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“What are you thinking about?”
Claudia blinked, refocused her eyes on the canvas in front of her. She’d made some progress blocking in the colours on the painting while her mind had wandered. She glanced at Cassandra, positioned with her own easel at a right angle to her, and found her watching intently, her paintbrush put down from her hand.
“Cornwall,” she answered. She couldn’t honestly have explained why. There was little to liken Nicosia with the Cornwall village, even less with the house’s island. Cyprus was an island, and the skies today were blue. That was all she could think to compare them.
“Homesick?”
She scoffed at the suggestion. “I don’t get homesick.” Besides, Mwanza was more her home than Cornwall was, she was sure – she spent less time there, but that was where she came from. Where she always returned to. Her most constant anchor, for her whole life.
“The other type of homesick, then.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cassandra smiled and picked up her paintbrush again. “Whoever it is, you should invite them. Any friend of yours, etcetera.”
“I don’t know why you should think I’d want to fly someone to Cyprus to entertain me when you’re right here. You don’t think your own company is that dull, do you?”
Cassandra laughed. “I think you know perfectly well I wasn’t talking about entertainment. If that was what you were pining for, I could definitely arrange something.”
Claudia resented the notion that she was pining. She was just thinking. Remembering. She worked on in silence, and after a watchful moment, Cassandra did too, and they forgot all about the conversation.
Well, Claudia tried to forget it.
“Do you remember Roimata?” she asked over dinner, as her companion took a sip of wine. “From my last party. I introduced you and you talked for a while.”
Cassandra’s face was immediately alighted with a bright smile. “Of course. I wrote to her last week. We didn’t have a chance to finish our conversation about Romanticism in post-Reckoning art movements while I was in Cornwall. I was eager to hear the rest of her thoughts.”
Claudia was thoroughly surprised by this information. Roimata was generally fairly reserved at parties, and had never expressed any particular fondness for any of her friends. And maybe this was just an intellectual debate being continued from a distance, but that smile of Cassandra’s spoke to a much stronger feeling than curiosity. “Do you like her?” she asked.
Cassandra laughed. “Like her? Claudia, you make it sound as if she’s horrible to talk to. You’re the one who invited her to stay with you, surely you agree she makes good conversation.”
“Well… yes.” Once Roimata was no longer dreadfully nervous around her, the words had flowed easily and with a dry humour that was easy to love. She was insightful and witty, and she wore her heart on her sleeve, which made her a wonderfully sincere critic. Roimata was good company once she got talking. But she had to get talking. For the first few parties she hadn’t talked to anybody at all, except when Claudia checked in or someone came around with a wine bottle asking who needed topping up and she murmured a ‘Thank you,’ that was almost always lost in the noise of the parlour.
Claudia hadn’t been able to help but feel like she had become privy to some secret, well-guarded side of Roimata when they were alone together. She had strong opinions and a broad smile just waiting to burst out of her, and Claudia was her confidante. Or so she thought.
The waiter approached their table with food, and the conversation was left behind in favour of enjoying their meal and recounting the highs and lows of their dining experiences when they had travelled the world ten years prior. Claudia’s mind kept travelling back to Cornwall, but she didn’t mention it again, and then eventually, she was home. A big, old house off the coast of Cornwall, with all its idiosyncrasies.
The drafty porch door. The shutters of the second guest bedroom that banged against the house practically no matter which way the wind blew. The bathtub in the parlour, and the screen decorated with seashells and sea glass that didn’t really obscure it from view. The kitchen tap that groaned and shuddered if you cranked it too hard too fast, and the smallest guest room that was strangely shaped because of the boiler cupboard that was tucked in beside it. The cat. That decrepit, ornery old cat that Mata loved no matter how much it scratched her.
Matryoshka arched her back into Claudia’s hand and meowed. Claudia scratched under her chin, prompting a contented purr.
There was one idiosyncrasy missing. It was passionate, and detail-oriented, and unafraid. Claudia had half-expected to find Roimata waiting at the house for her, drinking a cup of tea, sitting on the patio with her sketchbook or her knitting. But the island was as big, and old, and lonely as it ever was. She would have to do something about that.
She and Chrisette were about halfway through a bottle of wine when she sighed so forcefully that it cut Claudia off in the middle of a sentence. “Why did you call me, Claud?”
She blinked. “For company? I believe I made that clear enough.”
“I don’t think it’s my company you’re after. Here I am, looking absolutely stunning,” she gestured to herself – and she wasn’t wrong, with her black lipstick and the elegant purple dress that hugged her hips, and the artfully swooping hair – and continued, “and you’ve talked about nothing and no-one but Roimata for the entire evening. I would be offended if it weren’t so adorable.”
“Adorable?” she repeated.
“Well, it’s so unlike you. You usually remain so grounded in the current moment, in present company. You seem determined not to go a minute without thinking of her.”
“So distract me,” Claudia said, leaning across the gap towards her. “You normally excel at that.”
Chrisette matched her, leaned in so that they were face to face, almost nose to nose. She had a tender expression, and her lipstick was dark and shiny and distracting, and formed the words, “There’s nothing wrong with being in love.”
