Work Text:
Claudia had had practice.
Vivienne, she thought, had not. She kept touching her ear, as if she meant to tuck a stray braid behind it, but she was wearing her hair loose and natural, a dark cloud that brought out her shining eyes.
Claudia carefully avoided adjusting her glasses, so that she did not draw attention to the shape of her nose - slender, smooth bridge, wide base - and how similar it was to the one the woman opposite wore. She adopted an easy, practiced smile, one that she had given Aimée many times. One that did not give too much away. That did not suggest that she knew something nobody else did.
She let herself be introduced to everybody present as if she was equally unaquainted with all of them. Bernice. Miguel. Vivienne. Michael. She look the time to register each of their faces, as she had ignored the others, before. From the balcony that bordered the exhibition room - she had taken to going up there when she didn’t want to be accosted by every gallery patron, but without missing anyone who looked interesting - she had seen them come in. Her eyes had tracked Vivi around the exhibit, assessing her broad shoulders, her round cheeks, trying to be sure. Then the man with her had said something close to her ear, she had smiled, and Claudia saw her own smile. And she knew.
She watched Vivi linger on The Charcoal Dish, lean in to read the details of Direction of Culture. She steadied her heart in her chest with hardened will alone, knowing that she could not descend into the gallery to greet her with butterflies fluttering in her ribcage. She calmed the giddiness like she was her own mother.
Stop giggling at the table. What is funny?
Claudia probably imagined that she felt a bit of the air get sucked out of the room when Vivienne saw her come downstairs. For a moment, she had this kind of awestruck look, and it was so similar to how she had been regarded by other patrons that she doubted herself. Or doubted that Vivienne had recognised her. Just doubted. But their eyes fixed together in a way that was a little too familiar to be anyone but her sister.
"We love your work,” Bernice said, indicating herself and Vivienne. The men, it seemed, were mere decoration, though the one on Vivi’s arm seemed positively jubilant on her behalf. “Vivi has an incredible piece of yours--”
“Still Life,” Vivi chimed in, perhaps a touch eagerly.
Claudia remembered the painting; the rendering of texture wasn’t her best, but it was more of an expressive piece, anyway, a snapshot of a bureaucrat springing from his seat with papers clutched in hand, as if he had suddenly leapt out of the frame moments before the picture was taken. The mid-motion nature of it was the cause for its name. Still Life. Claudia had been greatly enjoying ironic titles at the time.
“It’s one of my favourites. It’s moved houses with us twice.”
Claudia had not found Vivi. Vivi had found her, years ago, and kept up with her, and never quite reached out. There was something infuriating about that - that Vivi had been so close, and Claudia had been none the wiser, and if she’d only reached out sooner--
But there was guilt, too. Because Claudia hadn’t exactly made herself accessible, hiding herself in the rafters of museums.
Bernice asked about The Charcoal Dish and Claudia answered her - and the others’, when they joined in - obligingly. How long did it take you? You worked on it how many hours a day? Is it based on a real building? How did you create the hazy effect over the figures in the distance? Are any of the faces at the picnic supposed to resemble members of the Societal Council?
(The last one, she deftly avoided answering. As always.)
“Are you living in Ontario?” Vivienne asked. It was an innocent, if slightly over-curious, question that could pass for polite conversation.
“For now,” she said. I’m sorry. I’m moving on soon. I’m going away soon- “I’ve been travelling - the Artist’s Tour Grant has let me go all over.”
She had more to say, but Miguel nudged Bernice with a cheeky kind of smile, and at this point in the conversation, the men jumped in - Bernice (in turn quick to give partial credit to Michael) had been one of the policy administrators who secured the Tour Grant for Artists from the Treasury’s fund allocation committee. This somehow turned into a recounting of the production of The Topaz Window by Niamh Connolly that had made world news when it caused uproar in London. Apparently, Claudia had been considered for the artist to commission for the titular painting. She vaguely remembered Archie mentioning something like it, but she hadn’t realised it was The Topaz Window he’d been talking about. She couldn’t remember what she had been doing, to turn it down.
When she next found an opening, Claudia said, “Yes, I’ve been all over. I have an exhibition in Sydney later this year.” She tried not to emphasise her words, but she hoped Vivienne heard her when she added, “I’m going to try and get out to Brisbane while I’m there, as well. Have you ever been?” Come with me. I know where she is. We can all be together again.
