Travelling Light

by Sandra Field

  ‘Let’s find some lunch.’

  They ate in a charming little restaurant overlooking the offshore islands, and then Lars said, ‘There’s a hotel a couple of streets over—I’ll book a room for tonight.’

  He was not specifying whether the room was for him or for both of them. But even as he had spoken a plan had dropped into her mind. Trying to look cool and sophisticated as though the hotel room was of no concern, simultaneously despising herself for the deception she was about to practise, Kristine said casually, ‘Lend me your keys and I’ll drive your car to the hotel—I’ve never driven a Jaguar before.’

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a key-ring, showing her the ignition key. ‘The hotel’s one street over from Leif’s.’

  ‘Not far enough,’ she teased. ‘Maybe tomorrow I can drive it on the highway.’

  ‘Or we could go into Kristiansand tonight, go dancing.’

  She was never going to risk dancing with him again. ‘That would be fun...see you in a few minutes.’

  He was looking over the bill. She slipped between the tables, hurried out on the street, and once she was out of sight of the restaurant began to run. She ran all the way to her campsite, took her tent down in record time and stuffed it into her car, and then, with a fateful sense that she was altering her destiny forever, took Lars’s keys and threw them as far as she could into the trees. Dimly she heard them clunk against a tree-trunk, rustle through some branches and then fall to the ground.

  She leaped into her car, drove to the gate, paid the attendant what she owed him, and turned on to the road. Taking a route that skirted both the hotel and the main street, she was on the main highway in a matter of minutes. Her plan was to drive straight to Stavanger. Stavanger looked large enough on the map that she could avoid Lars if by any chance he came after her.

  But why would he? She was making it horribly clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him. And to top it off she had wilfully deceived him and caused him considerable inconvenience. No, Lars would not come after her this time.

  He would want nothing further to do with her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOR the first few miles after she left Mandal Kristine was too agitated to pay much attention to the scenery; she found herself checking her rear-view mirror constantly, as though Lars was suddenly going to appear on her tail.

  He couldn’t. She had thrown away the keys to his car.

  He could send a police car after her, via his friend the commissioner.

  And have to explain why an attractive young woman was fleeing him as fast as she could?

  He wouldn’t do that; it would be too embarrassing. She had seen the last of him. He would accept that she wanted nothing more to do with him, and he would go back to Asgard and to his grandmother.

  But not to Sigrid. He had said he would never marry Sigrid.

  With an impatient sigh Kristine shifted gears for a hill; the Fiat did not like sharp inclines. It was none of her business whom Lars married. In turning her back on all he represented, she had opted to travel light. So why was she even thinking about him? She was in Norway, the land of her birth; she could at least pay attention to the countryside.

  By escaping from Lars in Mandal and heading for Stavanger, she had turned north. Fjaerland lay to the north.

  She couldn’t think about her grandfather either. Not when Lars was so fresh in her mind.

  A rollicking mountain stream was following the course of the road; as she climbed higher it became a series of waterfalls, the foam white as snow. She rounded a curve and saw in front of her her first fjord, the sheen of light on the water hinting at the ice-cold depths below. She went through tunnels smelling of exhaust, she drove past the farms near Heskestad and the sheep country of Algard. And her rear-view mirror remained empty of Lars in a police car with its lights flashing and its siren wailing.

  Lars was not coming after her. In one act of deceit she had made sure of that.

  She drove into Stavanger, got thoroughly lost, and more by luck than good judgement found the tourist information centre near the harbour. The first thing she saw when she went in was a coloured poster of an immense vertical cliff overhanging the impossibly blue waters of a fjord. ‘Where’s that?’ she said to the young woman behind the counter, any plans she might have had of continuing straight on to Bergen disappearing in a flash.

  It was called Prekestolen, Pulpit Rock. It could be reached by ferry and car and a two-hour hike. She could catch the ferry the next morning. Which meant she needed a place to stay.

