by Sandra Field
‘You flatter yourself,’ she snapped, and grabbed a handful of cutlery from the rack. Three of the knives slipped through the cloth and clattered to the floor. She bent to pick them up, adding wretchedly, ‘I’m not normally bitchy; what’s wrong with me?’
Lars pulled her to her feet, getting suds on the sleeves of her sweater, and kissed her with a combination of frustration and desire that caused her to drop the knives and the cloth and to clutch him with unashamed fervour. Then he released her. ‘Maybe the sight of all that ice will cool us down,’ he grated and turned back to the sink.
She picked up the knives and dropped them into the water again. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
He lifted Karoline’s bread pan. ‘Why don’t we take off for a couple of days, Kristine? I’d like to show you Dalsnibba and Geiranger...then we could come back here.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
His grin was boyish. ‘I like a woman who knows her own mind.’
‘This has nothing to do with my mind, Lars,’ Kristine said primly, and put the cutlery away in the drawer.
Twenty minutes later they took the path that led through the trees to Supphellebreen, Lars setting a fast pace that Kristine was more than happy to emulate. If she tired herself out she might get a decent night’s sleep, something she hadn’t had since she had left the cottage.
Getting dependent on Lars, Kristine? a mocking voice whispered in her ear. That’s not travelling light.
Go away, she adjured it. This is about sex. Nothing else. Just sex.
As she bounded incautiously up the slope, a cedar tree dumped a day’s worth of raindrops on the back of her shirt. And then she came out into the open and saw in front of her the high crest of the glacier at the top of the mountain. At the base of the cliff was another great mound of ice, dirty ice pock-marked with fallen rocks, connected to the glacier by waterfalls that tumbled down rifts in the rock. A river swirled around the cliff, the water pale as milk in the twilight.
With a crack like thunder a piece of ice broke free of the glacier and crashed down the mountainside.
‘Some of that ice is five thousand years old,’ Lars said. ‘They’ve had as many as fifteen avalanches here in twenty minutes.’
Kristine gazed at his profile, which merged into the rock behind him. Somehow he had made peace with his past in a way she, so far, had not. He had gone to the deserts of Sudan and the jungles of Malaysia to do so; whereas she had come to Norway...
Over the ceaseless splash of the river she heard a new sound, a strange, high-pitched sound like that of an animal in distress. ‘What’s that?’ she said sharply.
‘Jakob told me there’s a herd of horses near the foot of the glacier—let’s take a look.’
Lars began pushing his way through the tangle of tall shrubs that lay between them and the river. When they reached the edge, Kristine saw a wide strip of grass lapped by the pallid waters of the river. Milling around on the grass were the dark shapes of several horses, the bells around their necks clanging, their wild neighs splitting the dusk. She also saw, with a surge of pure rage, the reason for their distress.
Two men were standing on the riverbank, men in black trousers and leather jackets. They were firing rocks at the horses, and even as she watched a rock struck a foal in the ribs. It squealed with pain and one of the men laughed raucously, bending to pick up another stone and wading out into the river to get closer to the horses.
‘We can cross down river and get behind them,’ Lars rapped. ‘Come on.’
They raced along the bank, then waded the river; although the water was, not surprisingly, extremely cold, it did nothing to cool Kristine’s anger. They ended up behind the two men, both of whom were now in the water. The mare was trying to coax the foal into the river on the far side of the grass; a rock struck her flank and she whinnied with fury.
Kristine had spent a lot of time outdoors with her brothers, partly in an effort to get them away from the oppressive atmosphere of the house, partly to escape from it herself. She could climb trees with the agility of a monkey and was a mean hand with a catapult. She now picked up a round stone, hefted it in her palm, and fired it with deadly accuracy at the nearer of the two men. It hit him on the back of his neck. He yelped with pain, swung around to see where the rock had come from, and lost his footing. Grabbing at empty air in a futile attempt to keep his balance, he sat down hard in the river.
