re involved in some urban gardening project,’ he’d said to Gloria when she popped in on an errand to collect dishwasher salt for her mother. ‘Take these.’ And Noggsie had produced half-a-dozen planting troughs along with three bags of compost, refusing all offers of payment.

  Now Noggsie was gone and the General Hardware Store along with him. It had been shut for several months, ever since the day its proprietor collapsed across the counter with the first in a series of strokes, and was one of several shops in the high street that continued to stand empty. It had come an unwelcome surprise to many of the locals – Gloria included – to discover that even Primrose Hill was not immune from the toxic effects of hard times, greedy freeholders, ridiculous business rates, and the residents’ own growing tendency to go shopping without ever leaving home.

  Whoops!

  Gloria realised she had been lost in her trip down memory lane and stood up hastily, a second or two later than the rest of the congregation. She fumbled for the order of service and stood in respectful silence as the three members of a boy band whose strategic failure to win Britain’s Got Talent a couple of years earlier had launched them on the path to international stardom (and adjoining mansions in Regent’s Park) began their acapella arrangement of ‘Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven’.

  The hymn’s final notes died away and everyone sat down again. All except for Eddie Banks. He inched out of the pew, negotiating around his two grown-up children, Zoe and Barclay, then walked purposefully towards the lectern.

  ‘Noggsie was my neighbour, my friend, and my inspiration.’ Eddie Banks paused as if he expected to be challenged about what he had just said. ‘He watched me grow up, and I watched him grow old.’ Unexpectedly eloquent for Banks, Gloria thought. He was a man who tended to call a spade a bloody shovel. Or worse. She wondered how many of his PR people had been working on the eulogy.

  Everybody present knew the story of Eddie Banks. Local boy made billionaire. Born in a council house along Chalcot Road, and now reminding his captive audience about the car cleaning business he’d started aged nine, equipped only with a bucket-load of ambition, a green sponge and a jumbo bottle of Fairy Liquid, purchased with his Christmas money from Noggsie at the General Hardware Store.

  ‘Noggsie taught me so many things,’ Eddie Banks continued. ‘But most important of all, he taught me to dream big. When I told him I had no time to clean more cars, he told me to recruit my friends to help out. And that wasn’t just so he could sell more Fairy Liquid.’

  A pause for gentle laughter. ‘When I told him my first business was about to go bust and my best bet was to go work for someone else, he told me to get over myself. And fail better the next time round. Then later, once I’d stopped failing,’ a modest shrug, ‘and could afford to buy Noggsie a decent dinner or two, I asked him … “Noggsie,” I said, “you’ve told me I’m capable of conquering the world, and I believe you. But what about you? What is it that you dream of? What is that you want? And how can I help you have it?” You know what he replied? He told me, “I’m blessed to have found a way to earn a living doing something that contributes to others, yet doesn’t rob my soul. I’m lucky enough to have found my calling, which allows me to continue the tradition of helping my community and to know that in my own small way, I’m making a difference.”’

  Banks’s excellent eulogy made Gloria think of Nina. She imagined her friend casting a professional eye over the proceedings. What was it Nina had said the day before? About the way funerals were changing, with more people drawing up plans for their own farewell appearance while they were still alive and well. A question of matching the occasion to the person, she had explained.

  Gloria made a mental note to tell Nina the Traders Association had organised a wreath in the shape of a giant hammer.

  Then she realised she could do so much better.

  At the champagne reception that followed Noggsie’s funeral, Gloria cornered Eddie Banks and told him about Nina and her ideas about dragging funerals into the modern era.

  Banks immediately offered to do what he could to help, and Gloria had been impressed that someone so successful was prepared to go out of his way to help a woman he’d never even met achieve her dream.

  Noggsie would definitely have approved.

  And later, listening to the way Nina talked – enthusiastically yet respectfully – about the people she intended to help once she had refurbished Noggsie’s shop, Gloria was convinced Happy Endings would have had his blessing.

  7

  Here I am in Primrose Hill, one of the most fashionable parts of London, and it ought to be wonderful.

  But it’s not.

  I’ve spent all morning watching the world stroll past my shop window oblivious to my presence.

  All morning, feeling I don’t fit in.

  All morning, every morning.

  Monday to Friday.

  Afternoons, too.

  It’s been an entire week and I almost wish I was back in Siberia. When Jason banished me to the back office, at least I had a sense of belonging.

  I keep reminding myself it’s like being the new girl at school. Too soon to have made any friends, too shy to approach anyone, but knowing that before too long, someone will be kind.

  Maybe Eddie Banks lulled me into a false sense of security. I’ve never actually met him because he’s almost always in Monte Carlo. But I spoke to him on the phone after Gloria’s brilliant idea about me taking over Noggsie’s shop.

  The moment their conversation ended, Eddie Banks had apparently marched right up to Noggsie’s son and told him, ‘I’ve got the perfect tenant for your father’s shop. Young entrepreneur by the name of Nina Sherwood. I know you’re back off home to Australia tomorrow, so shall I have my people sort out the lease and the terms on your behalf? Save you the hassle, and get that shop open again.’

  The two men shook hands and Eddie Banks’s team proceeded to process the paperwork in record time, which was just as well, because apparently another retailer was showing serious interest in opening a business. I felt especially fortunate that Noggsie’s son had even been talked into letting me have an initial discount on the rent. All I’d had to do was sign the agreement.

  It had felt like destiny. But now I’m not so certain. Still, it was foolish of me to imagine customers would fall into
my lap. That only happens once a business has proved itself and the recommendations roll in. For now, it’s important to get a proper feel for the neighbourhood. Which makes the people-watching important rather than just a time-filler or an activity to stop myself fretting about the future.

  I’ve certainly seen one or two strange sights, including a family of four dressed all in matching tweeds riding along the road on a double tandem the length of a hearse. Then there’s Sybille Newman, my neighbour with the roof issue. Always dressed in orange. She’s just spent five minutes telling off a road sweeper for doing a sloppy job. (I’ve privately taken to calling her Mrs Happy, because she treats me to a scowl every time she marches past the shop, pretending not to look inside.) There’s also a man on rollerblades who seems to be circling our block of shops … I’ve seen him go past at least five times, and here he is again.

  In between studying the locals, I try to knuckle down and practise my daily exercises in creative visualisation. I imagine myself busy and productive, doing a good job for satisfied customers, opening bank statements that demonstrate increasing prosperity, then the look on my parents’ faces when I present them with tickets for a luxury weekend in Sardinia to say thank you for their backing.

  And the rest of the time? I’m scared I’ve made a dreadful mistake.

  Marry in haste and repent at leisure, isn’t that what people say? I begin to think I’ve achieved the retail equivalent, and that I should have looked a lot more carefully before I leapt into self-employment.

  My watch tells me it’s still far too early for lunch, although talking of food, word must have got out that Happy Endings has nothing to do with coffee or cupcakes. No-one’s asked me if I’m selling either since Wednesday.