by Sandra Field
‘And what if I decide I hate skiing?’ she retorted. ‘So much so that I’m going to give it up altogether?’
‘You don’t hate it,’ he said with total conviction. ‘Don’t forget that you and I lived together for nearly two weeks. I know how much passion you’re capable of, I’ve heard you laugh until you cry, I’ve watched you swinging on the hammock smiling up at the sky. You’re as different from your mother as—as I am from your father.’
‘Stop it, Lars.’
‘Deny that we were a partnership when we routed those men who were stoning the horses. Deny that you thought of bearing my child when you held Margrethe’s baby at your grandfather’s...dammit, Kris, don’t shut yourself up in a cage of your own making!’
Each word he uttered battered at Kristine’s composure, tearing away the certainties that had upheld her for so many years. And if she allowed those certainties to vanish, what was left? The risk of throwing her lot in with a man she had known just over a month?
He’s also the man who saved your life, and who’s brought you incredible happiness, a betraying inner voice told her.
‘Love doesn’t last,’ she said desperately, as much to herself as to Lars.
A faint smile removed some of the intolerable tension from Lars’s face. ‘I won’t be able to prove that it does until we’re dandling our great-grandchildren on our no doubt arthritic knees.’
Kristine bent and picked up a rock, firing it into the lake, where it thunked against a block of ice. ‘And what if I say I don’t love you?’ she said. ‘What then?’ She raised her eyes and looked him full in the face.
A muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘I won’t believe you.’
But she had seen doubt and fear chase themselves across his face, and pushed her advantage. ‘You must—because it’s true. And that’s the real answer to your proposal of marriage, Lars. I won’t marry you because I don’t love you. So there’s nothing more to say.’
He thrust his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, deep lines indenting his face. ‘You’re not telling the truth,’ he said. ‘You’re hiding behind—’
‘Lars, I don’t love you!’ She took a step back from him, her heel inadvertently crushing a tiny Arctic anemone, exhaustion settling on her shoulders like a dead weight. ‘I want to go back to Fjaerland.’
White about the mouth, he said, ‘Maybe you don’t love me now...but if we keep on seeing each other you—’
She had to end this. ‘No,’ she said.
A muscle jumped in his cheek. ‘If I take you back to Fjaerland today, I won’t be stopping—I’ll go straight to Oslo.’
‘That would be best,’ Kristine said.
‘And I won’t be back. Ever.’
‘There’s no point in you coming back. Because I can’t give you what you want.’
Behind him the waves sloshed against the ice. He said bitterly, ‘I thought I knew you, Kris, knew you through and through. All this talk about love—you’re hiding behind those words, using them so you won’t have to face how afraid you are of commitment and intimacy...I never thought you were a coward.’
Stung, she said, ‘I’m a realist—there’s a big difference.’
‘At least Anna admitted her fears, was honest about them,’ he blazed. ‘You’re not even that.’
In hot denial Kristine spat, ‘I’m not being dishonest if—’
‘Yes, you are! And let me tell you something else—I don’t need to be with a woman whose life is run by fear. I went through that once, and I never will again. I thought I could be myself with you—but I was wrong. Dead wrong.’ Biting off the words, his eyes like chips of ice, he added, ‘I’ve had enough of this. More than enough. We’ll check out of the hotel and then I’ll drive you back to Fjaerland. Because in one respect you’re most certainly right—you can’t give me what I want.’
Turning on his heel, he started back to the car park, and if he stumbled, he who was normally so nimble of foot, Kristine was in no state to notice. The vast, majestic panorama of mountains and sky seemed to mock her, for Lars was wrong—marriage offered no similar long view but rather a cage, confinement as tight as a narrow black dress. Confinement she was right to fear.
Lars took the steep, winding track down the mountain as fast as was safe; the drop-off was on Kristine’s side of the car, and made her feel physically ill. When they reached the hotel, it was with a huge reluctance that she entered the bedroom where she and Lars had made love only a few hours ago. Made love...that word again, she thought miserably, stowing her garments in her backpack any which way.
She said stiffly, ‘I could get a bus to Fjaerland. I’m taking you out of your way.’