  Armed with lists of youth hostels, campsites and guest-houses, Kristine went outside. If by any chance Lars came after her, the first place he would look would be a campsite. She started phoning guest-houses, and on her fifth try found one at a price considerably lower than the rest. She located it on the map, drove there, and parked outside.

  It was in a very old building squeezed between two other buildings, and was clear proof of the adage that you got what you paid for. She went inside, inspected the room, which was a narrow cubicle containing a bed and a dresser, and paid her deposit. The landlady had wispy grey hair, spoke in a hushed voice, and had a nervous habit of continuously looking over her shoulder as though an unknown assailant was about to creep up on her. Kristine, who had spent a good part of the day worrying that Lars was going to creep up on her, brought in her backpack and left as soon as she could.

  She spent the evening by the waterfront, feeding the gulls and watching the tourists, then eating grilled bacon, potatoes and tomatoes in a little café. Finally, reluctantly, she headed back to the guest-house.

  In the darkness its blank windows and stone stairwell were downright sinister. She had paid a considerable number of kroner for this, she wasn’t going to back out now, Kristine thought stoutly, went inside, and unlocked her bedroom door. The house was utterly silent, as if she were the only occupant. It was a waiting silence, she thought with a little shiver, gathering up her toilet articles. She needed to wash the salt from her skin and her hair, salt that was a tangible and painful reminder of a man and woman frolicking in the waves and kissing each other on the pale sand...

  She was thinking about Lars again, she realised, grimacing to herself and heading for the poky little bathroom. After an unsatisfactory shower with lukewarm water, she went to bed.

  The ceiling needed re-plastering. The curtains did not fully close, letting in a cold white glare from the streetlights. There was not a sound anywhere in the house.

  She had lied to Lars today, Kristine thought miserably; she had deliberately deceived him. The only time in her life that her father had ever struck her had been when at the age of five she had told him a barefaced lie. After that she had been too frightened to ever think of doing so again. Lars most certainly deserved better of her than that. Why hadn’t she simply told him she didn’t want to see him any more?

  She had done that in Oslo. And it hadn’t worked.

  Her thoughts marched on. Was the real root of her fear that of getting pregnant? Or was that just a cover-up for a deeper fear, a fear that intimacy of any sort with a man would destroy the possibility of love rather than foster it? Five children to the contrary, there had been no love between her father and her mother.

  The bed sagged and the pillow was rock-hard. Kristine forced her eyes shut. She counted sheep, then seagulls and pigeons. She went to the bathroom, the plumbing gurgling through the pipes like an old man clearing his throat. She crawled back into bed and contemplated selling her car, taking the ferry to Bergen, and flying home. Home was known. Home was familiar. Home was a long way from Lars.

  There was a clock near by that chimed every fifteen minutes. By two forty-five Kristine hated that clock. But the next time she heard it, it was ringing eight times, and the light falling into the room was the soft grey light of morning.

  She would go to Bergen tomorrow, she thought, and in Bergen she would decide what she was going to do about her grandfather. Today she was going to clim
b Pulpit Rock. And she was going to pretend Lars did not exist.

  Kristine left the guest-house without a second look, knowing that if she spent another night in Stavanger it would be at a campground. At the market that was in full swing near the Vagen inlet where the ferries docked she bought fruit and pancakes for breakfast, eating on the stone steps and falling into conversation with a group of hostellers from Sweden. Afterwards she went down to the dock and bought her ticket for the ferry to Tau.

  Among the crowds milling around the fish-sellers she suddenly saw a tall man with streaked blond hair, his back to her. Her heart did a flip-flop in her chest and for a moment she forgot to breathe.

  The man disappeared into one of the pavement cafés. Had it been Lars? Although she had had only a fleeting glimpse of the back of his head, something in the way he held it, in the curl of blond hair on his nape, had reminded her forcibly of the man she was fleeing.

  It couldn’t have been Lars. Her pulses racing, she scurried away from the dock, up the stone steps and into the huge twelfth-century cathedral. The massive vestibule, the nave with its tall Gothic arches and the chancel crowned with glowing stained glass passed in front of her eyes like a dream. It wasn’t Lars. She was imagining things. Imagining because deep within her she wanted to see him again?

