Everywhere Teresa looked, she saw black. Their clothing caught her attention before anything else—blocks of black, arms and legs indistinct from each other. And then she noticed their faces, small and peeping out of the blackness, pale and unanimated, but not sad. She considered them—their small, wormy lips; their mellow eyes. They weren’t upset; they were uncomfortable. They wanted to leave. Plucking at their collars, peeping at watches and the clock above the door. She noticed it rather suddenly.
In a way, it was funny. None of them had liked her father. None of them had known him. Mostly they were employees. Alien-looking when removed from the offices, who had come out of respect and for appearance’s sake. If they were not employees, they were family or friends. The family had come from all across the Isles. Brought together over the buffet-table, not eager to mingle with those not of kin. The friends—those scattered few he had gained in his fifty-eight years of life—she despised. The women smoked and acted sad, and the men, in suits, cooed over her mother.
Teresa turned back to the piano, at which her sister Effie sat, stroking the keys with lithe fingers. ‘Do you think I should play something,’ Effie asked. She was twenty-four now, beautiful and all too conscious of it. She snaked her fingers through her curls, teasing a ringlet more pronounced than the rest. ‘We could all do with cheering up.’
Teresa thought one of Effie’s sprightly songs would make little difference, but Effie’s face was pink with hopefulness. ‘As long as it’s not too cheery,’ she warned, and then looked away. The music was sudden, louder than anticipated in the room where mumbled conversation had been the only sound. Effie carried on regardless, churning out a jingle that teetered on distasteful. The men smiled at her; Teresa wondered if, perhaps, it had loosened the strained atmosphere. But then again, the men always smiled at Effie.
She made her way across the room, jostling past the scatterings of cliques and twosomes, past the forty-something wives and their blue clouds of cigarette smoke. One woman, with a black bob of hair so neat it was like a helmet, said, ‘How are you coping, my dear?’ Teresa only nodded at her, feeling the cracking sensation of a mechanic smile.
Slipping through the door, she was in the hallway—gloomy and satisfyingly quiet. Still she could hear the tinkling sound of Effie’s novice performance. It grew lesser and lesser as she approached the kitchen.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house. There was forever a log fire raging in the hearth, and a pot brewing over the stove. Its contents made the air pungent with beef and red wine. At a rectangular pine table in the centre of the room, Cook sat with her hammy hands pressed together, and her eyes firmly shut. Anyone might have supposed her to be praying, but that thought was laughable to Teresa, who had known her for as long as she had known herself. Cook was not the praying type.
Teresa entered the room and Cook’s eyes opened almost immediately, like a cat she was easily disturbed from a nap. She smiled, but her smile almost looked as though it came unnaturally, and at great pains.
‘Are you hungry, lass,’ she asked, resting her hands on the tabletop.
Teresa came closer. ‘No.’ She scratched with her ring finger at a knot in the wood.
‘Thirsty?’
Impatient already, Teresa shook her head. ‘I just can’t hack Did you mean a different word? If not, I'm just not smart enough to know what it means.it in there,’ she admitted, her eyes
downcast. ‘Nothing seems real.’
Cook was silent so Teresa curiously looked up. Cook was nodding in her grave way, as if she understood. ‘How’s your sister coping?’
‘Effie is… Effie’s just being Effie. You know?’
‘I do. What of your ma? She was in here early, very [s]organised[/s]organized[/b], running through checklists of food and so on.’
‘She hasn’t cried. I think she spent her tears when it first happened.’
Cook nodded. ‘That’s for the best. Your ma’s very concerned for appearances.’
Cook sent her off with a sliver of raw carrot—saccharine and crunchy to eat. Teresa went out into the garden, gnawing at the end in an absent state, marginally aware of the cold. The garden had been the pride and joy of her father’s. When he had not been at work, he was most likely to have been the garden, tending to his allotment, his flowers (which he never deemed feminine) or making notes in his leather jotter of things to be done. Teresa would watch him, hidden behind a hedge like a spy, or a ghost staring through the pane of a window, as he bent over his potatoes, scruffy in a jersey and dungarees, tending the earth as if it were another child of his. She had always considered herself to have two fathers: the businessman and the gardener.
