Travelling Light

‘Your cousin isn’t coming back tonight, is he?’

Her lashes flickered. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not until the weekend.’

‘Yet you invite me—a stranger—up to his apartment. Do you go around looking for trouble?’

‘I asked you here to make amends—not to be insulted!’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

She gave him a mocking smile. ‘You didn’t have to accept the invitation, Lars.’

‘A fighter, indeed,’ Lars said, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet, and holding her gaze with his own. ‘I want to see you again. Tomorrow why don’t we go to the Viking museum at Bygdoy?’

Normally there was nothing Kristine liked better than to tour a city with one of its inhabitants. ‘No, thank you,’ she said firmly.

‘Every visitor to Oslo should go there.’

‘In that case I shall do so. On my own.’

His jaw tightened infinitesimally. ‘How long are you staying in Oslo?’

‘Not long.’

‘Then what’s the harm in one outing?’ he asked, his smile deliberately high-voltage.

Fighting against his charm, she said, ‘I travel light.’

‘I’m not asking you to bring your cousin.’

In spite of herself her lips quirked. ‘Earlier you called me foolish. I think it would be extremely foolish of me to accept your invitation.’

‘Merely high-spirited.’

‘You have an answer for everything and I need that beer,’ Kristine said feelingly, and marched into the kitchen. There she perched on a stool by the counter and launched a determined discussion of Ibsen’s plays. Lars obligingly followed her lead. They moved to Grieg’s music and drank one beer each. Then Lars stood up. Moving towards the door, he said, ‘What time will I pick you up tomorrow?’

‘You’re taking it for granted that I’m going with you!’

He leaned against the doorpost, his body a long, lazy curve. His blue eyes were laughing at her again. ‘That would be very foolish of me,’ he said.

If she were sensible, she’d say no and oust this man from her life as violently as he had entered it. ‘I’ll go,’ she said crossly. ‘Ten-thirty.’

‘Good.’ Lars pushed himself away from the door and crossed the hall to the main entrance. Pulling one of the tall double doors open, he said, ‘Lock this behind me, won’t you? I hope you sleep well.’ Then the door shut and he was gone.

Kristine, who had been pondering what she would do were he to try and kiss her goodnight, gaped at the gleaming wood panels, said a very rude word, and hoped she wouldn’t behave as atypically during the rest of her stay in Norway as she had on the first day.

CHAPTER TWO

KRISTINE slept poorly. She got up early the next morning, washed out some clothes and hung them on Harald’s balcony, and soaked in the jacuzzi with a gloriously scented bubble bath that she suspected must belong to the owner of the négligé. She then dressed in her blue shorts with her favourite flowered shirt, breakfasted on the less dubious remains in the refrigerator, and went out to buy some groceries.

She had woken with Lars very much on her mind. But in the bright morning sunshine his effect on her last night began to seem the product of fright and an over-active imagination. He was only a man, after all. She would visit the Viking museum with him, there was no harm in that, and then they would go their separate ways. Jauntily she crossed the street to the market.

On her way back she dropped into the post office, finding to her delight that there was a letter in general delivery from Paul, her youngest and favourite brother, to whom she had mentioned the possibility that she might go to Oslo. Kristine sat down in the sun on a stone wall near Harald’s street and tore the letter open.

Paul at eighteen was in love with basketball and women, in that order; he was putting himself through university on athletic scholarships and was now at a summer training session that happily was co-educational. After a two-page description of a centre-forward called Lisa, he reported on the duty visit he had made to their parents recently. Mum was the same; Dad was suing the next-door neighbour for building a fence that infringed on his property.

Kristine let the closely written pages fall to her lap and stared blindly at the ground. She had done the right thing to leave the farm two years ago; as far as her family was concerned she had more than paid her dues. Yet not a letter came from home that she didn’t feel guilty...

A shadow fell across the letter and a deep male voice said, ‘Bad news?’

Kristine gave a nervous start. Raising her eyes, she was presented with a close-up view of long muscular legs, navy shorts, and a shirt clinging to a flat belly. Lars. The gouge in his arm looked worse in daylight than it had last night. More guilt, she thought wildly, clutching at the thin sheets of airmail paper.

Lars sat down beside her on the wall, put an arm around her and said, ‘What’s wrong, Kristine?’