Claudia knew it was too perilous to attempt. She knew Vivi was unlikely to find an excuse to follow her halfway across the world, and it was all the more risky to keep contact with her; Aimée was a fellow artist, and she and Claudia didn’t look quite as alike as they could have. But if there were three women of a similar age with dark skin, and dark hair, and hazel eyes and a naturally mischievous smile-- That was more suspicious. That was worth closer scrutiny. And once they realised how much Aimée and Vivienne looked like each other…
(Bibi always said that Aimée and Vivi could have been the twins, if she didn’t know them so very well. Claudia had always been slighter and sharper by a small margin.)
Both of the couples took cards with Claudia’s details on them - she had a postbox in Mwanza, but there was no other sure way to reach her, and she didn’t get out to Tanzania as often as she should. She regretted that now. She regretted she had never quite found a way to have “home” on her own. When they left the gallery - they had more to do today, at the very least find somewhere in the city to have dinner - Claudia sat blankly in the exhibition hall for a few minutes before realising she didn’t want to speak to anyone else for the remainder of the day, and she retreated back up to the balcony.
Claudia went back to the hostel she was staying in feeling a giddy buzz in her chest, heavily tempered by a bone-deep exhaustion.
Then something unexpected happened: Bernice Jones came back.
She came alone this time, apparently paid full price for a ticket just to talk to Claudia again. She had not yet had to hide upstairs that morning, so Bernice saw her sitting on a chair in the exhibit and made a beeline for her. Pleasantries were exchanged until she deemed it appropriate to launch into what she had actually come to talk about.
Bernice Jones wanted to commission a painting.
Bernice Jones wanted to commission a painting of and for Vivienne Torrance.
They made a date for discussing it at a more appropriate time, of course. They went to dinner and they talked about prices and timelines. Bernice had brought reference pictures, of Vivienne and the cat, separately and together. Normally Claudia would have appreciated such forethought and organisation, but this time it ticked her off, though it was no fault of Bernice’s. She knew how to paint her own sister. Claudia’s schedule was busy - she really did have exhibitions in the South Pacific through the next two years. But Bernice was insistent that a painting would be just as welcome five years from now as it would be tomorrow, so she didn’t mind the wait. She said it was worth waiting for.
Claudia wondered if she had any idea how right she was.
Through the rest of her time in Ontario, Claudia filled up a sketchbook with cats. There was a stray that frequented the hostel’s block - a resident had probably got into the habit of feeding it at some point, and since moved on. It was a skinny, dark dart of a thing, and she studied its form, the way it paraded gracefully along the half-wall outside the hostel. Once, Claudia was sitting on the wall and sketching the building, when the cat suddenly hopped up beside her from behind, and investigated her hands with its whiskers and nose. It chewed the end of her pencil briefly before concluding it was not food, and then began to nuzzle Claudia’s hand and arm with zeal.
“Stop it, silly cat,” she chastised. It did not stop. She remembered her childhood dog wistfully. He had been excellent at following directions.
When her time in North America was done, she flew to Brisbane before Sydney. Ever since they saw those smoking men loitering outside the Mwanza apartment, she was careful about how she reconnected with Aimée. Either they pre-arranged a time and place, or she just frequented artists’ events in the city until they bumped into each other. She didn’t bother with that this time; she went directly from the airport to Aimée’s house, luggage in hand, and knocked on her door.
“Claudia!” she said. “I didn’t expect you until next month.”
They played the charade long enough to sit down at the table with a cup of tea each. Then Claudia began to tell the story of the party who had come to her exhibition at the Royal Ontario, and the woman with the cloud of dark hair and a smile like she knew something no one else could.
Aimée blamed her weepy eyes on the beginning of the southern hemisphere’s spring season. The hayfever promised to be atrocious this year.
Claudia practiced drawing round cheeks, broad shoulders, clouds of dark hair. How Aimée looked with her eyes turned down softly. She practiced painting the flat, shimmering Pacific Ocean off the Port of Brisbane.
She studied the photographs Bernice had given her; it was more difficult to draw her sister than she remembered. It no longer felt like second nature, and the tiny differences between the three of them grew colossal in her mind. They looked the same, but they had changed; Aimée had grown taller than both of them, though she’d never been more than three centimetres taller than Vivienne when they were children and fell behind when Claudia’s growth spurted at school. It seemed she had kept growing when Claudia had stopped - she now had at least an inch and a half over her. Vivi was shorter than both of them now, when she had always been slightly taller than Claud, and she had thicker thighs, a bigger chest, a softer face, than Aimée’s had grown into. In their separation, Aimée and Vivi had drifted in opposite directions, and Claudia had stayed in place.
