VIRGINIE - A NOVEL AFTER VILLETTE

by

Philip Dossick.

Copyright 2026 Philip Dossick

All Rights Reserved.

Threshold

It was a Sunday morning in June, the last summer before the war. I was six years old.

I remember my white frock and my straw hat with the blue ribbon. I remember Father, who was thirty-five that summer, tall and fair, with his clipped moustache, in the hall buttoning his gloves. I remember Mother, five years younger, small and dark in her best Sunday hat, already halfway down the front path before she realised I wasn’t behind her.

A moment later she came back inside.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“I know you don’t want to go. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do.”

“No.”

“It’s only church.”

“No.”

Then louder:

“NO.”

Both of them stopped.

The tears came all at once.

I did not know why I was crying. I only knew that the thought of going outside made something inside me seize up. My chest felt tight. My stomach hurt.

Mother held out her hand.

“Come along.”

I backed away until my shoulder touched the frame.

“Virginie?”

I pressed myself against the wood.

The front door stood open. Sunshine covered the path outside. The motor was waiting at the kerb. Somewhere down the road a lawn mower droned steadily.

It was an ordinary Sunday morning.

Nothing was wrong.

Yet my heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Mother bent down to me.

“Hush now. Nobody’s upset.”

She reached for my hand.

The instant she touched me, panic surged through me. I snatched my hand away and clutched the doorframe with both hands.

“Virginie, nobody’s angry with you.”

“I can’t.”

My voice trembled.

Father looked over.

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

I stared through the doorway.

The sunlight outside seemed too bright. Every sound felt strangely far away. I could hear the Hendersons getting into their motor two houses down, but it sounded as if they were speaking from the far end of a tunnel.

I swallowed.

My mouth was dry. I bit down on my lower lip until it hurt.

Father held out his hand.

“Just come as far as the step. You don’t have to go any farther. Just the step.”

I wanted to.

I really did.

I loosened one hand from the frame.

A fresh wave of fear hit me so suddenly that my knees felt weak.

I grabbed hold of the wood again.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t.”

“Virginie—”

“I CAN’T!”

The words echoed in the hall.

My fingers ached from gripping the frame.

Mother and Father looked at one another.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then Father’s face hardened.

“Goddammit!”

I flinched.

I only remember the sudden rush of movement.

The shock of striking the ground.

Gravel pressed into my palms. Tears blurred the sky above me.

To this day I cannot tell you exactly what happened. Whether he pushed me, pulled me, or simply lost patience trying to pry me loose.

Part One: The Crossing

Chapter 1: The Square

I am writing this in the spring of 1939, in a room of my own above a baker’s shop, on the shore of a lake I had never heard of when this story begins. I went to that lake to earn my living, in a house where other people were sent to be made well. I mention it now so that there is no confusion later about which of us I was. It is the kind of confusion I have learned to head off early.

But the story does not begin at the lake. It begins, as far as I am prepared to begin it, in the summer of 1921, in my godmother’s house at Selbury.

Selbury is a cathedral town in the south of England, of the clean, old, unhurried kind that seems to have been put down whole in a water meadow and left to weather. The cathedral stands in the middle of it like a ship that has run aground among the roofs. Around the close there are lawns no one walks on and houses no one seems to leave, and around those there is a ring of streets that sell the close what it needs: gloves, sermons, seed cake, coal. My godmother, Mrs. Margaret Lyall, lived in one of the tall red houses on the north side of the close, with a walled garden at the back that ran down to the river, and a front door whose brass was polished every morning before seven by a maid called Hobday, a stout, red-armed woman with a cast in one eye, who did not like me and looked at me as though I were a smear on her brass.

I was thirteen that summer. I had been sent to Selbury before, for a week at a time, but this was to be the whole of the holidays, and I understood without being told that it was not entirely for my pleasure. There was trouble at home. I did not ask what it was, and nobody offered to say. My father’s letters, which came twice a week, were longer and more cheerful than usual, and my mother did not write at all. I was a child who noticed such things and drew no conclusions aloud. I have been told since that this made me a restful companion. I think it made me a convenient one, which is not quite the same. I was small for my age, and thin, with straight brown hair that would not curl however it was put up in rags, grey eyes, and the sort of pale, closed face that teachers forget by the end of term. I was used to being overlooked. I had begun, I think, to prefer it. The only unusual thing about me was my name. My mother’s mother had come from Tours, and I was christened Virginie for her; and when my father was out of the house my mother spoke French to me, softly, as though it were a secret between us, so that I grew up with two languages and used neither of them aloud more than I could help.

