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“How much were you drinking,” she murmured, rubbing Claudia’s back. It wasn’t really a question, since it seemed evident enough from her arms draped around the toilet seat. It had been a while since she had got this sick, was all, and usually the parties involved were much more memorable, stretching over several days without petering out as this one had done. Roimata thought she should probably save her thoughts that Claudia might be getting slightly too old to drink like a twenty-something for later.
“I wasn't.” Her voice echoed in the bowl, scratchy and slightly bunged up.
“What...?” her hand paused in its repetitive motion momentarily. Hadn’t she? They had been drinking white wine, she remembered the bottle. The bottles. She could remember Claudia filling glass flutes… but she had passed them out. Not brought them to her lips. As she became aware that she might believe Claudia, she lifted her head and looked to the door as if to catch someone’s eye, although she knew she had closed it behind them. She wondered if Dr. Okonkwo was still here, and if perhaps she should call her. Or if she should start worrying about having caught a stomach bug earlier this evening when they--
“It's morning sickness.”
She turned her head so fast she was surprised there wasn’t an audible snap. Claudia’s half-lidded eyes peeked over her arm with nauseous sincerity before she ducked low again and retched. There was nothing left in her stomach to come up.
“Morn-- Claudia.” If this was some kind of joke… “Claudia, morning sickness?”
Claudia’s lies tended to be wordy. It was why Roimata knew she was telling the truth, when all she said was, “Mm.”
Her mind halted like a piece of paper jammed in a typewriter. It was too much to process, and she didn’t want to process it, not yet. She didn’t want to understand all the implications of what Claudia had just said. “How do you know?” was the only question that pushed itself free of the gridlock. Maybe she was wrong. She knew plenty of people who had been wrong about these things…
She mumbled something, and the words might have been indistinct or Roimata might just have been too overloaded to parse them, it didn’t really matter, because she was already pressing, “Claudia, did you take a pregnancy test?”
“Of course not,” she said, sounding downright offended. Her haughty tone might have been out of place echoing on the inside of a toilet bowl, but it seemed perfectly… Claudia. “If I picked up a test I would be monitored like never before. I’d like to keep my reproductive rights intact, thank you very much.” Apparently finished with the toilet, she flushed it and shuffled back to sit against the wall.
After a long, weighty pause where Claudia had clearly expected to find another question but Roimata could ask none, she said, “I’ll fetch you a glass of water.”
Her mind felt filled with buzzing insects as she filled the glass from the tap. Through the door into the parlour, she could see an easel propped with a painting that Claudia had evidently started the previous night, several lurching figures dancing in that very parlour. For a brief moment, it felt as damning as photographic evidence of a positive pregnancy test. All these people saw. That was absurd, of course. It was not as if Claudia had suddenly acquired a visible aura of pregnancy. It only seemed obvious because she had just told her.
“I’m off now, Roimata,” Chrisette told her casually, as she passed the porch. Chrisette was bundled up warmly in the lavish fur coat and wholly impractical shoes she had arrived in.
“Alright then,” she replied, acutely aware that Chrisette was only addressing her because she happened to be the person she saw as she headed out the door.
“I changed your calendar over. Sorry to rob you of the joy, but I know you two hopeless ones will leave it in March all the way until October if no one reminds you. Time still moves on off this island, you know.”
“That’s what my editor keeps telling me,” she replied absently, looking at the wall calendar which Chrisette had, indeed, changed. She had bought it from a market in the village, from a friend of the photographer who took the pictures. This month’s was a burst of bright purple flowers emerging in front of the azure sea. It was the first of April.
“Alright, well, I’m off, but give Claudia my best, I hope she feels better soon.” It was well-intentioned, but it made Roimata’s stomach turn anyway. A pang of nausea at the idea of Chrisette learning the truth of Claudia’s illness was drowned out by resentment bubbling up in her throat. She was sour that Chrisette was leaving her to deal with this on her own, that she always did this, she stayed for the parties and got the amiable, charming side of Claudia, while Roimata was left to deal with her when she got tired and moody.
No one is forcing you to stay, she reminded herself. You could follow Chrisette out that door and take the motorboat back to the mainland. You could catch the coach to Plymouth.
She handed the glass of water to Claudia and sat down on the rim of the non-functional, leaky old bathtub, which naturally was being used as storage. The truth was, she liked being the one who cleaned Claudia up when she was a mess. It was hard, thankless work, and she wouldn’t have stayed for anyone else.