He looked at her across the bed as though she were a stranger. ‘I’ll take you,’ he said, and threw his razor into his case.
Kristine never forgot that drive from Geiranger to her grandfather’s. Although it was not very far, for which she was everlastingly grateful, it seemed like a thousand miles. She felt paralysed inside, as if she had been anaesthetised, and for that, too, she was grateful. Small talk was out of the question, and she and Lars had said everything else there was to say; so they sat side by side in the car in a charged silence that screamed with tension.
Each turn in the road, each tunnel and incline, brought her nearer the farm that she was calling home, the place she could hardly wait to reach; yet when the Jaguar turned up Jakob Kleiven’s driveway she was surprised that they had arrived so soon. Lars spoke for the first time since they had left Dalsnibba. ‘I’ll get my stuff and say goodbye to Jakob and Karoline.’
He was out of the car door and taking the front steps two at a time before Kristine could think of any reply. As she heaved her backpack from the back seat and followed him into the house, her grandfather came out of the kitchen wreathed in smiles. ‘Karoline has made fish cakes, lots for all of us—we weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.’
Kristine said baldly, ‘Lars is going back to Oslo.’
‘Not before supper...he’ll never taste fish cakes the equal of these in Oslo,’ Jakob boomed. ‘Anyway, what’s his hurry? Nils is haying the day after tomorrow and could do with help.’
Incapable of telling either the truth or a lie, Kristine said nothing. Above her head she could hear the floorboards creak as Lars moved around his room packing; then he came downstairs and into the living-room. He held out his hand to Jakob, speaking so rapidly in Norwegian that Kristine could not follow what he said. Jakob asked a question, gesturing in the general direction of the kitchen, and Lars shook his head, adding another spate of Norwegian. Although it was clear Jakob was still prepared to argue, the two men shook hands. Then Lars turned to Kristine.
In her jeans and a sweatshirt she was braced against the chesterfield. He said coldly, ‘I can always be reached via my grandmother at Asgard. Safe travelling, Kristine—because that’s what you’ve chosen, isn’t it?’
‘Goodbye,’ she muttered, pressing the backs of her knees into the plush fabric. She didn’t love Lars. She didn’t. Why then did she feel as though her heart was turning to ice within her chest?
He left the room, his footsteps echoing on the wooden steps outside. As though pulled by a force greater than herself, she walked to the window and watched him throw his case in the back seat and get in the car. Without giving the farmhouse another glance he drove down the narrow lane to the road. Within seconds he was out of sight behind the trees.
Jakob said with a casualness that grated on Kristine’s nerves, ‘A pity he had to leave so soon—I’ll miss our chess games; he was a worthy opponent. Ah, well, business comes first, I suppose. And it’s all the more fish cakes for us, eh, Kristine?’
The thought of fish cakes turned her stomach. Yet it would appear Lars had fabricated a reason for his leaving that had satisfied Jakob, and she had no intention of telling the real reason for his departure. ‘Excuse me for a minute, Besse,’ she said, and fled up the stairs.
She had the second floor to herself. She crept along th
e hall to Lars’s room and looked in. The bed was made, the dresser bare of personal effects; there was no sign that for five nights he had slept here. He was gone. Gone without a trace.
Kristine went to the bathroom, locked the door, and leaned on the basin, looking at herself in the wavery old mirror. She looked the same as usual. Yet her stomach was churning and her hands as cold as if she had dipped them in the lake on Dalsnibba. Lars was gone. He would not chase after her ever again, as he had in Mandal and Stavanger. This time he was gone from her life and he would not be back.
I did the right thing, she thought dully. I can’t marry him if I don’t love him.
The old cow bell, Karoline’s signal for mealtimes, clanked in the downstairs hall. Hastily Kristine splashed cold water on her face and ran downstairs.
While Jakob, to her great relief, asked no questions about Lars’s precipitate departure, he did have a tendency to drop his name into the conversation in a way that scraped on Kristine’s nerves. She begged out of her grandfather’s offer to start teaching her to play chess that evening on the excuse that she was tired, and went to bed early, only to lie awake for most of the night. The next morning when she went downstairs some of the haying crew were in the kitchen, three handsome, blond young men who left her totally unmoved. Lars should have been with them, leaning against the counter, joining in their jokes and horseplay.