Mrs. Lyall was a widow of about forty-five, tall, handsome, quick in her movements and slow in her judgments, with the kind of good sense that looks like indifference until you need it. She did not fuss me. She gave me the small back bedroom that looked over the garden, a shelf for my books, and the run of the house, and then she left me alone, which was the greatest kindness anyone could have shown me at that age. If she noticed that I spent a great deal of time at the window, she did not remark on it. She had a son to remark on instead.

Hugh Lyall was sixteen and home from school, and I will describe him carefully, because I am going to describe him a good deal in what follows, and it is as well to start accurately. He was tall for his age and not yet sure what to do with it. He had his mother’s colouring, which in him had gone a shade warmer: reddish hair that the sun turned to something nearer gold, a fair skin that freckled, light eyes that were always half laughing at something. He was clever without being studious and kind without effort, and he had the gift, which I have since met in a few other men and envied in all of them, of being liked at once by almost everybody. Servants liked him. Dogs liked him. Old ladies in the close stopped him in the street to tell him how he had grown. He took it all as his due and returned it in small change: a joke, a compliment, a hand with a parcel. He was not vain, exactly. He had simply never had any reason to doubt his welcome anywhere, and so he never did.

That summer he had decided he would be a doctor. He had dissected a frog in the scullery, to Hobday’s horror, and he talked about it at dinner with a great deal of relish until his mother told him to stop. He was interested in how things worked, people included, and he would look at you sometimes with a frank, pleasant, clinical attention, as though you were an interesting arrangement of nerves. It was not unkind. It was not, either, the attention of someone who imagined you might be looking back.

He was kind to me in the way one is kind to a quiet cousin: he lent me books, he included me in games that needed a third player, he called me “Mistress Winter” and pretended to be afraid of my disapproval. I liked him as much as one can like a person who is always slightly elsewhere. I did not expect more, and I did not want more. At thirteen I wanted chiefly to be let alone and to watch.

* * *

The child arrived in the second week of July, late at night, in a hired car from the station.

I heard the car from my window and went to the head of the stairs, where I could see without being seen. Mrs. Lyall was in the hall in her dressing gown, and the front door was open on the warm dark, and a nurse in a grey coat came in carrying something wrapped in a travelling rug. The something was set down on the hall floor and turned out to be a very small girl, perhaps six years old, in a velvet bonnet that was too warm for the season, standing perfectly upright and looking about her with an expression of the deepest suspicion.

Her name was Philippa Hale, and everyone called her Pippa. Her mother had died in the spring. Her father, Mr. Hale, was something in banking, and the bank was sending him abroad, to Geneva, for some months; he could not take the child, and he could not, he said, bear to leave her among strangers. Mrs. Lyall had known his wife as a girl. And so Pippa had come to us, with her nurse and a trunk and a velvet bonnet, and stood in the hall at Selbury at half past eleven at night looking as if she had been betrayed.

I expected her to cry. Children who have been put down in strange halls at night generally do. She did not. She allowed the nurse to take off the bonnet, and underneath it her hair was so fair it was nearly white, cut in a straight fringe above a pair of enormous dark eyes and a small pointed chin. She held her thin shoulders very straight, as if somebody had once told her to and she had never forgotten. She allowed the nurse to unbutton her coat, and she allowed Mrs. Lyall to kiss her, and she said, in a small clear voice, “Papa is coming to see me before he goes,” in the tone of someone stating terms. Then she was carried up to bed, past me on the landing, and she looked at me over the nurse’s shoulder with a long, measuring stare, as if to say that she had noted my presence and would decide about me later.

She did decide about me later. She decided I was furniture.

* * *

I do not mean that unkindly. Pippa was the most single-minded creature I have ever known, and in those first days her whole mind was given to her father. Mr. Hale came down twice before he sailed, a tall, stooping man of about forty-five with a long grave face and a beard already going grey, who carried himself like someone who had spent his life leaning down towards smaller people at desks, and on both visits Pippa would not leave his side. She sat on a footstool at his knee and handed him his cup. She brought him her copybook, in which she had been writing out his name, over and over, in large unsteady letters, because, she said, she wanted to be able to write to him properly. When he went she stood at the drawing-room window until the car was out of sight, and then went to her room and shut the door, and the nurse said she was not to be disturbed. She did not come down to tea. In the evening Mrs. Lyall went up, and came down again looking thoughtful.

