her mother’s kitchen and the plain cutlery that had come with them from Fjaerland. What was she doing here in a house that she hated, with a woman who did not like her and a man who liked her too much?
The meal began with thin strips of herring in a tangy sauce. Kristine waited until Lars had picked up his cutlery and chose the same knife and fork. Marta Bronstad said, ‘Are your parents still living, Miss Kleiven?’ Kristine nodded. ‘And do you have brothers and sisters?’
Impatient with this catechism, aware that she was speaking to Lars more than to his grandmother, Kristine said, ‘I have four younger brothers, whom I virtually raised—my mother hasn’t been in good health for years. When the youngest turned sixteen nearly two years ago and left home, I too left. I’ve been travelling ever since.’
‘It takes money to travel,’ the old lady observed, delicately dissecting one of the fillets.
‘I’ve worked since I was sixteen, and saved every penny I could. I also had temporary jobs in Greece and France—and may have to do the same in Norway, presuming I wish to continue to eat.’
She smiled at the old lady after this smallest of jokes. Marta Bronstad flicked a quick glance around the richly appointed room and said frostily, ‘So you have no money.’
Lars made a sudden move on the other side of the table. But Kristine from the age of eleven had learned to confront her father, and was not about to back down to Marta Bronstad. Before Lars could intervene, she said with the clarity of extreme anger, ‘No, I have no money. Nor have I ambitions to acquire anyone else’s money by fair means or foul.’
‘You’re very forward, Miss Kleiven...young girls were not like that in my day.’
‘I saw a portrait in the National Gallery today of a young woman wearing a black dress that might just as well have been a strait-jacket,’ Kristine replied vigorously. ‘I’m truly grateful I’ve been born in an age when I can travel on my own and earn my own money.’
Marta Bronstad’s eyes did not drop. ‘So you will continue your footloose ways when you leave here?’
‘For as long as I have money and enjoy my travels, yes.’
The old lady pounced with the speed of a ferret. ‘You don’t consider you have a duty to your parents—to a mother who, you say, is far from well?’
Kristine flinched visibly; it was the chink in her armour, the guilt that grew with every letter from home. As the herring fillets wavered in her vision, she heard Lars rap out a sentence in Norwegian. Marta Bronstad’s reply was unquestionably the Norwegian version of, ‘Humph!’
Kristine raised her head. Her eyes filled with an old pain, she looked straight at her interrogator and with desperate honesty said, ‘From the time I was six until I was twenty-one I raised my brothers, Fru Bronstad—what more must I do?’
‘You always have a duty to your parents. Always.’
The butler substituted a clear soup for the remains of the herring, and, having achieved her purpose, Marta Bronstad changed the subject. She spoke of the artist Munch, whom her mother had known, and of the sculptor Vigeland, whom she herself had known; she was caustic and entertaining and offered no apology for any of her earlier remarks. Although Kristine responded valiantly, the unaccustomed amounts of food and wine were giving her a headache.
The meal ended with some wickedly strong espresso served in tiny gilded cups in the drawing-room. Then Lars stood up. ‘I’ll drive Kristine home, Bestemor.’
Kristine also got up. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, Fru Bronstad,’ she said, careful to keep any irony from her voice.
‘As you’re leaving Oslo soon, I doubt that I will see you again,’ Marta Bronstad said. ‘Goodnight, Miss Kleiven.’
It was a dismissal. Kristine stalked down the steps between the griffins, got into Lars’s car, and as soon as he closed his door said tempestuously, ‘What was that, Lars—some kind of test? If so, it’s very obvious I failed.’
‘I would say you passed with flying colours.’
‘It was a set-up!’
‘My choice, you may remember, was to go to a restaurant.’
This was not a statement calculated to appease Kristine’s temper. ‘She thinks I’m after you for your money.’
‘Then she’s wrong, isn’t she?’
‘I’m not after you at all!’
‘She wants me to marry the girl next door, who’s sweet and biddable and very rich. Sigrid is scared of my grandmother...she would never stand up to her as you did.’
Almost choking with an inchoate mixture of jealousy and rage, Kristine sputtered, ‘Then marry Sigrid if you want any peace in the house. In the meantime, please take me home—I’m tired.’
‘In a minute,’ he said. Taking her incensed face in his hands, he bent his head and began kissing her. This time he showed no restraint, no holding back, his mouth burning through her defences. Her lips parted on their own accord and as she felt the dart of his tongue like an arrow of fire all her anger and frustration coalesced into a passionate hunger. She looped her arms around his neck, dug her nails into his thick, springy hair, and kissed him back.
His response shuddered through his frame, as a tall tree shuddered in a storm. One of his hands caressed her back, bared by her dress; with the other he clasped her waist, pulling her closer. And still his mouth clung to hers, their tongues dancing, their breaths mingling.
Kristine’s knee was doubled under her on the car seat; as pain shot through it, she made a small sound of protest, trying to straighten it in front of her. She was trembling very lightly all over, and wanted nothing more than to haul her dress over her head and make love to Lars in the back seat of the car.
He said unsteadily, ‘On at least one level you’re after me.’
What was the use of denying it? In a jerky, graceless movement she backed away from him, pulling her skirt over her legs. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, and had no idea whether she meant Oslo or Ontario.
Lars put the car in gear and surged down the driveway, gravel spitting from behind the tyres. Trees flicked past, dark statues under a sky brilliant with stars. Kristine sat very still, hugging her chest, knowing that with one kiss she had crossed an invisible barrier and could never go back. Innocence had been lost. She now knew in her blood and her bones what it meant to crave the joining of a man’s body to her own.
The lights of the city spangled the night like fallen stars. Lars drove down Harald’s street, parked the car, and said with an urgency that in no way surprised her, ‘I want to make love to you, Kristine. Now. Tonight. I know we only met two days ago and that this isn’t the way either of us normally behaves. But I have to know this is real—that you’re real. That I can trust in—hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying.’
He raked his fingers through his hair. In the dimly lit car she gazed over at him, seeing the shadowed, deep-set eyes and the mouth that had seared its way into her soul. But on the drive from Asgard the turmoil in her blood had subsided a little, and her brain had started to work. She said quietly, ‘I can’t, Lars—you must know I can’t. We come from different worlds, you and I, and once I leave
