Dissonance: A novel

By Stephen Orr

Dissonance begins with piano practice. Fifteen-year-old Erwin Hergert is forced to tackle scales and studies for six hours a day by his mother, Madge, who is determined to produce Australia's first great pianist. To help Erwin focus, Madge has exiled her husband, Johann, to the back shed. Jo is diagnosed with cancer and Madge allows

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wakefield Press Pty Ltd
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781743050255

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Wakefield Press

Dissonance

Stephen Orr is the author of three novels: Attempts to Draw Jesus, Hill of Grace and Time’s Long Ruin (shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). He has also published a non-fiction volume of true crime, The Cruel City. His short stories have appeared in journals and compilations.

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Wakefield Press

1 The Parade West

Kent Town

South Australia 5067

First published 2012

This edition published 2012

Copyright Stephen Orr, 2012

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover designed by Stacey Zass, Page 12

Cover photograph by Rex Lisman / Getty Images

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author:    Orr, Stephen, 1967–    .

Title:    Dissonance [electronic resource] / Stephen Orr.

ISBN:    978 1 74305 025 5 (ebook: epub).

Dewey Number:    A823.4

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Contents

Part One

Tanunda 1937

Part Two

Hamburg 1938

Part Three

War

Part Four

Spring 1942

Part One

Tanunda 1937

Chapter One

Here is a house – stone, square and simple – sitting towards the front of a paddock along God’s Hill Road. The paddock is enclosed by a fence of rotten redwood posts – some still standing, some fallen, some held in place by rusted wire that is partly taut, partly tangled through wild ryegrass and thistles as tall as a Bösendorfer piano.

In the days before Johann Hergert bought the property at a bankrupt sale it had been covered in vines – but now these were dead, or wild, trained along more rusted wire that ran between more rotten stumps of redwood. Still, every year there were some grapes, ripening through summer, eaten out by birds, shrivelling, dropping, waiting for the rats, rabbits and foxes that were the only livestock on Killalah. The shiraz vines were as old as Henschke’s, as thick as telegraph poles around the base, as virile as lantana, drawing nutrients from the near-perfect soil, feeding leaves that were as green as the Hi-Gloss on Nev Scholz’s seeder – destined to drop in May each year and feed the fat-hen and Salvation Jane of another wasted vintage.

There was music coming from the front room of the house. It was sucked out of an open window, stirred up and filtered by grey lace curtains that fluttered like a flag on a cold Anzac morning. A woman’s voice was counting along to the music – four octave scales on C, then D, up and down, repeated in thirds, and fifths, without a single mistake. The notes were smooth and joined, mechanical, like a Mixmaster changing speed – electricity driving fingers across the keyboard like tappet-heads, producing music that fell out of the window into a garden full of wildflowers and more weeds, this time growing in carefully cultivated beds.

Erwin’s idea. When he was eight his mother, Madge, had presented him with a box of vegetable and flower seeds – carnations and lisianthus, pumpkin, peas and beetroot. But instead of planting these he’d walked along the nearby creek collecting seeds from wild artichokes, daisies, orange harlequins and wood sorrel. He went home and dug irises, pansies and stocks from his father’s bed and planted his discoveries throughout the front garden. His father, Johann, appeared from his shed and asked, ‘What are you doing, Erwin?’ and he replied, ‘I’m making it natural again.’

‘Leave my delphiniums.’

But Madge opened the front window and called out, ‘Leave him be.’

‘I will not.’

‘Johann.’

Johann fell silent, watching, eventually retreating to the solitude of Goethe on a drop toilet overgrown with wisteria. Madge put her head out of the window and called to her son, ‘Not in rows, scatter them, like the wind would.’

Madge was still at her window, counting time in a clear, metallic monotone more precise than any metronome, tapping an arthritic bamboo stick on the lid of their old iron-framed piano – a stick that Erwin had felt across his knuckles a thousand times in the years since he’d started lessons at the age of four.

An F natural instead of F sharp. Whack! ‘Sorry, Mum.’

‘Key of C-sharp, Erwin, what are you doing?’

‘I know …’

There was no point arguing. Mother was right. Such a simple thing – F natural in the key of C-sharp.

