Miss Virginia Pilgrim

Virginia Marguerite Pilgrim killed her father on August 22, 1949. It was a Tuesday. She was almost thirteen.

Confusion erupted after she pushed one of the heavy stone urns off the top terrace onto him. No one guessed what had happened. She walked off in a daze without looking down. Then Ginnie – everyone called her Ginnie – walked to the small arbour, where someone had placed an empty basket and a pair of secateurs on a bench; where she was later found by a maid, snipping white roses into a heap on the ground.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Come, miss. Come, Ginnie. They're all looking for you.’ She placed an elderly comforting arm around Ginnie’s shoulders.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes. His head … his back. Dear God! Crushed.’ She pushed her face into bowled hands for a moment. ‘Dear God!’ She reached out, then, to touch the girl again. ‘What a tragedy.’

‘Where are they all?’ She shrugged the maid’s arm off. Stretching to full height, tall and willowy above the small maid’s bent form, she gazed upward to flat clouds gathering, greying, glowering above her. It would rain and grow dark by the time the gong rang for dinner. Or perhaps it would clear and be sunny tomorrow. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Hungry!’ The maid’s face displayed enormous confusion; emotion that matched the sky’s portent. For the first time, she noted there were no tears on her young mistress’s face; eyes clear and unclouded by sorrow. The words He is dead floated between them; so many tiny grey verbal clouds, as if the maid had spoken them.

Two steps backwards. Ginnie regained the distance she wanted, a clear space around her slim form that was so necessary. Everyone wanted to touch her. And now that this had happened, this crushing of that man’s head and shoulders, they would all want to crowd in, trespass on her space, encroach upon her solitariness. Touch her, touch her.

It was dinnertime. She thought of a plate of thick potato slices smothered in the brown gravy they had sometimes. She thought of thin slivers of pork. Stuffed marrows. Golden chicken broth. Small macaroni tossed in butter. Grated hard cheese. Cubes of watermelon. Wedges of peach and plum. Rectangular slices of Madeira cake.

Hungry. Hungry. She had never felt this hungry. Never. She had to be urged to eat. Her thin wrists were the talk of the street, the school, the congregation in that stifling church.

‘Who’s at the house?’

The old maid inhaled. ‘Oh. Oooh. The doctor, I think. I think someone rang the doctor. Your mother … my goodness, my goodness … she … everyone is distraught.’

Distraught. A big word for this little maid. Someone at the house must have said it. The maid repeated it. It was mere imitation, repetition. Virginia Pilgrim knew many long difficult words. She was often told off for having her nose in a book too long, too often. Too negligent of the real world around her. ‘Distraught.’

‘They’re looking for you.’

‘Really.’

‘I think Sir Pancras has arrived.’

‘The magistrate. Really.’ Ginnie lifted eyes to the grey sky. Bounded as it was by the rickety trellis of pink climbing roses, garden wall overgrown with morning glory, leaning stair tower of the stone house, it seemed high, dull, distant, pale. ‘There's no sky to speak of now. A sky-less afternoon, this is.’

The magistrate would haul her away to prison. This would be her last eyeful of sky. That urn was heavy. Almost impossible to push. But it yielded. Its top-heavy bulk, its contents of soil and bushy geranium plant; it gave, and fell. It fell on top of the man down there. It did not even require half the force she had thought she could summon. It fell.

‘And crushed his head and shoulders.’

‘Hush. Shh. Come on, Ginnie. Let’s go.’

They hurried together towards the front steps. It was the long way round. The maid avoided the place where the accident happened; where there must still be fragments of stone urn. The ground would still be covered in broken shards, in smashed geranium plant. In flowers trodden and bruised. In blood. Blood.

‘Where did they take him?’

‘Hush.’

They turned round the stair tower as the first drops of rain fell out of the invisible sky. Virginia stopped. All the blood drained at once from her face, her head, her chest. Her head swam with shock, her mouth opened in an attempt to scream. No sound came. Loathe as she was of people touching her, of touching people, her hand reached out and clawed the old servant’s arm, but nothing could stop her from falling, falling.

The man she thought she had killed stood at the top of the grey stone steps to the front door of her house. He beckoned. Virginia saw nothing more. She slumped to the ground, and the maid looked down at her, puzzled, stroking her young unconscious mistress with an ineffectual motion of anguish.

‘Have her carried to her room. What’s all this fuss today? A pet donkey is killed, and everyone is paralyzed, ineffectual. Useless. That urn missed me by mere inches, and they all cry over a donkey.’

***

Sir Pancras removed steel-rimmed glasses from his nose and replaced them immediately, looking at all of them in the drawing room over the spectacles, through them, and over them again.

‘It was a long drive from Melbourne. An invitation such as yours, Mr Pilgrim, necessitated a number of changes. Hrumph – a number of compromises.’

