Travelling Light

by Sandra Field

  It could not by any stretch of the imagination be called travelling light.

  The finger wagged right in front of her nose this time. But you’ve joined the human race, it said. You’ve taken the risk of falling in love. Remember the monolith? You’ve just become part of it.

  She remembered something else: the incredible surge of joy when she had acknowledged to herself that yes, she did love Lars. Hugging the memory of that joy to her, trying not to think about Dalsnibba, she leaned back against the head-rest.

  Someone was shaking her arm. ‘The driver says this is your stop,’ the elderly lady in the next seat was explaining. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss it.’

  Mumbling her thanks, Kristine staggered up the aisle, waited while the driver got her backpack from the baggage compartment, and watched the bus drive away in a cloud of ill-smelling exhaust.

  She was standing outside a petrol station that fortunately was still open, for while she had been asleep dusk had fallen. Inside she got directions to Charles Franklin’s house in Lambourne, and bought a chocolate bar and a bottle of pop—all that the petrol station offered in the way of sustenance. Then she hitched her backpack in place and set off down the road.

  The village was charming, yellow light spilling from square-paned windows in salt-box houses, gardens smelling sweetly of honeysuckle and nicotiana. As she tramped along, the houses grew further apart, set among oak and elm trees amid gently rolling hills loud with crickets. Her frayed nerves relaxed a little.

  She passed a crossroads and began counting the houses on the left, the third of which belonged to Charles Franklin. It had a trimmed privet hedge and an elaborately carved gate, and was larger than the other houses. It was also well lit and had a car parked in front of the double garage. So someone was home.

  Her heart racing in her chest as though she had just climbed Prekestolen, Kristine started up the cobblestone driveway. Two black Labrador retrievers came bounding to meet her, barking loudly. She let them sniff her hands, then approached the front door, where pink roses were clustered on a trellis. Love is many-petalled like a rose, she thought numbly, and pressed the bell.

  After an agonisingly long wait a woman’s voice called, ‘Coming!’ The outside light was turned on, the door opened, and the entire doorway was filled with a very large woman clad in a voluminous apron. She said comfortably, ‘Can I help you?’

  She exuded kindness, smelled faintly of newly baked bread, and was presumably the housekeeper. ‘I believe Mr Franklin has a guest called Lars Bronstad,’ Kristine said awkwardly. ‘From Norway. I wonder if I could speak to him for a minute, please?’

  ‘Well, you could if he was home, dear. But the four of them went out for the evening.’

  ‘Four of them?’ Kristine repeated blankly.

  ‘That’s right. Mr and Mrs Franklin, and Mr Bronstad, and Mr Franklin’s sister Heidi. They probably won’t be back until midnight; it was a party at a neighbour’s.’

  Heidi... Kristine’s imagination supplied her with an image of a willowy brunette, cultivated, charming, and rich. ‘I—I’ll come back in the morning, then,’ she stammered, already backing away from the door.

  ‘Leave me your name, dear, and I’ll tell him you were here. Or you could wait inside with Jack and me; we’re watching the quiz shows and you’d be more than welcome.’

  Kristine took another step back and nearly tripped over one of the dogs, who was sniffing her trainers with a connoisseur’s thoroughness. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that; thank you anyway,’ she said with a false smile. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

  Perhaps.

  ‘Let Jack drive you back to the village, then. It’s dark and you shouldn’t be out alone.’

  ‘Truly I’ll be fine,’ Kristine prattled. ‘Thank you so much for your help, you’ve been very kind. Goodbye.’

  She hurried down the driveway and turned right through the gate. She had noticed a coppice of trees alongside a brook near the crossroads; she’d sleep there and in the morning she’d get the bus back to New York.

  Lars was at a party with another woman.

  Tears of exhaustion and misery stung Kristine’s eyes. That he had every right to be at a party with anyone he chose because she, Kristine, had sent him away, was immaterial. As jealousy sank its ugly claws into her, she walked faster, irrationally terrified that he and the beautiful Heidi—because she would, of course, be beautiful—might come home early and discover her.

  She could not bear to see him with another woman.

  There were no houses in the immediate vicinity of the trees, which were surrounded by hayfields; the brook chuckled to itself in the darkness. Wanting only to be out of sight of the road, Kristine clambered over the ditch and wove her way in among the shelter of the trees. Only then did she ease her pack to the ground and take out her flashlight.

  She was too tired to set up her tent, and by the look of the stars spangling the sky she didn’t have to worry about rain. After pumping up her lightweight mattress, she spread her sleeping-bag on top of it, slid into it fully dressed, and pulled it up to her chin.