Claudia was sitting with her knees up, her hands hanging between them, and her head leaned back against the wall. She didn’t look like she was joking. There was a very particular glint she got in her eye when she was playing a mean prank, and she didn’t have it now. After she had stared in silence at Claudia for some time, she held one hand out, and Roimata took a moment to remember that Claudia’s glasses were still tucked in her chest pocket. She passed them over, and as Claudia slid them into her nose, she said, “Aren't you going to ask?”
“No,” she said indignantly. If this was a prank, then she wasn’t going to fall for it. And if it wasn’t, she wouldn’t be baited.
Then, because she had to know, she said, “...Is it?”
“Is it what?”
“Claudia.”
“Ask me if you want to know.” She was insufferable. She was horrid, for making her spell it out only in service of a smug satisfaction.
“Is it mine?” It was a crass phrasing that she resented as soon as it left her lips, but she had no other to use. The ridiculous notion that she somehow owned a ball of multiplying cells in Claudia’s womb had no reason to be doctored and re-phrased by the language of the Society. It was not the kind of thing opined about in the columns of slow Thursday papers. It was simply not the kind of question that was supposed to matter.
“Yes.”
She did not know what she had expected. She did not know what she had wanted. Would she have been relieved, if she’d said no? Jealous? Angry? Sad? She seemed to be all of those things anyway, or at least her body was so confused about what she was feeling that it was firing off every signal it could think of.
“Are you sure?” she asked, and she put a name to what she was feeling, finally; scared. She was scared.
“No,” she said, which was good, because Roimata would have known she was lying otherwise. “But it is yours, because I am choosing to tell you and no one else.”
“You're talking as if we're going to be raising it.”
“Would you?”
She tried to swallow the feeling that leapt into her throat. “Claudia, don't be silly.”
“I'm not.”
“You're talking nonsense.” She looked away, but she could still feel Claudia’s gaze burning into her. Her heart was thumping hard, jostling her ribs like a beast rattling a cage. Claudia had all the sincerity of a teenager proposing a Truth or Dare, and that was the cruelty of it. If the aim was to humiliate, she was succeeding. April Fools prank or not.
There was a soft knock on the bathroom door, and Pavel opened it without waiting for a response. He handed Claudia another glass of water without heeding the one Roimata had already brought, and asked, “How are you feeling?”
If she had been asked to justify the flash of panic in her chest, she would have struggled. But she was powerless to stop Claudia from sharing her revelation if she chose to, and of all people, she was most likely to tell Pavel. Claudia met her eyes for only half a second. She said simply, “Better.”
"Good,” Pavel said.
There was a thick tension in the silence that followed. Roimata felt she should say something – anything – normal to move them along, stop them from floundering in a quagmire of unsaid things filling up the bathroom. Nothing frivolous felt worthy of her voice, and she wanted to say nothing earnest in front of Pavel. She didn’t know what, earnest, she might have said, only that Pavel did not deserve to hear it. Roimata still felt a clamp pressing down on her heart, and she was starting to look inward, back at every tender memory she had of pleasure in this great old house. She was cursing herself, for not having this conversation sooner. Before it was a reality. She had known they should, but it had never seemed to be the right moment, and anyway, she had hardly imagined there was a question about it. Claudia wouldn’t want to keep--
She tried to swallow the feeling, and she had to close her eyes for a moment, cheeks burning. As if that would remove her from the chilly bathroom tile shared by Claudia and Pavel. There had been a pregnancy scare once, before Atieno moved into the Cornwall house, and it had been a scare. It was in Roimata’s notes, from those first few interviews. Claudia didn’t see the point of having children. She said she would rather make something she could keep, and name.
Roimata thought she meant her art. Maybe she hadn’t.
She could hear another guest approaching, stalled by Pavel blocking the entrance; maybe looking for Claudia, maybe just wanting to use the damn bathroom. Reflexively she looked to the door as she heard them begin to exchange words with Pavel, but she couldn’t see who it was. Claudia was stirring, rousing herself off the floor, and Roimata offered her a hand up as she stood from the rim of the tub. When they were both upright on their feet, their hands stayed folded together. Roimata was close enough to Claudia to smell her breath, rancid and nonalcoholic.
“What do you want to do?” Roimata asked, low enough not to reach Pavel halfway out of the bathroom door.
Claudia said, equally quietly, “Well, you know very well that the only thing I can do is register the pregnancy with the local authority.” She said this looking directly in her eyes, with all the intensity of a bird watching a damselfly.
She did not flinch. She said, “And you know very well that’s not what I asked.”