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.