When the other man turned to see what had happened, her second rock struck him in the belly. He doubled over, slipped, and banged his elbow against a boulder. His bellow of outrage gave her immense satisfaction.
Lars said, ‘You could take your place in a Viking ship any day of the week.’
As she looked over at him, the fire of battle still blazing in her eyes, he reached out for her and kissed her mouth. ‘I like you, Kristine Kleiven,’ he said, his voice midway between passion and laughter. ‘And now it’s my turn. That little foal could have broken its leg.’
With vicious strength he threw a stone that hit the first man on the shoulder as he was struggling to his feet. Lars’s next shot glanced off the second man’s knee. He and Kristine were invisible through the screen of bushes on the riverbank, and she was not surprised when the two men started scrambling with ungainly haste for the shore. Lars said softly, ‘They’re not hikers...let’s at least get their licence number and report them. The parking lot’s this way.’
She followed him through the bushes, ducking low, branches scratching her bare legs. Then they were running across the grass past some trees. From the corner of her eye Kristine caught the shine of metal and veered to the right, straining to see through the shadows as darkness blended trees and grass and rocks into the flatness of night. Motorbikes, she thought. That’s what I saw.
Before her brain could process that there were three bikes, not two, she ran straight into the third man, the breath knocked from her lungs. As he grabbed at her, she heard the other two men shout something behind her, and twisted to free herself. But her face was jammed into a shirt that smelled of stale sweat, and the man had a grasp like a gorilla.
Her Swiss army knife was on the bureau in her bedroom at the farm.
Then everything happened very fast. A dark shape loomed behind her assailant, there was a flurry of blows, in the course of which she was unceremoniously dropped, and Lars gasped in mingled aggression and amusement, ‘Run for it, Kristine—back the way we came.’
The other two men were crashing through the bushes towards them. She grabbed the ignition key from the nearest bike, memorised the number on the second one, and as the owner of the dirty shirt thudded to the ground under the impact of Lars’s fist she dashed through a gap in the trees, Lars close on her heels.
They ran hard, keeping to the shelter of the undergrowth as much as they could. When they reached the river, Lars waded in, taking Kristine’s hand because the current was deep. He pulled her up the opposite bank and into the black-shadowed alders, put his arms around her and kissed her again.
Her chest heaving, Kristine wrapped her arms around his neck, kissed him back very explicitly, and knew she would have made love with him here on the ground in the cold night air. Lars muttered, ‘We shouldn’t hang around; I wouldn’t put it past them to come after us...I got two of the plate numbers, what about you?’
‘One set of numbers and one key,’ she said, triumphantly dangling it in front of his nose.
He gave a sputter of laughter. ‘You’ve got a thing about keys, haven’t you? I’m glad you’re on my side.’
‘Thank you for rescuing me,’ Kristine added. ‘He needed a bath—ugh.’
Lars flexed his muscles. ‘About time I proved my manhood.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there are other ways you could do that.’
‘Tomorrow night we’ll stay in Geiranger,’ he said forcibly, taking her hand and leading her through the bushes. ‘Four nights of celibacy have been more than enough.’
For her as well. Her wet shorts were cli
nging to her legs and water was slurping in the toes of her trainers; shivering, Kristine wondered how she would ever manage without him on the other side of the Atlantic.
CHAPTER TEN
THE final descent to Geiranger was a series of hairpin turns down the side of a mountain, with a spectacular view of the vertical cliffs and azure waters of the fjord. As Lars drove slowly down the hill, he glanced at Kristine’s hands, which were clenched in her lap. ‘Not much longer,’ he said.
‘I’m OK, really...did you ski again after the avalanche, Lars?’
‘I made myself go skiing two days after the funeral—or else I might never have gone.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Bestemor was outraged that I could do anything so frivolous when I should have been home mourning.’
He took another sharp turn, his eyes on the road. ‘Since then I’ve skied in Switzerland and Austria and even managed to enjoy it...see that building way down the fjord, by the water’s edge? That’s where our cabin is. It’ll be quieter there than in the centre of town.’
