Claire's Head (22 page)

Somewhat discouraged, Claire returned to her room. She changed into the bathing suit that she had borrowed from the spa – a black one-piece cut high at the thigh and low in the back, which fit her, more or less. There was a sign on her dressing table noting that all silver jewellery should be removed because the mineral content of the water tarnished it; the water had no effect on gold. Wrapped in her own white robe, she descended once again.

At the far end of the pool were two doors that led back into a wing of the hotel, each bearing a sign.
Consulenza Idrologica
said the first, the second,
Consulenza Cosmetologica
. Claire entered through the first door, stepping out of the pounding brightness into an interior of pale aqua where young women in starched white uniforms hovered around a reception desk, and a long hallway lined with white doors stretched away to her left, the doors all closed except for the one to the room at the very end, lined, like a lab, with shelves of bottles. One doctor of hydrology was with a patient. Another was already at lunch. The others were elsewhere. Any of the doctors will be happy to help you, one of the young women told her. In the meantime, you must take the waters.

Inside the second doorway, a peach-coloured corridor led into a large room through which extended a row of golden doors each set within a plaster arch, and more young women in the same white uniforms clustered about a similar reception desk and looked up expectantly as Claire entered. Here, as everywhere, the air was tinged with sulphur. Signora Forconi per la fangoterapia, one attendant asked her.

It was possible that Rachel had stayed on in Italy. She might be here, among the sunglass-shielded, white-robed spa-goers, difficult to recognize beneath this disguise. Perhaps she had met a man, an Italian man, and decided to throw in her luck with him. Perhaps Italy, the land itself, had worked some languorous seduction upon her.

Outside once more, Claire scanned for doctors. Beyond the three gold spigots set in a marble wall from which you could drink the water (no more than three cups in twenty-four hours,
preferably on an empty stomach), beyond a shallow, narrow ambulatory pool, where from the foot of a small artificial waterfall women set out to walk up and down to tone their thighs and benefit their circulation, near a large stone toadstool which pounded water from its cap upon the heads and backs of those beneath and lacked only a caterpillar with a hookah seated upon it; a doctor in a white coat, deep in conversation, gestured and nodded.

The doctor poured a bottle of aqua minerale into a glass for Claire and then did the same for himself They were seated in a triangle of shade. The frolicking notes of the string quartet tripped out of an open door towards them. His name was Dottore Nicolo Maggiorelli. He was evenly tanned, the smoothness of his manners and appearance offset only by the extraordinary length of his very black eyelashes. In English, as they walked towards the bar, he'd asked Claire where she came from. Canada, she said, a response that seemed to delight him, although perhaps he would have reacted similarly no matter what she'd said.

Now he asked courteously and in fluent English if there was a particular ailment or condition she wished to discuss.

“Do you get many visitors who suffer from migraines and is there anything in the water that's particularly good for them?”

He came close to touching the back of her hand with his fingers: the gesture hovered in the air. Claire crossed one leg over the other, her pale right calf protruding beneath the hem of her robe. She felt swallowed up by the robe, the bathing suit riding
up in places where she didn't wish it to. She tried to loosen her belt and part the sides of her robe in a manner she hoped would be alluring yet feared was ridiculous.

“Let me tell you a little how we work here,” Dottore Maggiorelli said. “Do you know what the word
spa
means?”

Claire didn't.

“A Roman acronym. Salus per aquam. For three thousand years people have been coming to visit these waters, fantastic, isn't it?”

She agreed it was.

“Now the nature of most illness is complicated, and much lies deep in the unconscious. So not only do the chemical and mineral characteristics of the water and the presence of these two gases, hydrogen sulfate and carbon dioxide, have their healing properties, but – this is very important – there is the symbolic value of the water. We bathe in the water. It soothes us. This is also therapeutic. We ask people not to think of their illness as a separate thing but of their global well-being.”

Claire kept being distracted by the twenty-two centimetres between her hand and the doctor's, now thirty-eight, nineteen between their feet. By his eyelashes and the liquidity of the sunlight beyond him. She drank some water.