The garden was not like most people’s. It was not a large plot of grass, rimmed with hedgerow and flowers. It was a rambling, ceaseless jungle, almost Utopian in mystique. It set off in many tangents, from its circular core, and was in that respect maze-like. The main tangent went straight forward, wider than the others, and Teresa went through it. It was nature’s passageway, with walls of trees. The further she went, the darker it got—the only source of light being the splinters of sunlight through the kaleidoscope treetops. As a girl, she had been afraid to go further than the bowl of garden in the centre, leading from the French doors. Only when with Effie had she dared enter the dark—as it seemed the time—abyss.
When she had walked for some three minutes, she came to the familiar sight ahead. It was the reward she’d received as a child for daring to enter the dark; the delight on seeing it was just as fresh each time. In the distance stood, in a grand and yet unostentatious manner, a square stone chapel. A whim of her father’s from long before she was born, the chapel served no purpose but to delight the eyes. ‘All the grand houses would have had one of these,’ he had told her when she had been very small. He had hitched her up onto his shoulders to see the whole chapel in perspective. ‘In the Catholic days.’
Before her was a gate of black wrought iron. As she pushed on it, it groaned from disuse and would not stand fully open—the bushel of ivy, which covered the brickwork either side of the gate, was too overgrown. Teresa moved past the mass, pressed against the coolness of the iron, touching the tips of her fingers to the waxy leaves of ivy.
The stone steps leading to the chapel were uneven with age and rounded at the edges with the wearing of feet. Scattered with the fallen brown leaves that autumn had shed, they looked so sombre to Teresa, and she kicked at them with her left foot, on the first step, whilst securing a hand onto a mass of leaves. ‘Twenty steps,’ she whispered to herself, the sound getting lost amid the rustling of the sycamore leaves above her head. Her father had said, ‘Imagine, won’t you: even after we’re dead, people will climb these steps. Our descendants will place their feet exactly where we place ours.’
Abruptly, she ran up the steps, telling herself she might fall. She could imagine the slip of a foot, the sudden amazement at being airborne, and then the crack of her kneecaps on the hard Yorkshire stone. The idea filled her with something strange, something as sharp and yet thrilling as jumping into a cool, dark river in winter.
She went towards the chapel. People had laughed at her father. They’d said it was nothing short of pretentious to build a chapel at the end of your garden, and more so when you considered his was not old money. The stain glass windows took the biscuit—who did he think he was, the Pope? Francis Hammersmith was the son of the son of a prospering mill-owner, and no pretty garden could blot out that fact.
Teresa had always loved the stain glass windows. It was the colours, more than the pictures. The colours were bright and sugary-looking; to Teresa they looked as though they were made of boiled sweets. She touched her finger to the centre window, moving it to the lead latticework. She leant her forehead against the glass, holding it there till her brain felt numbed. Her eyes focused on the colours, and then through the colours to the murky shapes within.
‘I love you, Daddy.’
Footsteps sounded behind her, clunking on the steps. Teresa closed her eyes tightly, for the briefest of moments, before opening them and turning around. It wasn’t an angel, it was Effie, kneeling on the soft earth and scratching her ankle as she blinked up at the white sky.
‘Effie, you scared me,’ Teresa said, because it seemed the sort of thing people did say. She moved towards her, and away from the chapel. ‘I thought you were playing the piano for the guests.’
Effie stood up and straightened her shoulders.Make a new paragraph here. When Effie starts speaking. ‘I was. I did.’ A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. ‘Mother said it was impertinent.’
Teresa could imagine that, and Effie’s anguish, but she shunned it from her mind, concentrating on the garden around them instead.
‘Tess,’ Effie said, ‘are you coming back in?’