  Someone brushed her arm. She gave an exaggerated start. Whirling, her eyes wide, she saw a young man standing in front of her who bore no resemblance to Lars at all. Searching for words of apology, she gasped, ‘Unnskyld meg.’

  ‘No sweat,’ he said in cheerful American slang, and turned back to his companion.

  Kristine sank down on the nearest wooden chair. This was lunacy. She couldn’t go conjuring Lars up at every turn; she’d go out of her mind. She took a couple of deep breaths, and gradually the ageless peace of the cathedral calmed her; by the time she had to leave for the ferry she had convinced herself that the man she had seen in the fish market was just another tall Norwegian with streaked blond hair. There were hundreds of them, after all. Slinging her small haversack on her back, she went to get her car.

  She had been lucky enough to find a parking spot near the tourist bureau. She was unlocking her door when, without warning, a hand reached round her and wrested the keys from her grip. ‘Let me do that,’ Lars said unpleasantly, ‘since you’re so good at losing keys.’

  She had not heard even a whisper of his footsteps on the pavement. He was holding her door open. Automatically she climbed in, stashing her haversack, which held juice, fruit and trail mix for her hike, on the back seat. Lars unlocked the passenger door, folded his long body into the seat beside her and said, keeping a firm hold on the key-ring, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m catching the ferry to Tau.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to resist Pulpit Rock,’ he said, tossing the keys into her lap. ‘There’s no point in taking two cars—let’s go.’

  From the corner of her eye she saw that he was wearing bush trousers and well-worn hiking boots. ‘And what if I don’t want to go with you?’ she said.

  ‘If you can climb quicker than I can, you can lose me on the way up,’ he said coldly. ‘I wouldn’t hang around here; they don’t take long loading the ferry.’

  Kristine put the key in the ignition and pulled out from the kerb. Her instincts had been right: she had seen Lars near the market. Next time she’d do better to trust them.

  She drove on to the ferry, parked on the lower deck, and locked the car again. In a silence that screamed with tension she preceded Lars up the metal steps to the upper deck. Within minutes the ferry pulled away from the stone parapet in a churn of foam. The deck was crowded with tourists, and cameras were already clicking as the ferry navigated the crowded inlet. Lars said with icy precision, ‘I don’t feel like standing here making polite conversation with you and this is no place for the fight I’m spoiling for...I’ll meet you by the car at Tau.’ Without a backward look he edged through the throng lining the gunwales and disappeared inside.

  Kristine let out her pent-up breath in a long sigh. They steamed under a bridge and past some grain elevators, the air cool against her face. It would be a good day for a climb, she thought absently, not too hot.

  The way Lars had sounded, he might just push her over the edge of Pulpit Rock. What had they told her at the tourist bureau? A vertical fall of two thousand feet.

  She wandered up to the bow, the wind whipping colour into her cheeks. Under a cloudy sky the sea was a dull grey, the low islands where sheep roamed slipping past one by one. Before she was ready for it, a loudspeaker announced their approach to Tau. She delayed as long as she could before trailing down to the lower deck, where Lars was waiting near the Fiat. For a moment across the rank of vehicles his eyes met hers, deep-set eyes livid with emotion. She winced away from them and got in the car.

  Almost immediately the ferry bumped into the dock. ‘Turn right when you get off the boat,’ Lars said brusquely, then hid his face in the newspaper he was carrying.

  Kristine was glad enough not to talk, partly because she had no idea what to say, partly because the narrow, winding road required her full attention and the signs for Prekestolen were inconspicuous.

  When she eventually arrived at the hiking trail, she parked in the shade near the kiosk and pulled the keys from the ignition, tossing them in Lars’s lap. ‘You don’t have to climb with me,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got the keys and the car, I can’t run away, can I?’

  He shoved the keys in a buttoned pocket on his trousers and said flatly, ‘I need to climb a mountain or two—it’s called sublimation. Are you ready?’