‘Back to your scales. One, two, three …’

She was right. It would get him there – it already had. The certificates on the wall above the piano proved it. ‘Tanunda Eisteddfod, Pianoforte, First Prize.’ 1929, 1930, 1931 … Madge had run out of wall. She’d hung the rest in the kitchen, taking down Johann’s Silesian farmscapes and painted plates.

‘Leave them,’ he’d argued.

‘We have no room. We have to encourage our son, don’t we?’

Back on the drop dunny, the smell of wisteria was strong in his nose.

As Madge counted she looked out across a valley. She saw smoke from other cottages nestled in the folds of hills or beside stands of old peppermint gums, and felt contented. There was a rhythm and precision to nature – the piano proved it, music proved it, freeing itself from scales and singing serenades to slow-flowing creeks and symphonies to the human will. Here was the proof – her son, Erwin. Tall, blonde, faultless – not that it had been easy. A good-looking fifteen-year-old with wavy hair, a high forehead and square jaw. Here was the proof – large, sprawling hands flying over keys, barely touching them to produce precise sounds. The proof – skin as soft as tallow, cheeks blushing red on cold winter mornings.

But to get Erwin this far she’d had to overcome a lot: the Barossa Germans, with their belief that music was all oom-pah and close harmonies, schools full of second-rate teachers, religion, and most of all, Johann.

Madge’s mother, Grace, had warned her about him – not because he was German, or a shop-owner, or had a strange leer permanently sculpted across his face – but because he had dark hair and brown eyes. ‘Once you open the gate …’ she’d said, one afternoon as she flicked through the Bray family album. Then she’d looked at her daughter. ‘The Hergerts are German, are they, Madge?’

‘That’s what he says.’

Grace looked at the photo of Johann that he’d given Madge.

‘Doesn’t look very German.’

‘They’re from Silesia.’

‘Ah, the East – perhaps there was a Pole involved.’

But Madge wasn’t going to be talked around so easily. ‘He’s nice.’

‘Do we get to meet him?’

‘Of course. He’s going to take over his dad’s shop.’

Grace lifted her eyebrows. At least it was better than a farmer.

‘Mum, I’m thirty-three. I want to settle down. I want to have a child.’

‘There’s more to it than that.’

‘I could wait forever.’

Then there’d been a meeting at the Bray’s cattle stud: a meal of pork chops and mashed potato, Johann lined up in front of her parents like a Hereford that had just missed out on a prize ribbon.

‘Your people are German, Johann?’ Grace had asked, as Madge held his arm and stared into his hazel eyes.

‘Yes,’ Johann replied. ‘Magda has told you everything, I suppose?’

‘Magda?’

‘Yes,’ Madge-Magda replied. ‘Doesn’t it sound so … European?’

Meanwhile, her father, Sam, was shaking his head. ‘That salt shaker’s empty.’

It was an abridged courtship, Madge helping out at the Hergerts’ shop, accompanying Johann to Tabor church every Sunday, helping him run the Sunday school (although at this stage she dared not say what she thought about religion), writing him long, romantic poems and polishing his five pairs of boots every Sunday evening.

And then, a few weeks before Madge’s wedding, Grace asked her, ‘Do you really think you’ll be happy with Jo in the long run?’ and Madge replied, ‘If I’m happy with him for six months, that’s all I care about.’

Grace sat forward. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Madge couldn’t believe she needed to explain. ‘Can’t you see … by then I’ll be set.’

‘For what?’

Madge smiled. ‘A baby. A big, bouncy boy.’

Madge and Johann were married in black, and before long everything that Grace had predicted came to be. Jo tired of his new wife and instead of coming home after closing he went to the Tanunda Hotel. But Madge didn’t care – she was preparing for her son. She rested on her back for six hours a day, lying with her bulging stomach facing a statue of Zeus on her bedside table, as if the spirit of the god would infect the child. She played Bach every day because she knew her baby could hear and would absorb the music through sweet, syrupy amnion and an umbilical cord as strong as barbed wire. She prayed to other gods she didn’t believe in: the Christian God, Mohammed and Siddhartha – covering all options, just on the off chance. She massaged her stomach with lavender oil and sang to the boy, walked along dry creek beds so he could hear the clunk of pebbles and smell the oil of gum leaves venting in the late afternoon sun. He would know and love nature. He would worship it, and describe it in music – perhaps even his own compositions.