There was an array of clothes in Bernice’s photographs, as well. Claudia was doing a study of one of the dresses, a long, light-coloured (yellow, she thought) summer dress with a subtle floral pattern, when she suddenly stopped. Her pencil had been following the shadows at the dress’s waist, feeling out how the light fabric draped and pleated, when she noticed it falling in an odd way. She studied the picture closely for another minute, then compared it to another, and finally concluded she was right. In this photograph, Vivienne was pregnant.
She had read something, recently. The Repopulation Initiative had been going for years, as long as the Age Ten laws had been in effect, and a writer had printed a scathing critique of this juxtaposition. Where had she read this? It wasn’t in the paper; they’d never print it. A zine of some kind, left behind at one of the hostels, it must have been. Who wrote that piece? Not Laura Halstead? No, her name had started with a B. But whoever she was, she had talked about the irony of encouraging people to give birth while denying them the right to raise those children. She had also expressed extreme skepticism of childhood centres run by a centralised government.
Claudia hadn’t really thought about pregnancy in relation to herself before, except the casual prevention of it. She had never felt any particular urge to reevaluate her teenage verdict of “yuck”.
She showed Aimée the photograph when she returned in the afternoon, as they were waiting for dinner to finish cooking. She absorbed the information silently, staring absently at the picture and then past it, into her own thoughts. Claudia said, “I wonder what it was like.”
Aimée fixed her with a stare. “Claudia. You don’t have to do something just because Vivi did.”
“I didn’t say anything about me.”
“I know you didn’t.” She was frowning, and it made her look older, folding wrinkles into her forehead.
Over dinner, when the topic of conversation was forgotten, Claudia realised that it was not only when she was frowning that Aimée’s face became creased with lines. She had lip lines, crows’ feet. Claudia noticed for the first time that there were silver strands of hair starting to show at her temples. She was barely thirty.
“Are you alright?” she asked abruptly.
Aimée looked startled. “I’m fine,” she said.
“You look awful. Maybe you should see a doctor.”
She laughed uncertainly. “That’s just what your company does to me,” she joked.
Claudia remained unconvinced.
It was years after her chance encounter with Vivienne before she could finish the painting. Years of sketching every cat she met, studying the way they would melt into surfaces on warm summer days. She could perhaps have started it sooner than she did, but she had waited until she was in Mwanza - away from the prying eyes of too many other artists, but also because it just felt right. Having the sunlight shimmer off Lake Victoria behind Vivienne and the cat was a detail she had settled on some time ago. One of those ideas that seized her and didn’t let go. It was so insistent, in fact, that she had to take a trip out to the lakeshore to paint it up close one afternoon, to get the feel of it just right.
(The sketches and colour-tests would become Child with Damselfly, later, a painting that Aimée insisted on buying from her. Insisted on hanging above her mantelpiece, and showing off to every guest she hosted in Brisbane.)
She tried to sketch Vivi from Bernice’s photographs, first, but her face wouldn’t come out right in pencil - too round, then too sharp, then someone else’s face altogether. She abandoned her materials in the Mwanza apartment and flew to Lyon to demand Leslie photograph her.
“Only if you agree to model for one of my projects too,” she said, which was very diplomatic of her since Claudia had not even said ‘hello.’
Claudia stuck Leslie’s and Bernice’s photographs side by side on a spare easel next to the one she was using. She pinned up her studies of cats and her studies of sisters, and her studies of the lake and the window seat where Vivi’s portrait was going to be sitting, and she worked. And worked. And worked. The only thing less demanding about the piece than The Charcoal Dish was that she didn’t have to keep physically moving her entire setup to access different parts of the canvas.
She wanted to present it to Vivienne in person. She knew that was ridiculous and dangerous and there was no earthly reason for it - she and Bernice Jones had kept in irregular but stable contact, and Claudia had a perfectly acceptable mailing address to use. And she always hated being present for her new work’s unveiling, which all her friends and every gallery she had ever exhibitioned in knew. But she wanted to see Vivienne’s face when she laid eyes on it. She wanted the hug that Vivienne would give her without even thinking about it. She wanted to talk to her sister.
When the painting reached its destination, she got a letter, through Bernice, from Vivienne. It had matured significantly, but Claudia could still recognise her handwriting.
Dear Ms. Atieno
The first time Claudia read the letter, she scoffed. The name was not theirs, and the formality was ridiculous. The second time she read the letter, it made her sad. The third and fourth, she skipped the polite introduction to get directly to, You captured my darling Connie so wonderfully, and then, Your painting reminded me how to smile. She did not give details, but she mentioned that her pregnancy - a second one, she had been pregnant twice, had had two children - had been difficult. She said the painting reminded her of what she had, and not what she had lost.
