LITMIR.BIZ

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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.’

      Marta Bronstad glared at her grandson, transferred the glare to Kristine, and said, ‘Are you here to visit relatives, Miss Kleiven?’

      For the first time Kristine’s composure faltered. ‘Partly,’ she said. ‘I’m staying in my cousin’s apartment, and I’ll be meeting him on the weekend.’

      ‘Where did your father come from?’

      ‘Fjaerland.’

      ‘Ah, yes...farmers,’ Fru Bronstad said dismissively.

      Anger licked its way along Kristine’s veins; she took a large gulp of sherry before she could say anything she might regret. As Lars described the history of some of the paintings in the room, Marta Bronstad sipped her sherry in a silence that was the opposite to repose. The butler made an announcement. In a rustle of skirts Lars’s grandmother stood up, took Lars by the arm and swept out of the room. Kristine perforce followed.

      The dining-room table, large enough for twenty, had been set at the far end with an intimidating array of silverware and goblets. With a wrench of homesickness like a physical pain, Kristine remembered the old pine table in 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

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