This is why Jo was at the Tanunda Hotel. There wasn’t much call for him back at their home on God’s Hill Road. Madge had fallen out of love as quickly as she’d fallen in. So now he could pay the bills, and provide, and for that she’d put up with his body odour and Polish eyes and give him the Lutheran respectability he craved.

And when he did come home, drunk, at eleven or twelve at night, she’d be there waiting for him, standing on the porch with her arms crossed. ‘Where have you been?’

‘What do you care?’

At which point she’d get out her horsewhip and threaten him. ‘I’ve made your bed up in the shed.’

‘Be damned, Magda.’

‘Madge!’

It was a dry-stone shed, built to head height so you always entered with a two-inch stoop. Its corrugated-iron roof was rusted out and blown away here and there, letting in the moon and stars and dew that settled on his face every morning – a shed full of unused machine parts, seized motors, broken tools, bags of fertiliser that had set rock hard, and rats.

‘The shed,’ she said, letting the thongs of the whip fall to the ground.

Jo tried to get past her and she whipped him, again and again, until he retreated. ‘I won’t have a drunk in my house.’

‘Whose house?’

Killalah, cracked and crumbling, sitting alone in the weeds on God’s Hill Road.

Jo staggered back to his Dodge truck, climbed into the cabin, started it and filled the night air with diesel fumes, driving off as Madge called after him, ‘Go on, back to your whore.’

In the form of a bargirl at the Tanunda Hotel, a seventeen-year-old with a plain face, wide hips and an interest in everything he said. ‘It’s time for you to go home, Jo.’

‘Home? To what?’

‘Your wife.’

‘Ha.’

But it was hardly one-sided. Madge had started off baking his bread and washing his socks. Then, one day, there’d been a letter.

Dear Mrs Hergert,

I hear Jo is married now, and I hope you two are happy. He was to marry me once, but then changed his mind. Still, I have his boy, and his name is Andrew, and if he gives you a boy then maybe they can play together. Can you see them running in the sun, shooting arrows, talking fondly about their papa …

No return address.

Jo denied it, of course, but people don’t just make up things like that, she argued. So, out with the horsewhip. Let him rot in the tool shed with the dead possums, she thought.

See, Grace said, when Madge went to see her the next day. Brown eyes.

‘But he seemed so loving.’

‘They all do. It just goes to show, you shouldn’t give them the chance.’

Then she went on to remind Madge how her father George, who’d kept a boarding house in King William Street, would study the register at 8 pm every evening and how, if he found a Leonard or Konigsberg or Hammerstein, he’d pick up a bell and start ringing it, storming up the stairs, knocking on the appropriate door and saying, ‘No Jews here, out!’

‘And he never had any trouble,’ Grace said, handing the letter back to her daughter. ‘I warned you, Madge. Now you’re just going to have to make the best of it.’

The final proof of Jo’s infidelity came on the night Erwin was born. As Jo relaxed in the waiting-room of Willow Pass Hospital, half-drunk, Dr O’Hara (a big man with a handle-bar moustache and a fencing scar across his right cheek) came in, shook his hand and said, ‘It may be a long labour, Mr Hergert,’ to which he replied, ‘No problems, Doctor, I’ve had plenty of practice.’

Words that Dr O’Hara repeated to Madge as she lay on a cold, stainless-steel table. As she thought, Of course, it’s true, everything’s true. As she promised herself never to kiss him again, or smile, or start a conversation – as she grasped the sides of the table and thought about her boy. Her boy: the perfect white bundle that was starting to make its way into the world – part Zeus, part Bach, the fingers of Moszkowski and the fire of Paganini, the humour of Chaplin and the heart of Hans Christian Andersen.

He was all this, and more, emerging into lemon-scented daylight with a high-pitched squeal that sounded like Schubert’s Erlkönig. ‘What colour are his eyes?’ Madge asked, before his shoulders were even out.

‘It’s a girl,’ Dr O’Hara replied.

‘A girl? Nonsense.’

‘It looks like a girl. No, no, wait – a boy.’

Madge smiled. Jo stuck his head in the door. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Out!’ Madge screamed. ‘Doctor, what colour are his eyes?’

‘I can’t tell.’

‘His hair?’