She retreated sharply, and protested, “I’m not in love with Roimata.” Chrisette sighed, also leaning back, and looked at her with an expression somewhere in the realm of pity, or was it exasperation? “Do you have any idea how selfish it is to be in love? To spurn the whole world in favour of just one person’s touch – yearning after them, clawing at every detail of their existence and scrap of information just so you have the chance to hold all of them in your mind, in your idea of them. You have no time for anyone else, any love. Are they to go without your attention, simply so you can lavish it all on another? Everyone in the world is hungry for that love, and you would spoil just one with it and starve the rest? Love consumes. Everything. You even squash yourself down to make more room for it, until you’re just a mirror reflecting the object of your affection.”
She would show Chrisette how wrong she was; that she had plenty of love to lavish elsewhere. She brushed her stray braids over her shoulder, and kissed Chrisette, with feeling, with love, with her hands cradling her face. She did love Chrisette, loved her lips, loved her silver tongue and the way her eyes moved over a canvas. She loved her singing voice, and her willingness to try new things.
Roimata did not own her, did not own her heart.
When the kiss broke, Chrisette cupped Claudia’s face in her hand in return. “Claudia, you’re one of the best artists I know. Your command of words is almost as impressive as your command of the brush. But you’re so full of shit. Call Roimata.”
There wasn’t a landline in Roimata’s flat in Plymouth, but she sent an invitation by post. As always with parties at the Cornwall house, guests were advised to arrive at the dockslip on the mainland by a certain time – four trips would be made across the afternoon and evening, after which the boat would only return to the village in an emergency. No RSVP was strictly required, but it didn’t stop Claudia expecting one. Roimata liked to make sure she was expected, and had in the past returned the invite with a note if she intended to make it. Of course, for the last several parties in Cornwall, she’d had no need to RSVP because she had been staying in the attic bedroom at the top of the house.
The parlour was warm, and filled with light and lively conversation. Outside the north window, the sea shone black and cold as the waves rocked back and forth.
“You seem distracted, darling,” a voice from the party pulled at her. “Waiting for someone?”
“Hm? No, no. Just a little weary from my travels, I suppose,” she lied. The passengers of the last ferry had arrived some fifteen minutes ago, and Claudia did her best to mask her disappointment in front of her guests, of course, and did admirably. It was not as if she did not want them at the party, after all. Only that there need only have been one guest to satisfy her, tonight, and she had not arrived.
Vishwathi smiled like she didn’t believe her, and took a sip of cordial. “You look like you need another glass of wine. You might be in luck.” She nodded towards the foyer, and Claudia frowned and turned around.
She was dressed in a long, dark grey woollen coat, over smart brown trousers and a shirt patterned with autumn leaves. She removed her hat, and placed it at the top of the coatstand at the entrance, revealing tight, dark curls streaked with grey. Under her arm, there was a bottle of red wine.
“Roimata. You’re here.” She had gravitated towards her without realising it, and seemed to have somewhat crept up on her, as she looked up sharply in surprise.
“Yes. I took a short walk before coming in,” she said, not moving her eyes from Claudia’s face.
“With the bottle of wine you brought.”
“Yes.”
“Perfect!” exclaimed Sanjay, intruding on the moment to extract the wine from her hands. “We were just about to run out of red. Good to see you, Roimata.”
Roimata was quiet amongst the other guests, but it did not seem to be in her usual way. She was reserved, holding something back, and while she would usually hang on Claudia’s every word, tonight she avoided her eyes. Claudia felt that she hardly let her out of her sight – but the moment she did, she vanished, and she feared that Roimata had gone on another walk. There was no way to safely leave the island this late, at this tide, so she couldn’t have absconded entirely, at least. Just as she contemplated finding her nice raincoat and setting out after her, she found her in the nook on the third floor corridor, where a telescope peered out into the sky.
“Mata. There you are.”
“Hello, Claudia.” She was sitting at the telescope’s eyepiece, but she wasn’t looking through it – it was much too cloudy to catch much of anything tonight, anyway. She had a cup of herbal sea cradled in her hands, and had thrown one of the blankets from the shelf over her shoulders.
She looked at home, here. Claudia hoped she felt at home here.
“Why did you invite me tonight?”
She felt the answer was obvious. “For your company. Why else?”
She sipped her tea thoughtfully, and didn’t seem inclined to answer for a minute. “I thought perhaps you intended to continue our argument,” she said eventually.
“Argument?” she repeated. Then, thinking back, she said, “Oh, that. That was weeks ago. Why should I still be bothered about that?”
Roimata glanced at her sideways, with an expression she couldn’t read. She returned her gaze to the window, and said slowly, “I hope that means the room in the attic is open to me.”
“Always,” she answered. It had ceased to be a guest room some time ago, in Claudia’s mind. It was Roimata’s bedroom, and the bathroom on the third floor landing was hers, and the stool on the far left of the breakfast bar, the red armchair in the main sitting room, and the cliff behind the house where she liked to dive. Any piece of it she wanted to lay claim to, she could, and would meet no resistance. “For as long as you want it, it’s yours.”