Dissonance by Stephen Orr Page A

staff looked at each other in amazement.
    â€˜And what will you tell those reporters?’ Madge asked her son.
    â€˜I’ll tell them about the Zinfandel,’ he replied. ‘I’ll tell them about my mother, and what she wore, and how she smelt and smiled.’ He took her hand and leaned towards her. She responded and he kissed her again. ‘I’ll tell them we’re the best two ever.’
    â€˜And what else?’
    â€˜And this was the beginning of everything.’
    The next day Madge drove out to her parents’ property. Statenborough covered the hills, valleys and creek beds of the country between Williamstown and Mount Crawford Forest. It was green country all year round and could support almost anything. Samuel, her father, had experimented with dates and olives, goats and prickly pear, but had always returned to sheep and cattle. He’d cropped barley and wheat and even created a wood lot that he intended harvesting when he was seventy to pay for a trip to Europe.
    Madge parked her truck on the gravel driveway, blocking any access to the house. Her mother, Grace, came out waving a tea towel and said, ‘Your father wants it parked out the back.’
    â€˜Why?’ Madge asked. ‘Are you expecting someone?’
    â€˜No,’ she replied. ‘He reckons it’s an embarrassment.’
    A few minutes later Madge was sitting in the living room with her parents. The house smelt of vanilla and Madge asked why. Grace sniffed the air a few times and said, ‘I can’t smell anything.’
    Then her father tried. ‘That’s not vanilla, it’s cinnamon.’
    â€˜Dad, it’s vanilla.’
    â€˜How can it be vanilla?’ Grace asked. ‘I haven’t done any cooking for days.’
    If Killalah was a slice of Empire, then Statenborough was the whole cake. And at the centre of this grand, six-bedroom home was the living room. Around the walls were a series of flat, glass-covered display cabinets that Sam had imported from France. In each of these was a collection on a theme – coins, pipes, war medals (other people’s), stuffed birds, whistles, theatre programs, ivory moustache combs, anything. Every time Sam had a visitor he’d spend an hour explaining each piece. ‘This here is a nose-ring worn by a Hutu …’ As Grace stood at the door with her arms crossed, saying, ‘Sam, they’re not interested.’
    â€˜Excuse me.’ Turning to his visitor. ‘You are, eh?’
    â€˜Of course.’
    There were four seats – two upholstered with satin, one with cotton and the other with rattan. Each was covered with a crocheted rug and on Sam’s chair, the biggest, there was a cushion woven with St George, a dragon, a coat-of-arms and a border of palm leaves. Above the chair was a print of Cruikshank’s ‘Death of Little Nell’ and beside it, on a smoking table, a candelabra that Grace polished every New Year’s Day.
    Madge poured herself a cup of tea and rested it in a saucer on her knee. ‘Well, the time’s arrived,’ she said, smiling, looking at the piano Grace had made her practise on for eleven long years.
    â€˜For what?’ Grace asked.
    â€˜To move on,’ Madge replied, savouring every fraction of every cinnamon-scented moment, listening to the grandfather clock that had been her metronome.
    â€˜Where to?’ Sam asked.
    â€˜Hamburg,’ Madge said, going on to explain her letter, the reply and Erwin’s excitement; describing a mostly imagined Hamburg full of mad composers and artists and writers running down cobblestone streets.
    â€˜It’s decided?’ Sam asked, when she’d finished.
    â€˜Of course. What do you think?’
    She looked at her mother. Are you proud of me, she wanted to ask. Isn’t this what we always wanted? I was never going to be Ignaz Friedman, but what about Erwin?
    â€˜Sight unseen,’ she