  Too proud to beg him to stay behind, Kristine reached round for her haversack, very carefully avoiding touching him, and said with noticeable coolness, ‘Yes...would you lock the car, please?’ Not waiting to see if he complied, she headed for the base of the trail, which was an unpretentious path through the trees.

  Lars soon caught up with her. Aware of him treading soft-footed behind her through every nerve she possessed, knowing she couldn’t put up with it for another five minutes, let alone two hours, she stepped sideways into the bushes and said ironically, ‘Why don’t you go ahead? I wouldn’t want to hold you up.’

  For a moment his eyes blazed at her with such primitive fury that she took a step backwards, her feet crunching in the bracken. Then, as if someone had pulled a curtain across a window, there was only a pair of blank, steel-blue eyes. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  But he adjusted his pace so that he was always in her sight as they wound steadily upwards through groves of jackpine, birch and mountain ash. Ferns rustled in the breeze. Far above them ravens swooped across the grey sky, their strident cries echoing among the cliffs.

  They crossed a swamp on a boardwalk. Kristine sniffed the rich, peaty odour, trying to drag her eyes away from the lean, easy grace of Lars’s stride; he looked as though he could keep it up for hours, she thought, batting at a mosquito circling her ear. And then they reached the base of a cliff and the climb steepened dramatically.

  Halfway up she stopped to get an apple out of her haversack, knowing this was really only an excuse so that she could catch her breath, wishing she could share this small joke with her companion. She held out a second apple to him; he took it with a brief word of thanks, his strong white teeth biting into the flesh. She turned away, staring back the way they had come, where she could see the tiny figures of four people crossing the bog.

  Lars tossed the core into the woods and started off again. Red-painted arrows marked the path across stretches of rock scraped bare by long-ago glaciers, while clumps of pink heather and yellow saxifrage overhung the dark water of mountain ponds. On the horizon rank upon rank of granite cliffs stretched as far as Kristine could see.

  She would have been very happy were it not for Lars. His long legs were scaling the rocks as easily as if they were the steps of the cathedral, she thought petulantly, already feeling the pull at the backs of her knees and her thighs. Through his T-s
hirt she could see the ripple of his muscles as he pulled himself up a crevice; she found herself staring at his taut wrists as he gripped a rock for a lever, at the line of his thigh where the fabric of his bush trousers was pulled tight, at his thick hair disarrayed by the wind.

  Because her attention was more on him than on what she was doing, her toes slipped on a patch of gravel and her knee bumped hard against a granite boulder. Although she bit off her cry of pain almost before it began, Lars turned instantly. Swiftly he reached down, took her hand, and drew her upright. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  She could not bear the warmth of his palm on hers, the easy strength with which he had taken her weight. She snatched her hand back, rubbing it down the side of her jeans, and cried raggedly, ‘Don’t touch me!’

  His mouth thinned. ‘Do I repel you so much?’ he snarled. ‘So much that you have to steal and lie to me?’

  The heat of that brief touch was still searing Kristine’s palm. She gave a wild laugh. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘What else am I to think? You lie to me about my car, you take my keys so I can’t follow you—why did you let me kiss you on the beach if that’s the way you feel? Are you such a good actress that you can fake passion, melt in a man’s arms when all the time you can’t wait for him to leave you alone? To get out of your sight? Is that what you’re like?’

  He took a half-step towards her. Flinching from the fury in his face, she stumbled against the same boulder, almost losing her balance. Again he reached out for her; but then, his fingers only inches from her arm, he stopped. His hand fell to his side. ‘I’m a fool!’ he said with savage emphasis. ‘What in God’s name am I doing, chasing a woman halfway across the country, a woman who hates me to touch her—?’

  Kristine couldn’t stand to see the self-contempt in his face. She said with frantic truth, ‘Try another version, Lars! Try that I liked your touch, your kisses so much that I was frightened out of my skin—so I lied to you and stole your keys and ran away from you. Try that one.’