His solicitude unnerved her almost as much as the warm weight of his arm. She shoved the pages of Paul’s letter back into the envelope. ‘Nothing. Just a letter from one of my brothers...I haven’t seen him for two years.’

Lars glanced at the stamp. ‘You left Canada two years ago and you’ve been travelling ever since?’ She nodded, her head bent. ‘Are you running from something—is that why you travel light?’

She was conscious of an irrational longing to pour out the whole sorry story to him. But that would be breaking a self-imposed rule she had never before been tempted to break. ‘I’ve already told you my private life is off-limits, Lars,’ she said more sharply than she had intended. She got to her feet, moving from the protection of his arm to stand alone. It was, she supposed, a symbolic action. Despite a father, a mother and four brothers, she had been standing alone most of her life.

And glad to do so, she thought fiercely. Stooping, she picked up the groceries. ‘Once I’ve put these away, we can go.’

Lars leaned forward and neatly took one of the bags from her. Then he said in deliberate challenge, ‘Now you’re really travelling light. Because you’re letting me take some of the weight.’

‘That’s not what I mean by it,’ she flashed. ‘I travel alone, Lars—that’s what I mean.’

‘Not with me, you don’t! When you’re with me, we travel together.’

The wind was playing with his hair. He looked as if he had slept as little as she, and on what was only their second meeting he was pushing his way inside boundaries that Philippe, Andreas and Bill had never once breached. ‘Then we won’t travel at all,’ Kristine announced, her blue eyes openly unfriendly.

‘Yes, we will. Because you know as well as I do how we met—we met because you screamed for help.’

She glared at him, visited by the mad urge to scream for help again. ‘That’s all very clever,’ she snorted, starting off down the street, ‘but you can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do!’

‘I never thought otherwise,’ Lars said mildly.

She stamped her foot in exasperation. ‘For goodness’ sake let’s talk about something else. Tell me about the Vikings, since we’re going to this museum. A good honest Viking with rape and pillage on his mind would be a lot easier to cope with than you, Lars Bronstad.’

He stopped dead on the street and gave her a comprehensive survey from her over-bright eyes to her slim, tanned ankles. ‘You certainly bring out the Viking in me,’ he retorted, and watched as the flush in her cheeks deepened.

‘Just don’t even think of acting on it,’ she threatened.

‘Not here. Not now.’

‘Not ever. Anywhere.’

A transient gleam of humour in his eyes, he said, ‘I have a philosophic dislike for absolutes.’

Disarmed in spite of herself, Kristine said sweetly, ‘You’d look really cute in one of those metal helmets with the horns on it.’

‘Historians have proved that Vikings didn’t actually wear those helmets,’ he drawled.

‘So is this museum going to give me a whole lot of boring facts instead of romance?’ she riposted, and felt every nerve in her body spring to life at the answering laughter in his face. It was a good thing this was her last meeting with Lars, she thought. He was far more complex—and more dangerous—than any Viking could possibly be.

They arrived at the museum a couple of hours later, after a brief ferry trip and a leisurely stroll up the hill past houses with red-tiled roofs and gardens brilliant with roses and delphiniums. As they bought their tickets Lars said, ‘Just do your best to blank out all the other people,’ and then gestured to her to precede him.

The hall into which she walked had a high arched ceiling and long windows on either side. In the centre of the hall was a ship made of dark wood, a ship whose hull was a graceful sweep from prow to stern. A tall mast stood amidships. High above Kristine’s head the stem and stern ended in carved wooden spirals whose very uselessness emphasised their stark beauty.

She stood stock-still. Lars had told her nothing of what she might expect, allowing the full impact of the ancient vessel to strike her. She walked around it, then climbed the stairs and viewed it from above, with its oarholes and wide, slatted deck open to the elements; she wandered around the other two boats, the burial chamber, and the fierce wooden dragon heads. Finally, with a sigh of repletion she turned to the man who at no point had been far from her side and said quietly, ‘How brave they were, to set out across the sea not even knowing their destination...thirty men in an open ship.’

‘A ship shaped like a woman.’

‘And carved with images of death and war...’ Her face bemused, she smiled at Lars. ‘Thank you...I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.’