‘Yes,’ Teresa replied, feeling that her body was made of bubbles, slowly popping and vanishing. ‘I’ll be in soon. Did Mother asked after me?’
Effie blinked. ‘Yes,’ she said, but Teresa knew that tone and its links to the fictitious. ‘Well, see you.’
When Effie was gone, vanished down the steps and into the garden, Teresa smiled to herself. Her sister was so alive; her pink, heart-shaped face made her mourning attire seem not even black. And when, in what was no time at all because minutes dispersed in the garden, she turned back to the chapel, it was grey to her. That is when she made her way home again.
We're all entitled to be something we're not for five minutes are not we? Before I go off talking about nothing *again* let's start:
Effie asked. She was twenty-four now, beautiful and all too conscious of it. She snaked her fingers through her curls, teasing a ringlet more pronounced than the rest. ‘We could all do with cheering up.’
The idea filled her with something strange, something as sharp and yet thrilling as jumping into a cool, dark river in winter.
The idea is truly beautiful.
The Garden Chapel
Everywhere Teresa looked, she saw black. Their clothing caught her attention before anything else—blocks of black, arms and legs indistinct from each other. And then she noticed their faces, small and peeping out of the blackness, pale and [s]unanimated[/s]inanimate, but not sad. She considered them—their small, wormy lips; their mellow eyes. They weren’t upset; they were uncomfortable. They wanted to leave. Plucking at their collars, peeping at watches and the clock above the door, she noticed it rather suddenly.
In a way, it was funny. None of them had liked her father. None of them had known him. Mostly they were employees, alien-looking when removed from the offices, who had come out of respect and for appearance’s sake. If they were not employees, they were family or friends. The family had come from all across the Isles, brought together over the buffet-table, not eager to mingle with those not of kin. The friends—those scattered few he had gained in his fifty-eight years of life—she despised. The women smoked and acted sad, and the men, in suits, cooed over her mother. [Okay, here you have the word 'cooed.' generally, that is what you would do to a baby, make funny faces and stupid baby noises. This is what I imagine here, so please, change the word!
Teresa turned back to the piano, at which her sister Effie sat, stroking the keys with lithe fingers. ‘Do you think I should pay something,’ Effie asked. She was twenty-four now, beautiful and all too conscious of it. She snaked her fingers through her curls, teasing a ringlet more pronounced than the rest. ‘We could all do with cheering up.’
Teresa thought one of Effie’s sprightly songs would make little difference, but Effie’s face was pink with hopefulness[Hopefulness? not sure that fits there.]. ‘As long as it’s not too cheery,’ she warned, and then looked away. The music was sudden, louder than anticipated in the room where mumbled conversation had been the only sound. Effie carried on regardless, churning out a jingle that teetered on distastefully. The men smiled at her; Teresa wondered if, perhaps, it had loosened the strained atmosphere. But then again, the men always smiled at Effie.
She made her way across the room, jostling past the scatterings of cliques and twosomes, past the forty-something wives and their blue clouds of cigarette smoke.[I'm not sure that cigarette smoke is blue] One woman, with a black bob of hair so neat it was like a helmet, said,[perhaps poltely asked', or 'with only good intentions, interrupted her sullen walk]' ‘How are you coping, my dear?’ Teresa only nodded at her, feeling the cracking sensation of a mechanic smile.
Slipping through the door, she was in the hallway—gloomy and satisfyingly quiet. Still she could hear the tinkling sound of Effie’s novice performance, but it grew lesser and lesser as she approached the kitchen.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house. There was forever a log fire raging in the hearth, and a pot brewing over the stove. Its contents made the air pungent with beef and red wine. At a rectangular pine table in the centre of the room, Cook[Is her name cook?][b/] sat with her hammy hands pressed together, and her eyes firmly shut. Anyone might have supposed her to be praying, but that thought was laughable to Teresa, who had known her for as long as she had known herself. Cook was not the praying type.