  Over her head the canopy of leaves rustled together secretively; from upstream the shrill peeping of frogs pierced the thick blackness of the night. Lars didn’t love her any more, she thought with utter clarity. No matter what Margrethe and Jakob and Harald had told her, love was as changeable as the tides, as fickle as the wind. Roses didn’t bloom forever; the petals shrivelled and died.

  Lonelier than she had ever been in all her twenty-three years, Kristine felt tears seep down her cheeks and soak into her sleeping-bag. Then, as suddenly as if she had been hit on the head, she fell into a stunned sleep.

  * * *

  The bear came closer, its small dark eyes only inches away, freezing her into immobility. Its lips were drawn back from twin rows of yellow-white teeth. Its black nose came closer, snuffling at her throat...

  With a shriek of fear, Kristine sat upright, pushing at the black head that had buried itself in her throat, animal breath rank in her face.

  The Labrador retriever sank back on its haunches, its tongue lolling from its jaws, its coat merging with the blackness of the night. From down the slope a man’s voice shouted through the trees, ‘Kristine! Is that you?’

  She heard the scrape of a shoe against rock. Dry leaves rattled underfoot as the beam of a flashlight lanced through the branches. Pulling her sleeping-bag against her chest, Kristine huddled into its down folds, not sure whether the bear had been real and she was dreaming the dog, or whether reality was indeed the Franklins’ black dog and the approach of Lars.

  Then a man accompanied by a second dog stumbled into the little clearing where she had arranged her sleeping-bag, and the beam of light struck her full in the face. Blinded, panic-stricken, she gasped, ‘Go away!’

  ‘Kristine—thank God I’ve found you.’

  Lars fell to his knees beside her, dropping the flashlight into the grass as he reached out for her. She struck him away. ‘I didn’t ask you to come looking for me—I should never have come,’ she cried incoherently. ‘Go back to the Franklins and forget you ever saw me!’

  The torch, although lying in the grass, supplied enough light for her to see Lars sit back on his heels, staring at her as though she had gone out of her mind. ‘If you didn’t want to see me, what in God’s name are you doing in the Catskills when I left you in Fjaerland?’

  ‘I thought I loved you so I came after you to tell you and then I found out you’ve already started going out with someone else,’ she said, the words tumbling over one another. ‘So I was right all along—love doesn’t last, I knew it didn’t.’

  Lars said with deadly quiet, ‘Will you kindly explain to me what you mean by you thought you loved me? Either you do or you don’t. It’s not something you turn on and off like the kitchen tap.’

  ‘You’re darn right it isn’t! So how come you’ve done exactly that, Lars Bronstad?’

  ‘I haven’t!’ he roared.

  The fir
st black dog butted against Lars’s chest, whimpering uneasily and nearly overbalancing him; the second had stretched out across the sleeping-bag and was snoring asthmatically. Kristine said pettishly, ‘There’s no need to yell.’

  ‘If I have to yell to get your attention, then I’ll yell,’ Lars retorted. ‘I loved you yesterday, Kristine Kleiven, I love you today, and I’ll love you tomorrow. In fact, it would appear to be my fate to love you until the day I die. So how dare you accuse me of turning you off like the kitchen tap?’

  ‘You went to a party last night with someone called Heidi,’ Kristine announced. ‘And don’t bother denying it.’

  ‘I went to a party with Heidi tonight,’ he corrected her. ‘It is now eleven forty-five exactly. I came home early because I didn’t have the stomach for cocktail small talk, and was told by Mrs Bentley that a young woman with a backpack, blonde hair, and eyes blue as the sky—Mrs Bentley is a true romantic—had been asking for me and had then left without saying where she was going. You’re the only woman I know who fits that description, so I’ve been searching for you ever since.’

  ‘And where’s Heidi?’ Kristine snapped.

  ‘Still at the party, for all I care.’

  ‘You really don’t care?’

  ‘I really don’t care! Heidi’s an attractive and pleasant woman and if I never saw her again I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep over her.’ Lars’s voice roughened. ‘Whereas if you were to vanish again right now, I’d—oh, hell, Kris, I’ve missed you the last week as though you’re my life’s blood.’

  ‘But you told me I couldn’t give you what you wanted,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘I know you can,’ he said forcefully.

  As the black dog leaned against Lars’s shoulder and closed its eyes in bliss, another piece of Kristine’s definition of love fell into place—a piece called trust. Because she instantly believed Lars. He hadn’t stopped loving her; of course he hadn’t.

