NORIDEL ZEUS: A POSTSCRIPT

 Whilst the tale of Noridel Junior’s sad and lonely demise needed to be told to counter some wicked talk that the exotic emporium had drearily been given over to accountancy, that is not the end of the Zeus family saga…

Noridel Junior had actually set his cap at Mr. Rapscallion’s eldest spinster daughter, a girl hampered in life not in the very least by the unfortunate name of Ariadne Pudenda, giving her the initials APR – another accountancy “joke”.

Such a union, as we have seen, was not to be.

However, because of the strange series of events that lead to Noridel Junior’s tragic end, the shop itself fell into the hands of Noridel Junior’s long-forgotten half-brother Septimus, who was the ultimate result of a dalliance that occurred with his father during a brief incident in the curious life of Suzie Le Nord*.

After a suitably respectable length of time had passed, Ariadne eventually fell madly in love with Septimus Zeus as he had, by this time, chosen to call himself on his return to recognised society. His background as the much-travelled illegitimate son of an elderly former war hero and a one-legged former prostitute from the colonies had left him with an abundance of good looks and more than his fair share of roguish charm which seemed so very exciting, mysterious and exotic to her, especially after stuffy old Noridel Junior, and Ariadne was swept quite off her feet.

Their fleeting union did produce a son, conceived one chilly, starry night on the very same floor of that old shop where Noridel Junior had breathed his last. They named the boy Noridel after his Grandfather, (and quite specifically not his half-uncle) and so the slightly tragic line of lonely men running that little shop was ultimately destined to continue.

It wasn’t too long before the itchiness in his boots and the wanderlust in his soul took Septimus and his fatal and irresistible boyish smile far beyond the horizon, never to be seen again.

Ariadne, of course, was heartbroken and devastated, not least because her father had thrown her out on her ear and disowned her. However, she did have the little shop, and she worked with a dogged determination to make a success of it despite the wagging tongues of the local gossips who felt she should crawl away in shame and ignominy after her so-called “fall from grace”.

To save money she even did the accounts herself, and when word of this got around, she started to do the books for other traders in the area at a much more reasonable rate than her father ever did, which gave him no end of trouble, and eventually gave her a kind of grudging respectability.

And, of course, she did have her son, who, as he grew up, began to help her with the business, almost as if he himself was part of the fabric of the old place, which, in a way, of course, he was.

And he absolutely loved it.

He loved it so very much, in fact that when that inevitable sad night came, when his mother passed away, not enough years later he always felt, he swore an oath to Saint Expedite that he would do his very best to ensure the continuing legacy of that little shop of dreams.

Which is exactly what he did.

((*Never to be mistaken for one "Sudzie Lenor" who performed a burlesque act at about the same time involving the decorous positioning of soap bubbles to preserve her modesty))