Her throat hurt. Maybe she was getting a cold, she thought, taking an orange out of the refrigerator and making a gallant attempt to respond to the repartee of the three young men. Then one of them mentioned that Arne, the tractor driver, was sick. She said eagerly, ‘I grew up on a farm, I can drive a tractor,’ and realised how badly she needed something concrete to do.
So Kristine’s days fell into a pattern. Up early in the morning to spend the day in the fields, home for supper, and a chess lesson in the evening with Jakob, who would all too often describe at great length details of Lars’s strategies. Physical tiredness would then drive her to bed, where sexual longing and emotional exhaustion kept her awake.
After four days of this regime it rained. Kristine tried to sleep in and failed, helped Karoline make blackberry jam, and then escaped to the barn to clean out the stalls. The barn was peaceful and smelled of hay; the swallows darted among the eaves. If Lars were here, she would want to make love with him in the hayloft...
‘Kristine?’
Kristine jumped, dropped the pitchfork, and said foolishly, ‘Oh, Margrethe, it’s you.’ Margrethe, Harald’s sister. Not, of course, Lars.
‘I scared you, I am sorry.’ Margrethe came closer. ‘But you look so tired. You are sick?’
Heartsick, thought Kristine, her eyes skidding away from the sympathy in Margrethe’s face. ‘I’ve been out haying the last few days,’ she said, and saw from Margrethe’s delicate withdrawal that the other woman would ask no further personal questions.
‘Jakob works you too hard,’ Margrethe said with a little click of her tongue. ‘Will we go to the house and make some tea?’
To her utter dismay Kristine heard herself blurt in a voice raw with feeling, ‘It’s nothing to do with haying. Lars asked me to marry him and I said no and now he’s gone.’
Wishing the words unsaid, she picked at the rough wood of the stall with her thumbnail, avoiding Margrethe’s eyes. Margrethe said calmly, ‘You have changed your mind?’
‘No! I don’t love him, so how can I marry him?’
‘You cannot—you did the right thing, Kristine. Although I can see it was difficult. He seemed a fine man.’
You’re no help at all, thought Kristine. If I did the right thing, why do I feel so unhappy?
‘Mind you,’ Margrethe added, ‘I think it is as important to like your partner as to love him. But then I have been married only five years. I am not—what is the word?—an expert.’
‘Love doesn’t last,’ Kristine burst out. ‘My parents don’t love each other any more.’
Margrethe said with more force than Kristine had yet seen in her, ‘I love Iver and he loves me. I do not know how that will be in five years, ten years, twenty years. I hope and pray we will still love each other—but I do not know. That is how life is, Kristine.’
The monolith at the sculpture park fell into Kristine’s mind, that mass of seething humanity, interconnected in love and in suffering. She said hesitantly, ‘So you think I’m looking for guarantees?’
‘I do not suggest you marry anyone before you know him well. Do you like Lars? Do you trust him? Is he a good man, a kind man? I love my little Sonja...I must know that Iver will be a good father to my child. All these are questions to ask before you trust your life with another person.’ She gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘I sound like the pastor on Sunday morning, I am so sorry.’
Kristine’s head was whirling. ‘What is love?’ she said.
‘Ah...I don’t know.’ Margrethe frowned in thought. ‘Perhaps it is like the many petals of a rose—together they make a flower that is beautiful.’
Kristine’s throat tightened. ‘Thank you, Margrethe,’ she said, adding with a smile that was almost normal, ‘Let’s make that cup of tea.’
After tea the rain had stopped, and Kristine volunteered to look after Sonja while Margrethe and Iver went for a walk. She lay down on the carpet beside the baby, singing it some of the nonsense songs she used to sing to her brothers, and because Margrethe had been honest with her she forced herself to a matching honesty such as she had been avoiding ever since Dalsnibba. As Sonja’s pudgy fingers tugged at her hair, she knew in her inner heart that she did not want to close off the doorway to having her own child.