“She is not crying,” she said to me. “I almost wish she were. She is sitting on the bed with her hands in her lap, waiting for something.”

I think I knew even then what she was waiting for. She was waiting for someone else to love. A heart like that cannot stand empty for long. It was a mistake, I thought, to have one at all. I had already begun to arrange my own on the opposite principle.

It was Hugh who filled it, of course. He came home from a cricket match two days after Mr. Hale left, sunburnt and pleased with himself, and found a small girl sitting on the bottom stair with her chin in her hands, and he picked her up without ceremony and put her on his shoulders and carried her into the garden. She shrieked, and then she laughed, and that was the end of it. From that hour she belonged to him.

I watched it happen with an interest I did not altogether understand. She followed him from room to room. She waited for him on the stairs when he went out, and was on the stairs when he came back. She saved him the best of everything: the brown end of the loaf, the largest strawberry, a feather she had found in the garden. She learned his habits as a dog learns them, and anticipated them, and fetched his slippers before he had thought of wanting them. When he teased her, which was often, she flew into furious little rages and then forgave him at once, before he had even asked. When he was out late she would not go to sleep. Her nurse complained of it. Mrs. Lyall laughed and said it would pass.

Hugh was amused and flattered and, in his way, fond. He called her his little shadow. He let her sit on the arm of his chair while he read. He carried her up to bed on his shoulders and told her nonsense stories about the cathedral gargoyles, which she believed absolutely. But it was easy for him, as everything was easy for him. He gave her an hour, and then he forgot her for a day, and she sat on the stairs. I do not think he ever noticed the stairs.

I noticed them. I noticed most things that summer. I noticed that Pippa’s love made her ridiculous and that she did not care; that she would come down to breakfast with her face shining because he had said good morning to her; that she would go white and silent when he went off with his friends and did not say goodbye. I noticed that Hugh’s mother noticed, and smiled, and worried a little. I noticed that I was the only person in the house who did not love anybody visibly, and that this gave me a sort of freedom. No one watched me, because there was nothing to watch.

I will not pretend, looking back, that I was quite as cool as I believed. I see now that I watched Pippa with Hugh the way one watches someone else’s fire on a cold night: from outside, knowing it is not one’s own, unable altogether to look away. But I would have denied it then, and I am not certain I would not deny it now, if anyone were in the room to ask.

* * *

There is one other thing I must set down about that summer, and it is the hardest, so I will do it plainly and be done.

On a Saturday at the end of July Mrs. Lyall sent me to the market for her. Selbury market is held in the square in front of the west door of the cathedral, a large open space, cobbled, with the cathedral on one side and the shops on the other three. On Saturdays in summer it is filled from end to end with stalls and carts and people from the villages round about, and the noise of it comes over the roofs of the close like surf. I had been to it many times with Mrs. Lyall or with Hobday. I had never been to it alone.

I was to buy a pound of cherries and a reel of black cotton, and I had a shilling in my glove. It was a hot, bright morning, with a high pale sky and no wind. I went out by the gate of the close and along the lane, and turned the corner into the square, and stopped.

I do not know how to describe what happened next except by describing it exactly, which I have tried to do many times since, to myself, without much success. The square was very large. I had known that before; I knew it then; but I had not felt it, and now I did. It seemed to go on and on in every direction, under that enormous sky, and all the people in it were moving, and none of them were moving towards me or away from me but simply across, and across, and across. The cathedral was very high. The air was very bright. My heart, which I had not been thinking about, began to beat so hard that I could feel it in my throat and in my ears and at the ends of my fingers, and I could not get my breath, though I was breathing. I was quite certain, with a certainty I have never felt about anything else before or since, that I was about to die, or to fall, or to do something so dreadful in front of all those people that I would never be able to come back from it. I did not know what. Only that it was coming, and that there was nowhere in all that space to hide.

I put my back against the wall of the corner house and stood there. I do not know for how long. At some point I found that I had caught my lower lip between my teeth and was biting it, hard, and that my mouth tasted of blood. I had not known I was doing it. I had done it once before, at six, in a doorway, and had forgotten. I have done it ever since, whenever the thing comes, and I have never once been able to stop it by deciding to. A woman with a basket asked if I was poorly, and I said no, I was waiting for my aunt. She went away. The bells of the cathedral struck the quarter and I counted the strokes. Gradually, very gradually, the square came back to its proper size, and my heart came back to its proper place, and I found that I was holding the shilling so tightly through my glove that it had left a mark in my palm.