‘Blonde.’

‘His eyes?’

‘Brown.’

‘Look again.’

‘No, blue, blue.’

Madge stopped pushing and the boy’s legs slid out like a pair of lubricated bananas. She took a deep breath and thanked God (any god) for answering her prayers. The rest she could do herself with a mix of love and discipline, copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and a new piano she’d just bought, charged to Jo and had delivered to God’s Hill Road.

Jo stuck his head through the door again. ‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’

‘Is it a boy?’

‘It’s a boy,’ she replied, thinking, Not that you’ll ever get your hands on him.

Half an hour later, Dr O’Hara was finished and Madge was resting on a freshly made bed in an almost empty ward, feeding her son from the breast she kept covered from her husband’s view.

‘Erwin, as agreed?’ Jo asked.

‘Edward.’

‘We agreed.’

‘Edward.’

Jo looked at her and his face tightened. ‘How will you look after him then, when I’ve gone?’

Madge adjusted the infant on her tit. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘It’s a fact. We have a mortgage.’

‘I’ll return to my mother.’

‘You won’t.’

Stand-off. Nothing but the sound of a clock slicing time into paper-thin fragments. The baby was full, and asleep. Madge wrapped him up in a blanket and rocked him. Jo extended his hands to take the boy but Madge wouldn’t ­surrender him.

‘Magda.’

‘My name is Madge.’

‘Please.’

‘He’s my son.’

‘He’s ours.’

‘He needs to be loved.’

‘He will be.’

But Madge wouldn’t let him go. ‘Erwin then,’ she said, as a compromise, as a way of keeping the mortgage paid. ‘Erwin Hergert … the great Australian pianist.’

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Erwin.

She wasn’t about to let Jo within smelling distance of the boy. Which meant that he spent the next days, months and years praising God at Tabor church beside a reluctant wife (who only agreed to come as part of their Compromise) – returning home from poker nights and kegel to find her standing on their porch, brandishing the whip she made sing like a thousand angry angels. Then he’d crawl off to his shed, leaving his work-clothes on the front porch for his wife-by-name-only to iron before the dew of another Tanunda morning woke him for work.

Back at the piano, Erwin had moved on to Mozart’s An Chloe. Madge had read about the lives of the great pianists – their genius had extended beyond the concert repertoire to orchestral transcriptions, chamber music, concerti and lieder. So here she was, warbling the words in her best Barossa Deutsch, raising her chin and reaching for the high notes as Erwin’s finger’s clunked away on the almost child-like arpeggios, the trills, the heavy block chords and runs of thirds and fifths. ‘Louder here … softer here,’ she called, holding her bamboo stick in the air.

Madge had run to seed. She’d started off as a fresh, green lettuce, but she’d wilted; softened with cellulite that hung, melted and ran like fat from the still twitching pigs that Jo hung in his smokehouse. Her tomato-stake legs had turned to telegraph poles and her ankles had swollen, but her feet had got no bigger. So now she found it hard to walk – a sort of side-to-side hobble, stopping to rest on fallen logs and lean on shaky fences.

Time and egg noodles had taken their toll – years of waffles and honey cakes, roast beef cooked in recycled fat, pickled pig, cabbage and dill pickles – things she’d developed a taste for during the Hergert years (although, again, Grace had warned that cold climate food would ruin her).

Food was part of the Compromise: meals left at the shed door, rained on, dried out, forgotten if Jo was staying in town with a ‘friend’, picked over by birds and rats, the empty dishes left until he stacked them neatly at the back door beside a barrel of water with a soup ladle attached with twine. She couldn’t let him go hungry. He had work to do.

Madge dropped the octave. Erwin looked at her, smiled, and she raised her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘Mozart, not me!’ They finished and Madge sat down. Her chair groaned as its legs moved apart on the unsealed floorboards. ‘Schubert,’ she said.

He looked at a timer on a shelf above the piano and tried to read the minutes – thirty-five, forty – he was nearly there. Soon it would be time for his warm-down: a Liszt etude, a Czerny study and more scales. And then a walk in their garden of weeds, or perhaps an hour of sketching his father’s nude paintings or Madge’s Greek statues, or a watercolour of horses and sheep to send to someone on the Bray side of the family.