As if he couldn’t help himself, he ran one finger down the curve of her cheek. ‘I don’t—’ And then he stopped.

‘What is it?’ she asked in quick concern.

‘Nothing...a silly fancy.’ He glanced down at his watch. ‘It’s time to eat.’

‘You know something? You’re a total mystery to me,’ Kristine said matter-of-factly.

He gave her a crooked smile. ‘I could say the same of you. Food, Kristine.’

They found a restaurant by the water and ate open sandwiches with prawns and lettuce—and argued about aggression and the roots of war. Kristine was thoroughly enjoying herself, for Lars’s intelligence was both wide-ranging and tolerant. It was only his emotions that caused her trouble, she thought wryly. That and his sheer physical attraction: the ease of his long-limbed body in the chair, the gleam of blond hair on his arms, the latent strength in his hand as he poured more water into her glass. She insisted on paying her share of the bill, and then they passed between the closely packed tables on their way out.

Lars curled his fingers round her elbow. Like a stone thrown into water the contact rippled through Kristine’s body. As they emerged on the street, he took her by the hand, another very ordinary gesture that filled her with a complicated mixture of pleasure and panic and reduced her to a tongue-tied silence.

They meandered along the streets until they came to a barrow selling cherries. Lars bought some, holding the bag out to Kristine. They were big ripe cherries like the ones her father used to grow before the orchard went into bankruptcy. She took one, biting into the dark red flesh, instantly transported back to the old farmhouse where as a child it had first become clear to her that something was badly wrong with her parents’ marriage.

Juice was trickling down her chin. Lars said, ‘Hold still,’ and with a folded handkerchief swabbed her face. Then, taking her by surprise, he lowered his head and kissed her.

His lips were firm and tasted of cherries and flooded Kristine with bitter-sweet pain and an ache of longing. She pulled away, muttering frantically, ‘No, no—don’t do that.’

He said with a calmness belied by the rapid pulse at his throat, ‘I’ve been wanting to kiss you ever since last night.’ Then, as if nothing had happened, he offered her the bag of cherries again.

She fought to steady her breathing. How could she make a fuss when for him the kiss was already in the past? Anyway, she was twenty-three years old and both Philippe and Andreas had kissed her before she had made it clear to them that she was not interested in that kind of travelling companion. Determined not to let Lars know that the blood was racing through her veins from that brief touch of his mouth to hers, she helped herself to another cherry.

They took the ferry back to Oslo, past the crowded marina and the bulk of Arnhus Castle, and window-shopped near the city hall. In front of a display of hand-knit sweaters Lars said, ‘Where would you like to have dinner?’

‘I can’t afford to eat out twice in one day,’ Kristine answered lightly.

‘I was inviting you to be my guest,’ he said with a careful lack of emphasis.

Almost glad that he had presented her with a genuine excuse, she said, ‘I can’t do that, Lars. Because I don’t have enough money to return the compliment.’

‘Your company is return enough.’

Not sure whether he was serious or joking, she said, ‘You may think so, I don’t.’

‘Kristine, you’re a visitor in the city I call home. Let me at least introduce you to the delights of sursild and rensdyr.’

‘I’d be using you if I did that, don’t you understand?’

He was clearly making an effort to hold on to his temper. ‘You have a conscience as scrupulous as a cardinal’s!’

‘I’ve met a lot of men in the last two years, and I’ve never wanted to be indebted to any of them.’

‘So I’m to be lumped together with everyone else?’ he grated.

He was startlingly different from everyone else. Which she was not going to share with him. ‘It’s a rule that’s stood me in good stead,’ she said obstinately.

‘Rules are made to be broken.’

‘Not this one.’

Two American tourists in loud checked shirts were listening unashamedly to this interchange. Muttering a pithy Norwegian word under his breath, Lars took her by the arm and steered her out of earshot across the cobblestones. ‘Let’s get something straight,’ he rasped. ‘Which is it—you don’t want to have dinner with me or you can’t afford to have dinner with me?’

Kristine let out her breath in a tiny sigh. It was a strange moment to remember the Viking vessel with its elegant curves and its aggressive crew, its unsettling combination of the feminine and the masculine. She said honestly, ‘I don’t know, Lars. I do know I’m not looking for a summer romance—’

‘Neither am I.’

