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‘No. He was not my lover,’ Christa had told him fiercely. ‘He was my best friend’s husband. He was a liar and a cheat and he broke her heart and drove her to her death. He…’
She had stopped and shaken her head, appalled at the way she was revealing so much of her life…herself to him. He had a knack of making her do that, a subtle charisma which somehow compelled her into behaviour which was surely totally alien for her.
Releasing the imprisoning side of her personality, he had called it. Freeing her to be wholly herself. But she was already herself…All the self she wanted to be.
Remembering this discussion now, Christa hunched her arms defensively around her knees and looked away from where Daniel was working towards the house. It was an attractive house, well proportioned and sturdily built, and something about it reminded her, in some odd way, of the house she had shared with her parents.
As a very young teenager she had yearned to grow up and marry, to have a large family—to replace the love and security she had lost with her parents’ death.
Only a very young girl could believe in that kind of fairy-tale. Husbands did not always continue to love their wives, nor children their parents. She was far better off as she was…
‘It’s almost time for lunch.’
Lost in her own thoughts, Christa hadn’t heard Daniel’s approach, and now her body betrayed her with its shocked reaction to his proximity, her muscles tensing so fiercely that their swift contraction actually made her start to tremble.
Daniel was standing far too close to her not to be aware of what was happening to her. She could feel her face starting to overheat and quickly turned her head away from him.
‘You’re shivering. You should be wearing something warmer.’
He thought she was cold. She closed her eyes in brief relief, her tension easing.
‘And more serviceable.’
Before she could stop him he had leaned towards her, his thumb touching the grubby mark on her trousers.
Instinctively she jerked away, unable to bear her body’s reaction to his touch. Her thigh felt as though it was on fire where his thumb had rested lightly against it, and the heat from that spot seemed to throb and spread all the way over her body until it reached the most sensitive core of her being, flooding her with an aching longing so intense that she could feel her eyes starting to burn with the tears of its pain.
If Daniel were to touch her now, to hold her, to…
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the way his mouth had hardened, and her ache of longing was replaced by an equally painful sense of desolation.
‘We’re going to have to start walking soon. They’ve forecast snow for the end of next week.’
‘Walking?’ Christa repeated in confusion, his comment so far away from her own thoughts and feelings that it was almost as though he had spoken in a foreign language.
‘Yes,’ he repeated, frowning at her. ‘The brochure and prospectus both explained that a very important part of our course involves a series of carefully structured mountain walks, culminating in a final walk where people form pairs and then have to make their way to a specific point with only one another to rely on.’
Now he did have Christa’s attention.
‘You mean you abandon them in those mountains? Isn’t that dangerous…?’
‘It would be if that were what we did,’ Daniel agreed drily, ‘but in point of fact their progress is monitored and carefully watched to make sure that they come to no harm. The purpose of the exercise isn’t to frighten them but to build a sense of trust, an acknowledgement of the need to be able to trust and rely on others, to share with them.’
Christa shivered. ‘But what happens if something goes wrong? If one of them gets hurt, has a fall and becomes totally reliant on his or her partner?’
‘That wouldn’t happen. But if it did, then the relationship they had built, the mutual sense of trust and responsibility, would ensure that the person left behind would know that his or her partner would get help.
‘I could never trust anyone so much,’ Christa told him fiercely. ‘Never.’
She glanced towards the mountains, thinking how terrified she would be if she were lost and alone up there, and possibly injured and unable to move into the bargain. There was no way she would be able to trust someone else to get help for her. No way at all. She would rather risk further injury by crawling on her hands and knees if she had to, by helping herself, relying on herself.
‘Has it ever occurred to you that your fear of trusting anyone might have its roots in the death of your parents?’
The quiet question froze her body into rejecting immobility, her anger so intense that she was almost stammering as she threw her response back at him, demanding, ‘Why should it? It wasn’t their fault that they were killed, and besides, I had my great-aunt to turn to. She gave me a home…love…’
‘But she wasn’t your parents,’ Daniel enforced quietly, ‘and a child doesn’t always reason as logically as an adult. As an adult you know that your parents’ death was an accident outside their control. As a child, as well as a sense of loss and fear, you could also have experienced anger against them for leaving you.’
‘No,’ Christa denied quickly. Too quickly, she knew. How had he guessed, known about those dark feelings of bitte
rness and resentment she had fought so hard to suppress in the months after her parents’ deaths, when she had sometimes felt she almost hated them for leaving her alone?
‘And what about you?’ she challenged, fighting to suppress her unwanted memories. ‘According to your reasoning, you should have felt guilt at your father’s death…’
Even in the heat of her anger she couldn’t bring herself to be cruel enough to use the word ‘suicide’, not to look at him as she delivered her blow.
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to reply, and then, when he did, his answer shocked her into silence.
‘Yes,’ he told her, ‘yes. I did…And sometimes still do. Accepting those feelings, learning to live with them instead of fighting to deny them, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and the most frightening. To give up the self-inflicted punishment of those feelings, to give up making excuses to myself for all the things I didn’t do because of them, was very, very hard.
‘Negative emotions can be just as addictive, just as dangerous as any other kind of drug.
‘Think about it,’ he told her as he started to move away from her.
Christa stood up angrily, determined to refute what he had just said, and then cried out in startled pain as the wind blew dust into her eyes, causing her to blink and automatically start to rub her streaming eye.
Daniel had turned round the moment he heard her cry, hurrying quickly back to her.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked her.
‘Nothing…Just something in my eye,’ Christa told him.
‘Let me see.’
‘No.’
She started to move back from him, her brain already anticipating the havoc his proximity would cause to her senses, but it was already too late because he had closed the distance between them, one hand cupping her face and the other turning it slightly into the light.