‘You do agree, though, Sir Pancras, that this kind of investment is an aspect of my business that is – that is so attractive that one …’

‘Samuel – surely you can talk business with our guest when the rest of us withdraw after dinner.’ Mrs Pilgrim smiled, her teeth glimmered in the chandelier light, and her cigarette holder was held in a steady horizontal clutch of dainty fingers. There was no trace of the afternoon fright caused by a falling urn on the west terrace.

The doctor had probably administered something out of a small brown cardboard pillbox with a handwritten label, and left as discreetly as he had arrived, driving his shiny green Austin, which was very often to be seen on that gravel driveway.

Nanny had already taken the little ones up. Only Ginnie remained, still breathless after falling in a faint a mere hour ago. She could not move. She had washed face and hands in the mud room, avoided the doctor, and then ascended the little staircase with the maid to change her dress, but now, she was immobile, stiff, unable to stir even an ankle.

‘You are still shaken, Virginia.’

She nodded mutely at the magistrate, wondering why he telegraphed a tacit signal to her father, who looked as though he had swallowed a rod. Stiff and straight, he occupied an armchair as if touching its damask would infect him in some way.

‘What was his name?’

How insensitive. Really - his name? How brutal.

Ginnie’s mother immediately raised a handkerchief to her eyes. ‘Oh, I’m glad the little ones have gone up.’

The magistrate observed her quietly, and said nothing else. Smoke curled from the end of his cigarette, a grey S, which blurred and dissipated as she watched.

She found her voice. Clearing her throat briefly, Ginnie spoke without shifting position on the sofa, which she occupied alone. ‘Alphonse. Our donkey was called Alphonse.’ Her words did not catch. She breathed again, victorious. His cruel inquiry brought about no visible anguish in her. ‘Like the artist.’

‘The artist?’

She did not respond. One of the servants came in at that very moment and summoned them all to the dining room, where two chandeliers blazed and two low flower arrangements decorated the long table.

‘Your daughter dines with us?’

‘We didn’t think you’d mind.’ Mrs Pilgrim was arch and distant, her dislike of the magistrate and the prospect of him doing business with her husband obvious. The long cigarette holder had disappeared.

‘We know she is rather young, but she will sit by me, won’t you, Ginnie?’ Her father’s voice, his artificiality, his deceit, his pretense that everything was normal, made her stomach turn. The afternoon’s hunger had vanished, leaving her as reluctant to eat as before.

Over her left shoulder, she heard her mother explain – in a voice not nearly hushed enough – how difficult it was for them to make her eat, which was why she dined with them most evenings.

‘It has turned into a glorious evening. The cloud has lifted. Don’t you love a clear winter twilight, Sir Pancras?’ More artificiality, this time from her mother, who could not know what she endured, who had no idea of what went on under her roof.

‘I do.’ His voice droned. ‘Perhaps Samuel and I can enjoy a cigar out on the terrace after dinner.’

‘The terrace?’ She glanced at her husband.

The discreet nod meant he had arranged for the mess to be cleared away and the carcass disposed of. No doubt the flagstones had been thoroughly hosed down, leaving no trace of the afternoon’s incident.

Ginnie looked down at the thin pork slices smothered in brown gravy, served herself one slice and cut it into a hundred tiny pieces, carrying one to her mouth on the heavy silver fork. She counted in her head. Seven – she would eat seven tiny morsels. Soon, dinner would be over, and she would escape the maid and take a walk up in the gallery, where all the Pilgrim portraits were. She walked up and down there in wet weather, just like Pilgrims had done through three generations. She tried to find resemblances in the portraits; tried to find traces of evil, of perniciousness, of sin. She sometimes thought she found them. Sometimes she found pity. None of them could leap from those gilded frames to help her.

By a quarter past nine, from up where she walked, with only a small battery-operated torch to light her way, she could hear the rumbling of two male voices coming from below. Peering through one of the long windows after pushing aside the heavy curtain gave her a view of the moon, very nearly full, white-edged cloud, the mirror lake in the distance, the gate to the rose arbor and the roof of the stables.

She could not make out any of the words her father and the magistrate said. If she opened the window, she was sure to smell cigar smoke, which her mother said stayed in the fabric of furnishings a long time.

It was a simple thing to creep unnoticed to where she had stood earlier on the upper terrace. Past the bedrooms on the second floor, past the baize door to the downstairs servant staircase, past the gentlemen’s corridor, down one flight of marble stairs, through the double glass doors.

It was as if she did not need to breathe. Her chest did not rise and fall. She did not part her lips. She did not make a sound. She would not lie there tonight and wait in the dark. She would never again have to wait in dread in the dark.

The second urn was easier to shift than the first. Its geraniums looked black in the moonlight. If one urn had slid down, no one would be surprised if another fell. Something could be wrong with the balustrade on which they stood, stony and massive and solid, for a century.

She would step back quickly and make her way up the stairs and through to the nursery as silently as she had come.

There was no donkey now. No donkey. No Alphonse. No, only a magistrate, and he stood several feet away, talking to her father who had paused about a yard or so to the right, to avoid the small damp puddle where the first urn had fallen.

Ginnie pushed.

OoooOoooO