Madge was wondering if she should make him work harder. She had an image in her head of other mothers making their sons and daughters practise longer – training them to take the opportunities that were Erwin’s birthright. Still, she guessed, you had to keep a sense of balance; it wasn’t like training a monkey. That would be missing the point entirely.

Once, standing in front of a stall at the Goat Square market, she’d overheard a woman say, ‘Well, yes, fat women are always insecure.’

‘Yes, they overcompensate, don’t they?’ came the reply. ‘But you feel sorry for the child.’

Madge turned around and looked at them. ‘He loves the piano,’ she said, but they just looked at her as if to say, We have no idea what you’re talking about.

Insecure my arse, she thought, as she walked home, turning to Erwin and saying, ‘Hurry up!’

He practises for four hours, she fumed. What else would he be doing? ‘I don’t make you practise too much, do I?’ she asked her son.

‘No, Mum.’

‘You want to get good, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘The world’s full of hack pianists. You may as well be a plumber as one of those. You don’t want to be a plumber, do you?’

‘No, Mum.’

‘I tell you, Erwin, there are maybe five or six pianists in the world that everyone knows. That’s who I want you to be: Erwin Hergert, Australia’s greatest … hurry up! The more you practise …’

‘I know.’

‘These people, these people here, Erwin, they’re ordinary. They want everybody else to be ordinary. You don’t want to be like them, you want to be special, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘It’s because I love you, Erwin.’

‘I know, Mum. I love you.’

‘More than this Valley. More than Australia.’

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Eventually she said, ‘This is a second-rate country, Erwin. Remember that. One day we’ll have to move on.’

‘Where to?’

‘Europe … Germany.’ She smiled at him. ‘Isn’t that ironic?’

‘How?’

‘I tell you what, these Germans have been in Australia too long. Not much of the Beethoven left in them. They’ve become ordinary. Ordinary. This place is death … stupid bitches.’

‘Who?’

‘You know why I make you work harder? Because the pieces are getting harder. You can’t master Liszt on two hours a day. And think of what we’ve got ahead of us – Rachmaninov. Five in the world, Erwin, maybe six.’

‘I know, Mum, I know.’

Meanwhile, Erwin’s practice was coming to an end. The timer rattled and Madge hit it with her stick. ‘I suppose we should go shopping,’ she said.

Erwin took the stick from her hand and laid it across the keys. ‘I’ll get the basket,’ he said.

Half an hour later, Madge was driving Jo’s old truck along God’s Hill Road. Her body arched over the top of a large steering wheel that she fought to control. Erwin helped her turn it on tight corners as she changed gears and pumped an unreliable clutch. There was no glass in the windows (although the wipers still worked) and the cabin roof had rusted through, leaving a sort of latticework skylight. There were holes in the floor big enough for a man to fall through and the passenger door only opened on one hinge. But apart from that … As Madge often said, ‘A pianist only needs ten fingers … all the rest is for show.’

The Dodge was a monster, but she had tamed it. After Jo died in 1931 it sat in the sun and rain for two years – rusting, hosting foxes and pigeons – as she called for taxis to take them to Tanunda. But in the end that got too expensive. A neighbour told her what needed doing and she ordered the parts: filters, spark-plugs, new oil, the lot. She let Erwin off piano for a whole afternoon to help fix it. She found a 1919 service manual in the shed and lay under the truck in her husband’s old overalls for hours, wiping grease from her face and hands, cursing Jo (for dying of cancer, among other things) but slowly bringing the beast back to life.

‘Did I tell you about Bartsch?’ she asked her son, as she drove, pointing to a large Federation homestead surrounded by sugar gums and a series of small, dry dams, flying a ­swastika from a flagpole that was set a few degrees from the vertical.

‘His wife?’

‘Yes. They’re meant to be Lutheran …’ She almost laughed. ‘He stood up at church and denounced her. Called her a hound of Satan.’

‘Who was she on with?’

‘What does it matter? They’re all the same. Lucky I got you out in time.’

Just. Sunday school had been part of the Compromise. As was church – Madge dutifully attending every Sunday, holding her husband’s arm and making small talk over coffee and honey cakes in the vestry after service. All the time wanting to say, ‘You people make me sick.’

Grace had spent years warning her about Lutherans, about the difference between what they said and did, about their arrogance and intolerance of anything new, of anything outside the Valley.