She had to go back to Canada soon, Kristine thought with preternatural clarity. But she wasn’t leaving today. She still had tonight with Lars. Tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night before they went back to Fjaerland. That was future enough.
In the double bed in the cabin by the water’s edge she and Lars came together that night in an explosion of feeling that overwhelmed Kristine with its primitive force. That she was also frightened by the strength of her own emotions she did her best to hide both from Lars and from herself. She slept in Lars’s arms, she woke to his lovemaking, and in a daze of physical satiation she ate a late breakfast in the little restaurant overlooking the glassy waters of the fjord.
A spider had spun a web between two shrubs just outside the window; dewdrops clung to it, and the delicate threads trembled lightly as the spider made some repairs. The web’s design was exquisite. Yet as Kristine gazed at it an unwary moth was suddenly trapped in its sticky mucus. So it was also lethal, that beautiful web. Like the Viking ships, she thought, and heard Lars say in an amused voice, ‘Kristine, for the third time, would you like more coffee?’
With a little start she saw that he was holding the china coffee-pot poised over her cup, his fingers curled around the handle. Fingers that had touched her body in ways that a month ago would have been beyond her imagining. She felt hot colour creep up her neck and mumbled, ‘Yes, please.’
Some of the coffee sloshed into the saucer. Lars muttered something under his breath and said abruptly, ‘Let’s go to Dalsnibba this morning; the sky’s clear so it would be a good day to be on top of a mountain.’
‘As long as I don’t have to climb it,’ she said darkly.
He chuckled. ‘You can drive right to the top. It’s not like Prekestolen.’
Nor was it. A dirt road wound its way up the side of the mountain to the peak, where a mile above sea level there was a large car park. As Kristine got out of the car, she hastily reached for her jacket and pulled it on over her sweater, because the wind had a winter’s bite to it. Then Lars led the way out of the car park on to the rocky slopes of the mountain-top.
Kristine looked around her in awe. Not a tree or a shrub was in sight—only a tumble of grey rock, split by frost, worn by weather. In cracks and crevices tiny plants huddled from the wind, clinging to the scraps of soil. And all around her, at the same level as she, were the peaks of the surrounding mountains, smoothed by distance, their slopes coated with a dazzle of snow and ice.
Lars held her hand while she peered over the edge of Dalsnibba to see the way they had come, the tidy green fields of the valley a dizzying distance below, the road a thin grey thread that doubled back on itself time and again. Geiranger Fjord looked impossibly tiny, a teal-blue puddle under the blue sky. They then walked away from most of the other tourists to a lake whose clear cold water slapped in noisy waves against thick chunks of translucent ice.
A few high clouds had appeared in the sky, dappling the landscape with shadow. Kristine sat down on a rounded boulder and took a deep breath of the achingly pure air. ‘This is a wonderful place,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad we came, Lars.’
He had been gazing around him at the sweep of the mountains, snow, and sky, and almost unwillingly brought his eyes back to her face. The sun slanting across his features, he said, ‘I’ve often imagined that a marriage could be like this—space and immensity, height, depth and breadth...’
Kristine’s muscles tensed, her nails digging into the rock, for he had taken her by surprise and she knew him well enough to sense that this was no idle conversation. I don’t want to talk about the future, she thought, and said non-committally, ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at marriage.’
‘Room to breathe and room to grow.’
In the sunlight his eyes were more blue than grey, demanding a response of her. In a spurt of anger, kicking at the shards of stone beneath her feet, she said, ‘Marriage can also be like this—rocky ground where nothing grows because there’s no soil, no nourishment.’
‘The most beautiful Arctic flowers bloom here in the spring.’
Her nostrils flared. ‘The mountain-top’s covered with snow ten months of the year.’
He took two steps closer, resting one foot on the boulder that she was sitting on, leaning his arms on his knee. ‘Let’s cut out the fancy language, Kris. You know what I’m leading up to—I want you to marry me.’
With immense effort she did not back away from him. Shaking her head, she said in a stifled voice, ‘I can’t do that, Lars—I don’t want to.’