  Thoroughly ashamed of herself, she said, ‘I left Oslo—well, I guess it was just last night, although it feels like a week ago. And then I missed you at the hotel by only a couple of hours, and by the time I got here I was so tired I could hardly stand up. When the housekeeper told me you were at a party with another woman, it was horrible, I felt just awful. But I should never have doubted you.’

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ Lars said in a strange voice.

  ‘Your grandmother.’ Kristine gave him a small smile. ‘She thinks I’m more interesting than Sigrid.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’ Lars pushed the dog away. ‘So you came from Fjaerland to Oslo to New York to Lambourne just to find me?’ Kristine nodded, wishing she knew what he was thinking. ‘Why, Kristine?’ he asked. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘I was so unhappy after you left,’ she muttered, picking at the hem of the sleeping-bag. ‘I can’t really explain, Lars...I don’t think I understood what love is all about; I was too afraid of it to admit that I’d fallen in love with you, so I—’

  ‘You have?’ he interrupted.

  ‘Of course, that’s what I’m trying to tell you...when you look at me like that, I can’t even think straight,’ she added, her voice wavering shamefully.

  ‘Come here,’ Lars said. ‘Explanations can wait.’

  He put his arms around her and kissed her with a combination of hunger, happiness and humility that touched Kristine to the core of her being; and once again she felt that upwelling of incredible happiness that she loved Lars and was loved by him.

  Her foot was falling asleep where the dog was lying on it, and the other dog had thrust its nose between them, whining and flailing its tail from side to side. Before Lars could speak, Kristine said, ‘I love you, Lars,’ and heard the words hang softly in the cool night air. They were the right words, she thought. The only words.

  His face changed. He said huskily, ‘I never thought I’d hear you say that to me. I love you too, elskling.’ Then, shoving the dog’s head aside, he kissed her again.

  ‘I’m so sorry I sent you away,’ Kristine said, between kisses that brought her body to life and filled her heart with rapture. ‘I think I needed to be without you in order to understand what you mean to me. Does that make any sense?’

  ‘Anything that brought you back to me makes sense,’ he said forcefully. ‘I love you more than I can say, I’ll marry you as soon as—’ He stopped suddenly, raising his head. ‘You will marry me, Kristine?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she answered with a radiant smile.

  ‘Good,’ he said, stroking her breasts through her shirt and leaving a trail of kisses down her throat. ‘Right now all I want is to take you to bed, and one dog’s far too interested in us to let us make love and the other one is taking up most of the sleeping-bag...you do realise I won’t be able to get you to a hotel until tomorrow night?’

  She could feel the smooth play of his muscles under his shirt, while the clean male scent of his skin inundated her with memories. ‘When your grandmother told me you wouldn’t be home until October, that seemed like forever. But now all of a sudden tomorrow night is forever.’

  ‘I think it’s called relativity,’ Lars said, laughter warming his voice in the way she had never forgotten. ‘Something to do with Einstein.’

  ‘I do love you, Lars!’ she exclaimed, and tilted her head back to laugh in sheer happiness. ‘Margrethe explained it best—love, she said, is like the many petals of a rose that together make a flower of great beauty. So I trust you, and I know sometimes we’ll fight, and I know too that we complete each other.’ She traced the line of his mouth with her fingertip. ‘I want to make love with you, and I’ll want to bear our child...so many petals and none of them complete without the rest.’

  ‘Neither of us complete without the other,’ Lars added quietly. ‘I learned that in the last few days.’

  ‘We’ll still be travelling light,’ Kristine said with deep conviction. ‘Light of heart and side by side.’

  ‘The best way to travel.’ Lars grinned. ‘I got the job by the way, so we’ll also be travelling literally.’

  ‘Which will give me lots of chances to learn languages,’ she said contentedly. ‘I really want to do that.’

  A rabbit rustled through the undergrowth on the other side of the stream. The first dog pricked up its ears and crossed Kristine’s sleeping-bag in one leap. The second sprang to its feet, yelping with excitement, and followed the first through the stream, to be swallowed up in the darkness. Lars said, reaching for the zip on her sleeping-bag, ‘I think we should take full advantage of their absence. Tomorrow night’s too long to wait and we don’t have to make an appearance at the Franklins’ for at least another hour.’

  ‘Gather ye rose petals while ye may,’ Kristine misquoted with a breathless laugh.

  When the two dogs came back three-quarters of an hour later, having chased the rabbit with much delight if no success, Lars and Kristine were just starting down the hill. They were walking hand in hand and side by side.

  Travelling together.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-8402-9

  Travelling Light

  Copyright © 1993 by Sandra Field

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