‘Then what’s the point? I’ll be gone from here by Monday at the latest, and I won’t be back.’

‘I asked if you wanted to have dinner with me. Wanted, Kristine.’

She had never liked lying. ‘Yes, I want to! But—’

‘Then tomorrow night have dinner with me and my grandmother at Asgard. That’s free.’

He had cleverly undercut all her arguments. ‘Right now you look as though you’d rather pick me up and shake me than have dinner with me,’ she remarked.

‘Both,’ he said.

Surely there could be no harm in a family dinner. Besides, it might be her only chance to visit an old Norwegian estate. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘dinner tomorrow night.’

Lars said with a touch of malice, ‘You should be more than a match for my grandmother. I’ll pick you up at the apartment at six-thirty.’ He then wheeled and headed across the square.

Piqued that he should leave her so unceremoniously, angry with herself for minding, Kristine called after him, ‘You’re just not used to being turned down.’

He stopped in his tracks and looked back at her. ‘Kristine, if you’re picturing me as some kind of Viking Don Juan wallowing through a sea of women, you couldn’t be more wrong.’

Even across twenty feet of cobblestone she could feel the pull of his body. ‘Are Norwegian women crazy? Or does winter freeze the blood in their veins?’

A smile was tugging at his mouth. ‘You flatter me.’

Abandoning all caution, she said wickedly, ‘Clearly a female has to leave Norway at the age of two in order to develop a proper appreciation of a sexy man.’

His legs straddled, the sun glinting in his hair, Lars said, ‘Certainly leaving Norway at the age of two has turned this particular female into a raving beauty.’

Her jaw dropped. ‘Who, me?’

He looked around him. ‘No one else here.’

‘Raving beauties wear lots of make-up and elegant clothes and go to the hairdresser,’ Kristine argued. ‘I cut my own hair with my nail scissors—which, incidentally, I lost in the park last night.’

He said evenly, ‘You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’

In the middle of a crowded public square was not an appropriate place for Kristine to be attacked by a sexual desire so strong that she was sure it must be obvious to every tourist within a hundred feet. Although she had never felt this way in her life, she could define exactly what she was feeling. She wanted Lars Bronstad, wanted him in the most basic way a woman could want a man. She said faintly, ‘I—I’ve got to go...I’ll see you tomorrow,’ turned, and ran away from him across the square. Her face was burning, her eyes feverish...what must he think of her?

He thinks you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

She should never have agreed to see him again tomorrow. Never.

* * *

Kristine spent the next morning in the National Gallery, where two Munch portraits caught her imagination. The first was of a young woman in a high-collared black dress, hands submissively folded, hair scraped back; the second was of a wild-haired, half-naked Madonna. Which one was she herself like? Or was she like neither? Did travelling light mean that all her energies were confined to the cage of a narrow black dress?

She had no answers to her own questions. She only knew that the thought of seeing Lars tonight filled her with panic.

In the foyer of the museum she leafed through a phone book. There was no listing for a Lars Bronstad, no mention of Asgard, and she lacked the courage to tackle the operator with her minimal Norwegian. So she had to go to dinner tonight.

She set off down the street to the bookshop to buy a phrase book, trying to rationalise her dilemma. Lars was taking her mind off her grandfather. Once Harald returned—and providing the owner of the négligé did not object—she would spend some time with her cousin. And then she would be leaving Oslo. There was no need for her to panic.

Nevertheless, Kristine got back to the apartment in lots of time to get ready. Because she had only one dress, made of uncrushable jersey in a swirl of blues and lilacs, any indecision as to what to wear was eliminated. She shampooed her hair, soaked in more of the bubble bath, and made up her face with care. Her dress was designed for coolness, baring her shoulders and arms, hanging straight to her hips, then flaring out in graceful folds to her knees. Her shoes were thin-strapped blue sandals.

She looked at herself from all angles in the bathroom mirrors, remembering how she had gone dancing with Andreas in Greece and had flung the dress on without a second thought.

The doorbell rang. Her heart thumped against the wall of her chest and her wide blue eyes stared back at her as if they were not sure who she was any more. Taking a deep breath, Kristine went to open the door.

Lars was wearing a light grey summer suit with a shirt and tie; he looked handsome, formidable, and a total stranger. Her heart performed another uncomfortable manoeuvre in her breast. Ushering him into the foyer, she said weakly, ‘Hello.’