This part of the Compromise had lasted until Erwin was about eight or nine, until he emerged from Sunday school one morning with a picture he’d drawn of Jesus-as-Luther casting thunder from his finger tips like a Silesian Zeus, striking down a crowd of hook-nosed Jews selling vacuums, fridges and stoves at the Goat Square market.

‘Who told you to draw this?’ she asked, as Erwin pointed to Pastor Bartsch, standing smiling at the doorway to the vestry.

‘Let it go,’ Jo said, holding her arm.

‘I will not.’ She stormed over to Pastor Bartsch and held up the drawing. ‘Was this your idea?’ she asked.

Bartsch put his hands behind his back and examined the picture. ‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘And who are these?’ She pointed to the rat-like Jews.

‘I think it’s quite clear,’ he said, as the congregation ­muttered approval.

Madge looked back at her husband. ‘I won’t have him exposed to this,’ she managed. She returned and reclaimed her son, storming out of the hall, calling, ‘We are meant to be Australians.’

‘We were here first,’ someone shouted.

‘Why? Because of Wakefield – an English gentleman. You’d never see this in a Church of England,’ she cried, throwing down the poster.

‘Bartsch,’ she reminded her son, as they drove through a cold, autumn afternoon full of fresh, green grass and naked lambs shivering on granite-pocked hillsides, ‘is a horrible little man. A small man. Your father loved him, of course.’

Erwin looked at her, unsure what to say. Sometimes it seemed his father was the cause of every problem, past and present. And death hadn’t excused him of blame.

‘This gearbox …’ Madge cursed, almost kicking the clutch. ‘Why couldn’t we have a car like everyone else?’

‘Dad’s deliveries,’ Erwin ventured.

‘A van perhaps …’

And there was more to come. The Hergert family shop. She believed her husband had made a mess of that too. When his parents gave it to him in 1926 it had been one of the most profitable stores in Tanunda. It had sold the best of everything: Laucke flour and Wieck’s egg noodles, pickled cabbage, beans and turnips from the Homburg farm on Moppa Road and sauerkraut from the Nuriootpa Co-op, the best blutwurst in the valley, pickled pig in long, warm salted strips and boiled lollies from Angas Park.

But no, Jo had other ideas. The modern way was biscuits in tins, flour in packets and beans in cans. He decided to buy cheap from a warehouse in town and sell with modest mark-ups, thereby undercutting every shop in the valley. He’d get rich. People wanted reliability, longevity. They didn’t want food going stale in cellars. And if there was a war (and the Germans were always at war) this is how people would buy.

‘This is the future,’ he said to his wife one cold, winter’s day, standing at the back door of his home, scraping old food from a plate into a bin as he listened to Erwin practise.

‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,’ Madge warned him, barring his way.

‘Wouldn’t you like to get rich?’

‘Why?’

‘Dad couldn’t see the future, but I can. I can buy ten types of soap powder, corned beef in tins.’

‘Jo.’

‘Shaving cream and – ’

‘Please don’t disturb Erwin’s practice again.’

Madge parked in front of the shop. She climbed down to the footpath and straightened her dress. ‘Erwin, you have the list?’ she asked.

‘Coming, Mum.’

They walked into the shop and it was warm. The remnants of a fire hissed and popped in a bluestone fireplace; wurst hung from racks above the counter and barrels of fresh flour, bran and nuts lined a wall that had lost most of its plaster.

‘How are you, Madge?’ a woman behind the counter asked.

‘Fine, Mrs Collins. And you?’

‘Busy.’ Smiling.

Jo had made changes to his shop. He’d modernised; he’d created aisles and put down lino; he’d placed his cans and packets and tins in alphabetical order for ease of selection. Then he’d sat back and waited.

By the time he realised his mistake he was sick with bowel cancer – shit everywhere for six long months. Madge let him back in the house but warned Erwin to keep his distance. Once a bad seed always a bad seed, cancer or no cancer. That’s why you had to be vigilant. Like Grace always said, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ Well, this one will, Madge thought.

The store was closed for six months while she nursed her husband. After he was off her hands she re-opened it but it took up too much time. Some days she’d only turn over a few pounds. And for what?