Her fear of pregnancy had nothing to do with babies. Pregnancy implied commitment. Pregnancy implied a husband, a man who would be a good father for the child. A man like Lars?
Jakob sat down in the chair near her, lit his pipe, and said heavily, ‘In the kitchen Margrethe said I must be gentle with you because you are unhappy about Lars—she thought I knew the real reason why he left. Were you afraid to tell me the truth?’
It was quite clear her grandfather’s feelings were hurt. Kristine said in distress, ‘I’m sorry! I’m so confused, Bestefar. Lars asked me to marry him and I said no.’
‘Ach...so that was it. Urgent business, Lars told me—pah! Well, if you don’t want to marry him, that’s that, isn’t it? You must put him behind you.’
‘Yes,’ Kristine said in a hollow voice.
Jakob shot her a crafty glance that she missed because she was playing with Sonja’s toes. ‘He is too old for you anyway.’
‘He’s not! He’s only thirty-one.’
‘But from a very different background, a wealthy man from one of the old Oslo estates. You are Canadian more than you are Norwegian, and your home is there. These things matter, Kristine. Youth may not think they do, but they do.’
‘Our backgrounds were never a problem,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Anyway, he’s not going to live at Asgard.’
‘And a widower, besides. All these barriers...your decision was wise.’
‘Besse, we’d worked through all that,’ Kristine said in exasperation.
With rare delicacy Jakob said, ‘I’m an old man now, but I have lived—so all was not well in the bedroom?’
She flushed bright pink, buried her face in Sonja’s chubby belly, and mumbled in huge understatement, ‘That was OK.’
To her infinite relief Karoline came in the room with a biscuit for Sonja, and the subject of Lars was dropped. The reprieve, however, was only temporary, for that evening as she and her grandfather played chess it seemed to Kristine’s overwrought sensibilities as though every second word was Lars. Lars would have deployed his bishop like this. It was a good thing Lars had fixed the drive belt on the tractor. Lars would have enjoyed the fish they had for supper. Lars, Lars, Lars...
Her mind on anything but the game, she made a very silly mistake. ‘A good thing Lars isn’t here to see that,’ Jakob said complacently, removing her castle from the boa
rd.
‘Would you please stop talking about him?’ Kristine flared.
‘Why?’ Jakob said callously. ‘He isn’t dead. All you did was turn him down; he’ll recover.’
A detailed image of Lars wedding Sigrid flashed across her mind, filling her with an unpleasant mixture of pain, jealousy, and fury. ‘It’s me I’m worrying about, not him,’ she snapped, not very accurately.
‘Pay attention to your pawn there,’ Jakob said mildly. ‘If you’re the one who turned him down, I don’t see why you’re so upset.’
Neither did Kristine. Although upset was an altogether inadequate word for the state of dull misery in which she had been trapped since Lars had left. Her grandfather added with irritating certainty, ‘You’re probably homesick; two years is a long time to be away. Will you travel more before you go back to Canada, Kristine?’
She had no appetite for further travel, and, while it was logical that she go home, she didn’t want to do that either. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ Kristine admitted. Then, her shoulders slumping, she added with genuine desperation, ‘I turned Lars down because I don’t love him; I’m sure I was right to do so...tell me what love is, Bestefar.’
Jakob sat back in his chair, tamping the tobacco in his pipe. ‘I’m not sure that your father ever loved your mother,’ he said deliberately.
‘Never?’
‘She was very pretty and she thought the sun rose and set on him, and the job he had in Oslo hadn’t worked out. So he married her. But love...no.’
So love, in her father’s case, had not died. It had never been born. ‘Did you love your wife?’ Kristine asked.
‘Always. We fought sometimes—oh, how we fought—she was stormy-tempered, from an island far in the north, and sometimes for her my farm was like a box, too small and too tidy. Every year she would go home to Hasvik for a visit, every year I would be afraid that she might not return, and every year she came back to me. Yes, I loved her.’ He held a match to his pipe, his eyes trained on the small yellow flame. ‘Love isn’t always easy, Kristine. But after thirty years of marriage I still knew when she walked into the room. Knew it in my heart.’
