Kenneth Cameron - The Frightened Man

‘When they were very little girls; I think that when they are still in the age of innocence, little girls can be accepted where, later, they cannot,’ her mother said.

‘She wanted to know what a maid did, and what all the books I owned were, and how to play the piano, and — just everything! She was so sweet and she was my best friend, but-’ She glanced at her mother. ‘As Mama says, it was all right when we were little girls. She used to come here every day. I couldn’t go to her house, you see-’

‘A public house,’ Mrs Minter said. ‘We didn’t know, in the beginning. Then — it would have been most improper.’

‘Alice,’ Janet Striker said. ‘Alice what?’

‘Satterlee,’ Mrs Minter said. ‘The Satterlees, we found out too late, were low and common.’

‘Oh, Mama-’

‘You don’t understand these things yet, Stella. I couldn’t know her mother — to think of such a thing makes me ill; was it right that her child should know you? We decided not, finally. The girl was appealing when she was little, but at twelve, you can understand our position. It wasn’t proper.’

Minter smiled. ‘But it was a spectacle to see them together! Little Alice was another Stella! She did talk like our Stella; you could hear her using the big words, hear her trying to talk proper. She’d borrow books and try to read them, I suppose.’

‘Steal them, you mean.’

‘She didn’t!’

‘One of your books simply disappeared!’

‘She wanted to learn things, Mama.’

‘Giving herself airs,’ the mother said.

‘Mama, she was trying to better herself. She was trying to be proper.’

Janet Striker said, ‘Did she ever play at being you?’

The girl blushed again. ‘I suppose. Maybe.’ She looked at her mother. ‘We had a game. When we played me giving a tea party with my tea set. I’d be somebody — oh, it’s awfully silly, but we were children — I’d be one of the royal princesses or a maid of honour, and she’d be me. It was just a game.’

‘And she called herself Stella?’ Mrs Striker said.

‘That was the game. She was Stella.’

‘But you said,’ Minter interrupted, ‘that a girl using the name had passed away.’ Mrs Minter said ‘Oh’ in a tiny voice and turned her daughter aside as if to protect her, but the girl shrugged her off. ‘Do I hear now that you think this other girl might have known our Stella?’

Denton and Janet Striker exchanged a look; she said, ‘It seems possible.’

‘You mean Alice Satterlee?’ Stella said. ‘She’s — passed away?’

‘We don’t know,’ Denton said. ‘We’re trying to find out.’

Tears stood in the girl’s eyes, and Denton realized what a nice girl she probably was — truly touched, probably lonely, sentimental, treasuring the memory of somebody who had worshipped her. Her mother saw the tears, however, as danger and, after a glare at Denton, pushed the girl from the room.

‘Mrs Minter is very protective of our Stella,’ Minter said. ‘She doesn’t allow emotional scenes.’

‘How well did you know the Satterlees?’ Denton said.

‘As Mrs Minter said, they weren’t our sort of people. We never crossed paths, as the saying is.’

‘They lived in a pub?’

‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I believe they lived next to the public house.’

‘Satterlee was a publican?’

‘Satterlee was something for the building estate — over there on the other side of Crimea Way. He did something while the site was prepared, before the houses were put up — I remember walking Stella over there once and seeing the great expanse of it, levelled and nothing on it but the pub. Stella makes it sound as if they were friends for years, but it can’t have been awfully long; I think at most a year. Then they were gone.’

‘What’s the name of the pub?’

‘Oh-! I’ve never been in it.’ He frowned to indicate disapproval of the public house. ‘I think something about a rose. I really wouldn’t know.’

A silence fell; Denton knew it was over. Janet Striker stood, and then they were out in the front garden again, and the cab was waiting at the kerb.

‘You know a pub beyond Crimea Way called the rose, or some such?’ Denton said to the driver.

‘Just been there, many thanks.’

‘Take us there.’ He winked. ‘You can have another and then take us to the station.’

In the cab he leaned back against the stiff cushions, aware of how tired he was and how disappointed. That morning, he had despaired; now, they had come close, he thought, perhaps very close — yet not close enough.

‘I liked that girl,’ he said.

‘She has a hard row to hoe. As your grandmother might say.’

The Rose and Rooster was less than half a dozen years old but looked as if it came from the seventies or eighties, a public house purpose-built to the designs of a man who specialized in pubs for a large syndicate. Its dark wood, stained glass and gleaming brass were meant to evoke those earlier houses in which such details had been innovative, were now ‘pub style’, to be expected by the patrons. The tiled front, the name in gold letters, were standins for a national nostalgia — the roast beef of old England.

Denton steered Janet Striker around to the saloon bar, now comfortably full, the usual fug of pipe smoke hanging at chest level, women mostly sitting quietly while men in bowlers laughed or wrangled.

‘What’ll it be, then, love?’ the barmaid said to him as soon as they sat down at a small table. She was thirtyish, cheerful, professionally flirtatious.

Janet Striker said, ‘A half of your best bitter.’

‘Two,’ Denton said, ‘and I’ll have a word with the publican, if I can.’

‘He’s that busy, I wouldn’t put money on it, dearie. What’s it about, then?’

‘Tell him it’s personal-historical.’

She laughed, showing big, cream-coloured teeth. ‘You’re not a debt collector, I hope.’ When she was gone, Denton said, ‘Well?’

Janet Striker shook her head. After several seconds, she said, ‘I was thinking of that poor girl — Satterlee. Wanting so much to get out of what she was and not knowing how to do it.’

‘And ending up dead. If it was her.’

‘The mother was a piece of work.’ She meant the real Stella Minter’s mother, he knew.

He said, ‘Defending her chick.’

Janet Striker snorted. ‘Defending the proper and the prudish, you mean. Ambitious for the girl, probably driving her husband as hard as she drives her daughter, wanting she doesn’t quite know what — more of something: more propriety, more money, more things , more signs around her of how proper and accomplished she is — through her husband and her daughter. You can build empires with women like that pushing people.’

‘You think the motor car is his idea or hers?’

‘His, of course. He handles the money and makes the decisions; she pushes and mostly sets the terms. I’m sure she wants a better house — wouldn’t surprise me if she has one picked out for the moment when Stella is launched from university and a success. Suburban, detached, stylish . What a weight that child has to carry!’

‘But carries it pretty well,’ he murmured as the barmaid came back, placed the two wet glasses neatly in front of them and said, ‘Landlord’s drawing pints for a party of nine and then he’ll pop in, but he says to tell you — his words, not mine, don’t take it out on me, love — “If it isn’t important, I’ll be back drawing pints faster’n Jack Sprat.”’ She bent down so that her hair brushed Denton’s face. ‘His bark’s worse’n his bite.’ She giggled again, straightened, winked at Janet Striker and whirled away.