So there was an auction, and the Collins picked up the Hergert family shop for next to nothing. They reversed Jo’s renovations and soon had lines out the front door, producers pleading with them to stock their produce. Madge would visit, to stick her nose in, to criticise her husband’s folly in front of anyone who’d listen, to buy bread and jam so fresh the syrup was still bubbling.

Madge banked the proceeds of the sale. This was Jo’s way of making it up to her: doing in death what he could never do in life. The day after he was buried she gathered the last of his things in a box and put them in the shed. She took down the ‘Posen’ sign from beside the front door and took it to a signwriter. ‘What will it be, missus?’

‘Killalah. Enough of that German claptrap.’

Meanwhile, Erwin handed over their list and Mrs Collins filled it, writing down the prices and sub-totals on the edge of a local paper. When she was finished she said, ‘Oh, I forgot, I have something of yours.’ She went into the back room and returned with a shoebox full to overflowing with old letters.

‘What are these?’ Madge asked.

‘They seem to be Jo’s.’

Madge lifted the lid and took out one of the letters. There was no name or address on the envelope, just the initials, JH. She opened the letter and read a few lines.

‘They are his?’ Mrs Collins smiled.

‘Yes,’ Madge replied, folding and replacing the letter, realising the old cow knew very well what they were.

‘They were hidden in the wall, behind a tile,’ the shopkeeper explained.

‘Can you add those things to my account?’ Madge asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Erwin, the basket, please … thank you, Mrs Collins.’

As they drove home, Madge’s hands shook on the wheel. She ran a stop sign on Jollytown Road and almost lost control on gravel on the hill above their house.

‘What are they?’ Erwin asked.

‘Business letters.’

‘What sort?’

She glared at him. ‘Does it matter?’

Erwin leaned forward to pick a letter out of the box at his mother’s feet.

‘No,’ she screamed. ‘What did I just say?’

He sat back.

‘Do I say things for the sake of it?’

‘No,’ he whispered.

Whoever the letter writer was, her drawings (surrounded by French phrases, snatches of Donne and lipstick) were highly refined. And what’s more, she’d studied Jo’s body in some detail. The lines of pencil-thin charcoal were like preparatory sketches for a painting – Jo’s stomach hanging in a fold, covering his pubic hair and threatening to obscure his knob-cock. Then there were his freckled breasts, threatening milk in a paddock of hair that had repulsed her on their wedding night.

So, she was right to have done what she did. Grace was right, she was right. Her only regret was having cared for him when he was sick – for having washed his sheets, two or three times a day, for reading to him for hours on end, for going to town to fetch his papers and tobacco, for allowing Erwin to play hours of sentimental music to soothe him when he should’ve been playing technical studies; for marrying him in the first place (although millions made that mistake); for agreeing to the Compromise; for showing respect to a disrespectful man, love to a loveless man, compassion to a manipulator.

Erwin, sitting silently in the cabin, staring up into a cloud-washed sky, wondered what was in the letters – what his father had said, and to whom. He longed to hear the voices his mother censored. He could hear Jo’s voice, explaining. ‘Listen, old man, do you ever wonder why she doesn’t let me in the house?’

‘She says you’re a bad influence.’

‘Ha. There are two sides to every coin, son.’

Erwin could remember a day when Madge was outside hanging clothes on the line, when he heard his father calling for him from his sick bed. ‘Shot-a-tee … come talk to your dad.’

Thinking, I can’t go in.

‘Shot-a-tee …’

Edging towards the door.

‘Come on, son, you won’t have much longer.’

Turning, running out to the shed, curling up on his dad’s old camp bed.

Madge pulled up in the drive. She tugged on the handbrake, turned to her son and said, ‘I saved you from him, Erwin.’

‘Who?’

She didn’t reply.

‘From Dad?’

‘Promise me you love me?’

‘I don’t need to say it all the time.’

‘Say it.’

‘I love you, Mum.’

She picked up the box of letters. ‘You’ll thank me one day.’

‘For what?’

She frowned. ‘And you won’t have to ask.’ She opened her door and climbed out of the truck. As she started walking across the yard towards the incinerator she said, ‘The basket, Erwin.’

Erwin took the basket and went into their unlocked house, leaving the food on the kitchen table. The he returned to the piano. Without stretching his fingers, or warming up,