Young Writers Society

Yay! I'm sure I've never had so many critiques in my life. xD

Demeter - Oh, thanks for the critique! I always find those review for food things a bit impertinent, hehe, so am glad you chose to critique. Will bear your nit-picks (as well as everyone else's) in mind when I edit before the deadline. I wondered about your wondering on the "function of this story"---what function do any stories have, but to entertain and form a kind of escapism? I hope I did not fail there. Again, thank you.

Rosey Unicorn - Hi, thank you. I agree the nit-picks have been coming fast and steady... I am quite unused to one of my lil' tales getting quite so much attention, teehee. Funny you said that about lack of name use---I thought it was quite the opposite! Will bear in mind what you say about commas, although comma-use is widely debated and I believe that people may use them in different quantities. Think 'Old Man and the Sea', and then compare it to a Jane Austen or 'Moll Flanders'! Thanks.

Hiya!

It seems nit-picks have been done to death (ahem, pardon the pun) already. I'll just do some overall.

Names: You are rather skimpy on the names here. You use "she" a lot, when you could stand to replace it with the proper name.

You also don't mention her father's name until you talk about his heritage, which I found a bit fuzzy. I'd try to slowly work her father's name (and her last name) into things a bit earlier so we're not thrown for such a loop.

Description: You're doing okay with the description here, although you can get confusing at times (the beginning two paragraphs especially). Re-work some sentences (which have been graciously posted by those before me) so things aren't as confusing.

I would also go through and make sure everything is present and accounted for. It's a small thing, but that carrot goes missing-in-action as soon as the gate comes into play. I'm just being super nit-picky so this has the best chance of winning.

Commas: You use them a lot, often in the wrong places. here and here are good articles on them. The first is about where they do go (it also has other punctuation marks in there) and the second is about where they don't go.

If you have any questions, PM me.

~Rosey

Hey there, lhighton! Here as you requested, and glad about it

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.

June - Thanks so much for the critique 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."

Hey there! It's June!

I figured I haven't done enough long reviews lately, so I decided I should do a few. I don't think I've reviewed anything of yours, either, so... Anyway! Let's get to work on this! I won't be too harsh!

Nitpicks first, fun stuff later:

‘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.

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!

Two lovely more critiques Thank you both so much. I'll return the favour ASAP.

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!

asxz - A very prompt and effective critique. Thank you so much I will take all your pointers and criticisms into account, and hopefully improve this. Ta!

Hi, I'm not going to go into the nit-picks, just the over-all structure & flow of the piece.

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! , also, you say that 'men' coo over the mother, generally it would be the women that act sympathetic & care about peoples feelings!]


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.

Something to critique from my dear Lauren. Why was not I told of this before? I second your proclamations of being being a grammar geek, because you are, which is good by the way 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:

[quote]Everywhere Teresa looked, she saw black. I like the first line. 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. I adore this description! It's wonderful. 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. I love the insight here, something that could verge on too much telling, but you do it rather splendidly and so it turns out to be quite the opposite.


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 Erm... I'm not too good at grammar and such, but I think they would work better than who in this line. Less confusing maybe? 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. I'm thinking that perhaps the repetition of not is annoying. Maybe try not eager to mingle with those of different kin or something. 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 pay something,’ I expect you meant play? 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. Perhaps it's just me, but I think Effie (I adore that name by the way) appears younger than twenty four. A lot younger. In fact to me she appears more like the six year old sister or something, lol. That said, I don't mean that in a bad way, I absolutely love this. Her happiness and spirit make her appear rather young, they make her appear original and different. I love it


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, 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. I love these descriptions, they are beautiful. Give me a love for this place and create fabulous imagery in a very little amount of words. 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 I love the alliteration here! 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. 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 organised, running through checklists of food and so on.’


‘She hasn’t cried. I think she spent her tears when it first happened.’ I love this


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. Do you need the 's on father? Wouldn't it make sense as: The garden had been the pride and joy of her father 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.That line is absolutely amazing. Simply... I really, really love it.


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.I absolutely love the word waxy, it sets so much imagery and atmosphere. The texture is lovely too. Great!


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.Yorkshire! I completely and utterly love the place 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. ‘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 I think you mean was ) when she made her way home again.

Gosh Lauren. This is absolutely amazing. I adored it, and believe me, I can generally point out flaws in people's writing (because I am rather evil). It was original and refreshing, two words which are often over used and generally not deserved in most cases, but you truly do deserve them. Now, shall we?

Upon what lies the foundation of our fantasies?
Plots. They are your story. What you're trying to portray, how you're trying to depict certain emotions. What circumstances your characters are under. Everything comes back to plot, without a good one your story is nothing. Your story is beautiful. That is a word that even I admit to using too much, but I actually mean it for yours. The plot surprised me a lot: I observed the picture before reading your story, and I expected the picture to depict happiness. The path looked to me as though it was branching off, making you choose your route, perhaps leaving sadness and moving on? In some ways your story was doing that, but it wasn't. Tess didn't want to move on.

J'adore...
Perhaps my favourite thing about this whole story is the church. It's such an original idea to build a church at the edge of your garden. I completely love the idea, and I know you're probably going to dismiss the idea and claim that the church was in the picture, but actually it was you who chose to put it in the garden, therefore you get the credit The idea is truly beautiful.

For who am I, if not with you?
Characters. Yours are truly amazing. I love the collection of characters in this family. The father, reflective and loving for both his girls and his garden. Tess, she seems to me the more mature of the two, clever, strong and interesting. Then we have Effie, she seems very young to me, vivacious and full of energy, spirited and lovely. She's a great character. I adore how she's portrayed as being a young girl in an older person's being. I love the characters in this piece.

Gramurr and sppeling
Their great. Hahah, just kidding < they're great. (:

We are left with nothing but that with which we are born
Overall, Lauren, this is absolutely delightful. I adore it.

Well done

~Kirsten

Two critiques already!

mhmmcolleenx0 - Thanks for the critique! I see that mostly you have picked up on my tendency to make my sentences too long. I'll bear that in mind and take a proper look. By the way, I did mean 'hack'. I suppose it's regional talk. It means "I can't stand it" I guess. I shan't be writing for on this, because it's just a small piece for a contest. Once again, thanks!

stelagineva - Hi! I see you're new, so welcome and thank you immensely for the critique! My grammar mistakes were inexcusable--to think I call myself a grammar-geek! Bah. So anyway, I'm touched that you liked it. Thanks.

I will be sure to return the favour. If I'm stupid and forget, don't hesitate to remind me xD

Here it goes:

There were some silly grammar mistakes ,which is probably because you were rushing. They were along these lines "Did mother asked for me?". You just have to go over it and fix those ,but it was nothing too bad.

As for the actual story ,I thought it was very descriptive and the characters were really well developed. Overall it was an amazing piece. Can't believe all of these came from simply looking at a photo.

Hi! This was very good and very desciptive. So, here's my critique. My fixes are in bold. My comments are in italics. I don't feel like doing the separate quotes thing today.

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.