Double Spring by Juliet Darling

Author:Juliet Darling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, book
ISBN: 9781743432266
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Let me weep forever

I told Steve that I was organising a recital at our home and he offered to bless the apartment at the same time. A crowd of forty or more pushed their way into the corridor and living rooms.

I watched Steve carefully sprinkle the blue front door with holy water and thought, ‘What a wonderful act—to bless a front door.’ For years I used to leave it open. Now that door is always locked, and when I returned to the apartment, the first thing I did was have a video camera installed downstairs. The day after it was installed someone rang the buzzer. I crept up to the monitor, and when I saw the image of a man I didn’t recognise, I was terrified. He went away. It wasn’t logical but I was convinced he was hiding in the hallway and I called my friend Meera, who had a set of keys. She offered to come by and check the hallways to make sure he had gone. Later I found out he was a builder working in another apartment and only wanted access to the fire-alarm system.

Steve blessed the bathroom, the bedroom and the kitchen with holy water and he asked my friend’s children to read the blessings. The singer Gemma couldn’t look at me as she sang the lament ‘O Let Me Weep’ from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. She said later that it had been one of the hardest things she had ever had to do. David Malouf saw her hands shaking and held up the music for her as she sang:

O let me weep, for ever weep,

My eyes no more shall welcome sleep;

I’ll hide me from the sight of day,

And sigh my soul away.

He’s gone, he’s gone, his loss deplore;

And I shall never see him more.

When she finished, the crowd in the room was silent. A long time passed before anyone said anything. The Dean of COFA was glancing at me furtively, his head hung low. Steve told me he found the lyrics very confronting.

‘He’s gone,’ I told Steve. ‘Those are the words that need to be sung.’

‘I never did like those bereavement cards that read, Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room,’ said Steve.

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