I did not go into the square. I turned round and went back down the lane, and instead of going in by the gate of the close I went along the river path and through the back lanes behind the almshouses, where the walls are high on both sides and the sky is only a strip, and I came in by the garden door. I told Mrs. Lyall that the cherry woman had sold out, and that I had forgotten the cotton, and she looked at my mouth and asked whether I had fallen, and I said I had bitten it on a cherry stone, and she said it did not matter, and I went up to my room and sat on the bed with my hands in my lap.

I told no one. It did not occur to me to tell anyone. I would not have known what to say, and I was quite sure that whatever it was, it was something to be ashamed of. I decided, sitting on that bed, that it had been the heat, and that it would not happen again, and that if it did I would simply take care not to be in such places. It was a very sensible decision. It shaped the next fifteen years of my life, and I did not notice it doing so.

I have described Pippa’s heart at some length, and Hugh’s charm, and Mrs. Lyall’s good sense. I notice that I have said much less about myself. That is not an accident, and the reader may as well know it now. I have always found other people easier to describe. They hold still while you look at them, or seem to. I do not.

* * *

Pippa left in September. Mr. Hale wrote that his business in Geneva would keep him through the winter, and that he had taken a house there, and that he wanted his daughter with him. The nurse packed the trunk. Pippa, told the news, went white and then red and then said nothing at all for the whole of a day. On the last evening she would not go to bed until Hugh came in, and when he came in, late, from some party, she was asleep on the hall settle in her nightgown with her copybook in her arms. He carried her up. I was on the landing. He did not see me.

In the morning she said goodbye to all of us with great formality, as she had arrived: Mrs. Lyall first, then me, then Hobday, then the cat. She left Hugh till last. He knelt down to be kissed, laughing, and she put her arms round his neck and held on, and did not let go, and her nurse had to unfasten her fingers one by one. She did not cry. She went out to the car with her back very straight, and she did not look round.

Hugh stood on the step and waved, and said, “Poor little mouse,” and went in to breakfast. By luncheon he was talking about a boat he wanted to borrow. By the end of the week, I think, he had forgotten her name. I do not say this against him. It is the way of people like Hugh. The world comes to them so easily that they do not notice what it costs the people who bring it.

I did not forget her. I thought of her often, that autumn and afterwards, sitting upright in the car with her back straight, going away from the only thing she wanted. I told myself it was pity. Perhaps it was. But I think, too, that I had seen in her something I meant never to permit in myself, and I wanted to remember exactly what it looked like, so that I would know it if it came.

I went home to my parents at the end of September. What I found there, and what came after, I will tell in its place. It is enough to say that I did not see Selbury again for a long time, nor Hugh, nor his mother; and that when I did, it was not in England, and none of us was what we had been.

The square at Selbury is still there, I suppose. I have never been back to it.

Chapter 2: The Waiting Room

I will pass over the next twelve years quickly, not because nothing happened in them but because too much did, and most of it is the common story of the time. My father’s business, which had been failing in the summer of Selbury, failed altogether in the following spring. He lived another two years and died of pneumonia in a rented house in Croydon with a great many letters on his desk that he had not been able to answer. I have said little about my father. I will say little more. My mother did not die, but she went somewhere I could not follow: first into silence, then into a kind of soft, smiling absence, and at last into the care of her sister in Bournemouth, who wrote to me at Christmas to say that she was comfortable and did not often ask for me. I have not seen her for six years. I send money when I have it.

I was clever enough to have gone on with my education and not rich enough to do it. Instead I worked. I was a nursery governess for a year, and was not good at it, because the children wanted to be taken to the park. I was a clerk in a circulating library for three years, and was very good at it, because the library came to me: books and borrowers alike arrived at my counter and went away again, and I never needed to go anywhere at all. Then the library closed. I was a companion to an old lady in Kensington who complained that I did not like to take her out in her chair, which was true. After that I was nothing in particular for some months, and lived in a room in Bayswater, and grew thin, and went out as little as I could, and told myself that it was economy.

In the autumn of 1933 an agency sent me to Miss Thorley.

TO CONTINUE READING, PLEASE PURCHASE AN EBOOK OR PAPERBACK AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH AMAZON.