Teresa entered the room and Cook’s eyes opened almost immediately, like a cat she was easily disturbed from a nap. She smiled, but her smile almost looked as though it came unnaturally, and at great pains.
‘Are you hungry, lass,’ she asked, resting her hands on the tabletop.
Teresa came closer. ‘No.’ She scratched with her ring finger at a knot in the wood.
‘Thirsty?’
Impatient already, Teresa shook her head. ‘I just can’t hack it in there,’ she admitted, her eyes
downcast. ‘Nothing seems real.’
Cook was silent so Teresa curiously looked up. [s]Cook[/s][b]She was nodding in her grave way, as if she understood. ‘How’s your sister coping?’
‘Effie is… Effie’s just being Effie. You know?’
‘I do. What of your ma? She was in here early, very organised, running through checklists of food and so on.’
‘She hasn’t cried. I think she spent her tears when it first happened.’
Cook nodded. ‘That’s for the best. Your ma’s very concerned for appearances.’
Cook sent her off with a sliver of raw carrot—saccharine and crunchy [s]to eat.[/s] Teresa went out into the garden, gnawing at the end in an absent state, marginally aware of the cold. The garden had been the pride and joy of her father’s. [So this is their house? I got the impression that it was a funeral home... when Cook said:'What of your ma? She was in here early,']
[New paragraph]When he had not been at work, he was most likely to have been the garden, tending to his allotment, his flowers [s](which he never deemed feminine) [/s]or making notes in his leather jotter of things to be done. Teresa would watch him, hidden behind a hedge like a spy, or a ghost staring through the pane of a window, as he bent over his potatoes, scruffy in a jersey and dungarees, tending the earth as if it were another child of his. She had always considered herself to have two fathers: the businessman and the gardener.
The garden was not like most people’s. It was not a large plot of grass, rimmed with hedgerow and flowers. It was a rambling, ceaseless jungle, almost Utopian in mystique. It set off in many tangents, from its circular core, and was in that respect[Comma] maze-like. The main tangent went straight forward, wider than the others, and Teresa went through it. It was nature’s passageway, with walls of trees. The further she went, the darker it got—the only source of light being the splinters of sunlight through the kaleidoscope treetops. As a girl, she had been afraid to go further than the bowl of garden in the centre, leading from the French doors. Only when with Effie had she dared enter the dark[s]—as it seemed the time—[/s]abyss.
When she had walked for some three minutes[Three minutes through a garden? that's how long it takes me to walk 400 meters. Add something in about walking slowly.][/b[, she came to the familiar sight ahead. It was the reward she’d received as a child for daring to enter the dark; the delight on seeing it was just as fresh each time. In the distance stood, in a grand and yet unostentatious [b][Not sure if this is a proper word:(]manner, a square stone chapel. A whim of her father’s from long before she was born, the chapel served no purpose but to delight the eyes.[They have a chapel in their back yard? What a rich family!] ‘All the grand houses would have had one of these,’ he had told her when she had been very small. He had hitched her up onto his shoulders to see the whole chapel in perspective. ‘In the Catholic days.’
Before her was a gate of black wrought iron. As she pushed on it, it groaned from disuse and would not stand fully open—the bushel[Do you mean bushes?] of ivy, which covered the brickwork either side of the gate, was too overgrown. Teresa moved past the mass, pressed against the coolness of the iron, touching the tips of her fingers to the waxy leaves of ivy.
The stone steps leading to the chapel were uneven with age and rounded at the edges with the wearing of feet. Scattered with the fallen brown leaves that autumn had shed, they looked so sombre to Teresa, and she kicked at them with her left foot, on the first step, whilst securing a hand onto a mass of leaves. ‘Twenty steps,’ she whispered to herself, the sound getting lost amid the rustling of the sycamore leaves above her head. Her father had said, ‘Imagine, won’t you: even after we’re dead, people will climb these steps. Our descendants will place their feet exactly where we place ours.’ [Ohhh... Sentimental moment here!]