In silence he looked her up and down. The dress touched her gently at breast and hip. Her neck looked long and slender, her eyes huge. He put the bouquet he was carrying on the cherrywood table and rested his hands on her bare shoulders, stroking her flesh with his thumbs. ‘The reason I do not often touch you,’ he said formally, his accent very much in evidence, ‘is because when I do I want only to make love to you.’

The sensuous madonna and the black-clad woman rose in her mind. ‘I’ve never made love with anyone,’ Kristine said.

She saw his instant acceptance of her words. His hands stilled. ‘For whom have you been waiting?’

‘I—I don’t know...not for anyone. I—’

‘You are so beautiful I forget the rest of the world exists,’ Lars said huskily.

If he kissed her now, she would be lost. Kristine stepped back, stammering, ‘Lars, I—I told you I travel light—I don’t want involvement.’

He let his hands travel the length of her bare arms. ‘Sooner or later you’ll tell me why,’ he said.

The force of his will pushed against her defences. ‘I don’t owe you an explanation,’ she cried.

‘I don’t speak of owing or of debts—but of honesty,’ he said fiercely.

She took a deep breath. ‘Your grandmother can’t possibly be as difficult to get along with as you.’

His eyebrow quirked. ‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘By the way, these are roses from Asgard.’ He handed her a tissue-wrapped bouquet of old-fashioned blooms, heavy-petalled and fragrant, adding with his crooked smile, ‘They have thorns as sharp as your Swiss army knife—be careful.’

‘They’re beautiful, thank you.’

She arranged them in a lead-crystal vase, then she and Lars left the apartment. She was somehow not surprised that his car was a Jaguar, painted a sleek dark green. Within minutes they were in the countryside, winding up a low hill between tall, verdant trees. ‘My grandmother owns all this,’ Lars said. ‘The house is around the bend.’

The house was a stone mansion that somehow repelled Kristine by the heaviness of its design and the blank stare of its long ranked windows. ‘Do you live here?’ she asked non-committally as Lars pulled up by the door.

‘For now.’

Which was a less than satisfactory answer, she thought, getting out of the car and walking up front steps guarded by a pair of hideous griffins. A uniformed butler greeted them and led them into the drawing-room. Kristine had a quick impression of dark panelling, ornate furniture and gloomy oil-paintings before Lars said, ‘Bestemor, I’d like you to meet Kristine Kleiven. Kristine, my grandmother, Marta Bronstad.’

Marta Bronstad was seated in a high-backed wing chair, her crown of pure white hair held in place with diamond clips, her long gown of bottle-green taffeta instantly making Kristine feel underdressed. With swift intuition she knew Lars would ordinarily have worn a tuxedo for dinner and had not done so tonight out of deference to her restricted wardrobe.

Marta Bronstad was holding out one hand, palm down; the smile on her lips did not reach her faded blue eyes. She expects me to kiss her hand, thought Kristine, and knew this was the first test. She said politely, ‘Good evening, Mrs Bronstad, it’s very kind of you to invite me to your home,’ took the proffered hand in hers and shook it.

‘Fru Bronstad,’ the old woman corrected her.

‘I speak almost no Norwegian, I’m afraid.’

‘Yet you were born here, Lars tells me. Why did your father leave his home?’

A question to which Kristine would very much have liked the answer. As the butler offered her a glass of sherry, she said, ‘Perhaps he wished, like the Vikings, to find a new and different land.’

‘And what did he do in that new and different land?’

Kristine’s relationship with her father had never been easy, but she owed him more loyalty than she owed honesty to this inquisitive old lady. ‘He bought an orchard.’ She looked directly at Lars. ‘He grew cherries. Kirsbaer, you call them.’

Between them the memory of a kiss flared to new life. Kristine looked back at his grandmother and asked, ‘Have you always lived here, Fru Bronstad?’

‘Always. It will be the inheritance of my elder grandson, Lars.’

So this dreary mansion would one day be Lars’s. Somehow Kristine had not pictured him as a man content to wait around for his inheritance. She was almost relieved, because such a discovery lessened his attraction. Then Lars said levelly, ‘That is still to be decided, Bestemor.’