“If you suffer from migraine, what are the specific qualities of the water that help?”

“Eh-It is very good for the circulation and has strong anti-inflammatory effects on the muscles. It may not work directly on the neural system but overall it is a powerful relaxant. Think of the global organism.”

“Do you go in the water?”

“Of course. It is also detoxifying, good for the liver.” He smiled, which did something odd but not inelegant to his chin. “When I was a medical student in Rome, we used to visit for the weekend. Pleasure is also part of the therapy. This can be a very good place to cure a broken heart.” He glanced down, eyes shielded by those lashes. He had small, neat knuckles. “I have worked here for five years, and before that, for many years, at a hospital in Rome, and while there is a great hope in a hospital, there is also great hopelessness. Here, people come because they want to be here. They are trying to help themselves and the doctor aids them in this process whereas in a hospital the doctor is the source of the cure, he is the source, one could say, of the magic –”

Something distracted him. A female doctor, outside the door marked
Consulenza Idrologica
was waving one white arm at him, a black shadow thrown across the wall behind her. His fingers touched Claire's knee. “We must continue, I apologize. You will be here in the morning?”

Once he'd left, she sank back in her chair, eyes closed, convinced she'd blown it.

She took the waters. What was the point of being at a Terme if you didn't? The Terme's water, sour and eggy to drink, was heavy and thick to swim in, something about its mineral content slowing the body down. Like others, Claire kept her sunglasses on as she swam and settled into an empty spot along the side of the pool and tried to soothe her global organism.

There were, she now realized, families here, not staying at the Terme but day visitors, who arrived through a separate entrance on the far side of the grounds. They did not languidly peel themselves from robes, but launched themselves through the doors of change rooms in bathing suits, already disrobed. Families, generations' worth of families, raucous and high-spirited, boys teasing girls.

Perhaps Rachel had attached herself to a man and his family, had decided to reinvent herself as a slim Roman matron, stepmother to someone else's motherless children – this was as radical a prospect as anything else Claire could imagine. Perhaps Rachel was not only trying to escape her life but jettison her family, or what remained of it, its awkward tugs and lingering ghosts. Although the desire for a new family, a different family, was surely more of an adolescent desire. Years ago, Claire had watched Rachel as she walked along the Hunstanton beach, staring at other families with a curious, lingering gaze. Yet this was normal, at thirteen.

Did she want a child? Of course this was a different question than whether she felt she could manage with a child. A family was by its nature chaotic, even if hers had not particularly seemed so, apart from the chaos brought on by their migraines.

Migraines had not stopped their mother having children, three children in six years. Sylvia had told them explicitly how much she wanted a family, the family she'd never had – siblings gathered around a kitchen table. No doubt her desire had been
strong enough to outweigh whatever pain the desire had cost her. With a toddler underfoot, she had become pregnant a second time, and spent that pregnancy on the road in Africa. And became pregnant again with Claire, a little over a year after their return to Canada, while they were all still squashed into a two-bedroom apartment. It was never mentioned whether or not their father had wanted three children.

Perhaps Sylvia was simply tougher than either Rachel or Claire. Also, her migraines were not as frequent. It was not until she was an adolescent that Claire remembered her mother taking to her bed with a headache (and her father's disquiet in the face of this). Perhaps Sylvia had not needed to do so earlier, or she had simply hidden her symptoms and managed to keep on her feet. Perhaps Claire simply did not remember her mother being bedridden.

What she did remember from her childhood was a sense of her mother holding something back or overcoming something. All that ferrying them about, to ballet classes and skating classes and piano lessons, was not effortless. At seven, sitting beside her mother in the car, waiting for Allison to finish a skating lesson, Claire was aware that what her mother was doing wasn't easy. She had no sense that Sylvia wanted her to feel this, wanted to place any burden of knowledge or responsibility upon her, yet Claire couldn't help feeling the undernote of strain beneath her mother's selflessness.