Claudia wanted to go to her. She wanted to hold her, and let her cry on her shoulder, and propose as many insane, reckless schemes to find her children as she could think of. She might have risked it, if she had received the letter earlier; but as it happened, it arrived in the same week that the Global Council announced that they were debating adding a stricter amendment to the Age Ten laws. The amendment would put into law that siblings were prohibited from contacting each other after the age of ten, and technically it shouldn’t apply to them, being in their thirties, but. Well. There was a reason they had been so careful this far. Painting her anger at the Society was safer than acting it - it was harder to justify arresting someone over a subjective piece of art.
Claudia could live with being separated from Vivienne; knowing that she was alright, that she was loved, was enough for her. What really made her blood boil was the notion that Vivi’s children would be separated. Even if they were taken away from Mom, at least they’d have each other. At least Vivi could know that they had each other.
She and Cassandra had been planning to go travelling together for ages - any of their friends, mutual or otherwise, could have told anyone curious enough to ask that they had been talking about it for years. It just so happened that when their tour finally commenced, their stay in Kota Tua Jakarta coincided with the completion of a new, purpose-built Childhood Centre. It just so happened that they had their sketchbooks with them when they passed it, too.
Cass’s piece was celebratory, joyful, showing the children playing in the sunlight. Free from war, free from disaster. Claudia’s painting showed the same thing, except that the caretakers cast long shadows over their play. They were spaced out regularly, lining the square with stony faces, like prison guards. They were like the carers from the Programming Centre; impersonal, rigid, less like guardians and more like a breathing surveillance system.
Over the years, Claudia had gleaned slivers of Vivienne’s life through Bernice’s letters. Before Toronto, they had been in Chicago. Michael had been involved, Bernice seemed to imply (though perhaps not on purpose), with the Trade Office surveillance scandal. Vishwathi Ramadoss herself had complimented Claudia’s Ferngulch, Madurai, at a gallery showing. She had seemed like a woman playing her winning cards extremely close to her chest, and indeed she had got off without much more than a warning after the hearings. She hadn’t implied she knew anything about Claudia’s contact with Aimée - or Vivi. Claudia invited her to a gathering in Mwanza, to get a better read on her. And to send a message that she was unafraid of her.
Debuting The Three Sisters at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art was icing on the cake.
She so hoped that Aimée had managed to see it before she died. That painting was to be their reunion; in her mind, even if only there, she had imagined three of them converging on it hanging on the gallery wall, a second reflection - or were they the original? She had imagined taking each of their hands in front of the patrons and the gallery staff and the entire world and saying, These are my sisters, and you cannot take them away from me.
But Aimée died, and Vivienne had not found another excuse to send a letter, and the children would be ageing out of their Childhood Centre soon, and they would forget one another.
Claudia invited many interesting people to her house in Cornwall. One of the interesting people was a critic. She was an artist, too, but it was her criticism that intrigued Claudia, as easily as it frustrated her. It did not frustrate her the way critics usually frustrated her; with Roimata, she got to the heart of Claudia’s paintings too quickly.
And Roimata kept digging.
“What paintings are you going to speak about?” she asked. Archie had loaned a large portion of his collection - and several other peoples’ collections, it seemed - to the Tate Modern for the exhibit. But which paintings to include in the audio guide seemed to be up to Roimata.
She seemed to find this to be a big question. “Well, Still Life with Orchid, of course,” she smiled sheepishly, and Claudia returned the smile in acknowledgement. She was glad that their precipitous ejection from the Café Joyeuse several weeks prior was already something they could joke about. “The Charcoal Dish,” she continued, which she approved of; then, “House with Yellow Door, and then I think maybe Cornwall Market. It depends how much you can tell me, I suppose. What about Self-Portrait with Cat?”
She sipped her tea. “I’ve never painted a self-portrait with a cat,” Claudia said.
Roimata frowned and set down her cup. She shuffled her sheaf of papers, then slid one around to face her. “Here, this one. From 1961.” She was referring, of course, to Vivienne’s painting. Self-portrait with Cat. Oil on canvas. 1961.
She offered no indication of recognition.
“What was the cat’s name?” Roimata asked, studying the painting anew.
Connie. Her name was Connie.
For a second, Claudia thought she would see realisation dawn on Roimata’s face. To her, it was obvious that the woman in the painting was not herself; overlooking the broader shoulders, the thicker waist, she could attribute to the loose, flowy dress and the way the cat’s body obscured Vivi’s. But could Roimata not see the rounder cheeks, the softer jaw, the more pronounced dimple of her smile?
Roimata met Claudia’s eyes, expectant of an answer to her question and nothing else.
“I’ve never owned a cat.”