He said quietly, ‘There’s a word we’ve never used between us, isn’t there? A word I’ve longed to say when you’ve been lying beside me in the night, or when I’ve woken to find you curled into my body in the morning...love, Kristine. You see, I love you.’ Briefly a smile lit his face. ‘Maybe I have ever since you did your best to cripple me in the park in Oslo, I don’t know. I do know I love you now and that I’ll still love you ten and twenty and thirty years from now. And that I want to live with you at my side night and day, and to share with you the joy of children, and to be together for the rest of our lives.’
A lump as cold as ice had lodged itself in Kristine’s breast and she was having difficulty breathing. ‘Don’t do this, Lars—please don’t spoil everything,’ she pleaded, warding him off with a gesture that spoke volumes.
He leaned a little further forward, his eyes pinioning her to the rock. ‘It won’t spoil anything, I swear it won’t.’
She covered her face with her hands, unable to bear the intensity of his gaze. ‘I don’t even want to hear that word love!’
‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know I was falling in love with you.’
Kristine dropped her hands, staring at him with something like hatred. ‘You said we’d have fun together, that’s all. Share fun and laughter and adventure. We’ve done that—and now you’re ruining it.’
‘So you thought this was just a game?’ he said incredulously. ‘Something to while away the summer, a month-long affair and then we’d go our separate ways?’
‘I never asked you to fall in love with me,’ she said defiantly. ‘In fact, I did everything I could to discourage you. I was certainly honest with you from the start about how I feel about marriage.’
With a careful lack of emphasis Lars said, ‘And nothing’s changed for you in the last three weeks, Kristine? Our stay at the cottage—that didn’t show you that love between a man and a woman can be full of joy and intimacy?’
Kristine bit her lip, remembering all too clearly some of the intimacy they had shared, in bed and out. Clutching at straws, she said, ‘I can’t possibly marry you—I’d go crazy living at Asgard.’
‘My grandmother’s going to leave Asgard to my brother—that’s the other thing she and I sorted out after you left Oslo. I’ve never wanted Asgard as he does. That’s why I applied for the UN job.’
Furious with him for so neatly undermining her position, wishing she was a
nywhere else but marooned on a mountain peak, Kristine cried, ‘I don’t want to get married, Lars! How many times do I have to tell you that?’
He straightened, took her by the wrist and drew her to her feet. Then he said with an air of calm logic that infuriated her, ‘We wouldn’t have to get married right away—we could live together for a while if that would make you feel better.’
‘You’re missing the point; I’m not into commitment of any kind,’ she responded stormily. ‘Yes, we’ve had an affair, and it’s been wonderful; I’ve—’
He cut through her words. ‘You said something to me the very first time we made love, Kristine...you said you wanted me to be myself with you. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Anna’s fears had tamed Lars, diminishing him from the man he was meant to be. She, Kristine, had never wanted to do that.
‘I’ve been myself with you—you’ve freed me from the trap of the past. But if you truly want me to be myself you must accept that I love you, because that’s part of me. I love you, and I want to marry you.’
Feeling besieged on every side, she said helplessly, ‘I know I said that, and I meant it—but just because you love me doesn’t mean that I automatically love you back. Life doesn’t work that way; it isn’t that tidy and predictable.’
His mouth tightened at her words. She hated herself for saying them; yet they had had to be said. ‘Please,’ she added, ‘can’t we go now? And forget this ever happened?’
He dropped her wrist, taking a step back. ‘You might be able to forget it,’ he said grimly, ‘I can’t. Don’t you see what’s going on here, Kristine? Two days after the avalanche I went skiing, because I knew if I didn’t I might never put on a pair of skis again. You’re still hiding your skis in the closet. Yes, your parents had a lousy marriage, and your mother robbed you of your childhood into the bargain—you’ve got every right to be angry with them. But if you cut yourself off from marriage and the chance to have your own child you’re not allowing yourself to heal. The past is running the show...don’t you see that?’