Abruptly, she ran up the steps, telling herself she might fall. She could imagine the slip of a foot, the sudden amazement at being airborne, and then the crack of her kneecaps on the hard Yorkshire stone. The idea filled her with something strange, something as sharp and yet thrilling as jumping into a cool, dark river in winter.
She went towards the chapel. People had laughed at her father. They’d said it was nothing short of pretentious to build a chapel at the end of your garden, and more so when you considered his was not old money. The stain glass windows took the biscuit—who did he think he was, the Pope? Francis Hammer-smith was the son of the son of a prospering mill-owner, and no pretty garden could blot out that fact.
Teresa had always loved the stain glass windows. It was the colours, more than the pictures. The colours were bright and sugary-looking; to Teresa they looked as though they were made of boiled sweets. She touched her finger to the centre window, moving it to the lead latticework. She [s]leant[/s]leaned her forehead against the glass, holding it there till her brain felt numbed. Her eyes focused on the colours, and then through the colours to the murky shapes within.
‘I love you, Daddy.’
Footsteps sounded behind her, clunking on the steps. Teresa closed her eyes tightly, for the briefest of moments, before opening them and turning around. It wasn’t an angel, it was Effie, kneeling on the soft earth and scratching her ankle as she blinked up at the white sky.
‘Effie, you scared me,’ Teresa said, because it seemed the sort of thing people did say. She moved towards her, and away from the chapel. ‘I thought you were playing the piano for the guests.’
Effie stood up and straightened her shoulders. ‘I was. I did.’ A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. ‘Mother said it was impertinent.’
Teresa could imagine that, and Effie’s anguish, but she shunned it from her mind, concentrating on the garden around them instead.
‘Tess,’ Effie said, ‘are you coming back in?’
‘Yes,’ Teresa replied, feeling that her body was made of bubbles, slowly popping and vanishing. [Nice description here]‘I’ll be in soon. Did Mother ask[s]ed[/s] after me?’
Effie blinked. ‘Yes,’ she said, but Teresa knew that tone and its links to the fictitious. ‘Well, see you.’
When Effie was gone, vanished down the steps and into the garden, Teresa smiled to herself. Her sister was so alive; her pink, heart-shaped face made her mourning attire seem not even black. And when, in what was no time at all because minutes dispersed in the garden, she turned back to the chapel, it was grey to her. That is when she made her way home again.
Thank you both so much. I'll return the favour ASAP.
You're always such a considerate, complimentary critiquer, and to be on the receiving end of one of your critiques is such a warm, fuzzy feeling. Thanks!
I will take all your pointers and criticisms into account, and hopefully improve this. Ta!Kirsten - Why are you so kind? You're always such a considerate, complimentary critiquer, and to be on the receiving end of one of your critiques is such a warm, fuzzy feeling. Thanks!
Anyway, this really was great, Lauren. One of the best things I've read on here for ages.
‘Do you think I should pay something,’
‘Are you hungry, lass,’ she asked, resting her hands on the tabletop.
The stain glass windows took the biscuit
Did Mother asked after me?
That is when she made her way home again.
I agree with most of your nit-picks and will see to another edit to this story, save a few matters I disagree with.
• The proper punctuation marks to use to show dialogue is the quotation marks ("--"). Otherwise, your marks may be confused for apostrophes. However! If your character was saying something that someone else said, those would be appropriate. Like this:
"Yes, ma'am, he said, 'I don't know, but I'll find out.' I hope he does."
Teresa entered the room and Cook’s eyes opened almost immediately. Like a cat, she was easily disturbed from a nap. She smiled, but her smile almost looked as though it came unnaturally, and at great pains.
She touched her finger to the centre window, moving it to the lead latticework.
Footsteps sounded behind her, clunking on the steps.
Teresa closed her eyes tightly, for the briefest of moments, before opening them and turning around.
And when, in what was no time at all because minutes dispersed in the garden, she turned back to the chapel, it was grey to her.
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