What if she had a child, a daughter, who had migraines even worse than hers? Had Sylvia worried about this? Later she would helplessly apologize and say openly that she felt guilty for the intensity of her daughters' headaches. Not that either Claire or
Rachel had ever behaved as though they considered her at fault. Well, Sylvia said, it's obviously my genes you've inherited. Actually, Rachel replied, it's not clear what we've inherited, whether the migraines are genetic or if it's some neurological predisposition, something in your physical makeup that's been passed on, and the headaches themselves are a kind of learned behaviour, a body language. Great, Sylvia said, I taught you to have headaches. Or, Rachel said, or are they worse for us because of something Dad introduced into the mix, physiologically or behaviourally? Perhaps, Sylvia said, it's better not to pursue that line of thought.

Rachel had worried about passing on her migraines. This was why she claimed to have searched for someone genetically unlike herself as the father of her child. Genetic hybridity would lessen the chance of passing on the damn headaches, and so far there'd been no sign of migraines in any of the three girls, although they did have more headaches than many children.

The waters left Claire feeling sleepy rather than refreshed. Even a shower didn't shake her back to alertness and the smell of sulphur still breathed from her skin and lurked at the back of her mouth, but the wide bed awaited and she sank into its embrace and slept. She awoke, still groggy, to the ringing of the telephone. It was Stefan, for whom it was lunchtime, while the sun in the sky above her was already well into its fall.

“Claire? Your voice sounds funny.”

“I'm fine. My head's fine.”

“Have you found anything?”

“Not yet. I'm supposed to meet this woman in the morning.” It wasn't entirely a lie, it was what she hoped to do, even if she'd got no further in her attempt to find Hannah di Castro. How could she tell him she'd spent all day lolling in a sulphur-scented pool and idling under a toadstool-shaped fountain?

“No other word?” she asked him.

“No word.”

What did a spa offer someone who was in pain? Distraction. Hope. The balm of a place where you did not have to worry about other people's suffering. Where you surrendered to your body, to a world of sensation, without feeling guilty about it. Pleasure was good. The head became nothing more than a part of the body. There was the possibility of transforming a life in a weekend or a week, a cure that seemed both medicinal and magic. Drink this. Bathe in this and you will be healed. Which was not unlike the allure of swallowing pills. Eat this and you will be well. Eat this and you will be changed. A child's wish.

The next morning, the taste of sulphur was still in Claire's mouth, the dull odour of it now released not only by her skin but her clothes. Her silver jewellery – the necklace and earrings she'd worn only briefly the night before – had turned black. Her head was still all right.

Down on the green lawns below her window, groups of people in white were jumping up and down or setting off in a wavy line, six, seven, eight, along a path into the fields.

This morning she had no time to waste. Downstairs, she hurried along a hallway, unremembered from the day before, empty, lined with columns, her shoes thwacking against the
marble floor. She had to find a doctor, any doctor, and no more coyness, today she simply had to throw herself at someone.

Not before breakfast, though. Once she found the restaurant, the quest for protein at breakfast again proved a bit of an issue. There were no eggs to be had: they were not an Italian breakfast food. There was yogurt and milk and cheese and prosciutto and various cereals and fresh fruit and bread rolls and cornetti and rusks. She'd had cheese the day before despite feeling a little nervous about dairy ever since Rachel's recent bad experiences with it. Claire didn't have the stomach for prosciutto first thing in the morning. Since no protein at all would definitely bring on a migraine, she ordered a smoothie: strawberries and bananas blended with milk. How bad could that be? As soon as the brimming glass arrived, she drank it down.

For thirty seconds nothing happened.

A salt taste like the sea welled from the back of her throat and she had to keep swallowing it, salt mixing with sulphur, in order not to throw up. Her toilet bag with all her medications in it was in the bathroom and she was not. She was on the bed. The pain had come on so fast. It shook her in its jaws like a dog. It gripped her throat, it squeezed her eyeballs. Now the room pressed in and withdrew simultaneously. First there was silence and then the faint, blithe melodies of the string quartet started up, drifting through the window through the walls through the floor, the notes prancing across the carpet towards her.