Claire's Head (21 page)

The night was warm. Claire left the restaurant where the Dutch-Canadian missionary doctor had run from her, his bewildered face hovering before her as she walked south along Spuistraat. She was thinking not only of his face but of his story, which was a tale both of a gamble and of faith. She understood the gamble but was not prepared to discount the faith, even if she was uncertain
how to define it. When it came to healing, faith counted. There was statistical proof for the power of the placebo effect and even for prayer, not just a patient's prayers but of those who prayed for the patient. She did not know if you had to believe in God to make your prayer effective or if it was enough to believe in the power of prayer itself, the strength of your conviction that someone could be healed, however this occurred – faith in the healing rather than the healer. The ways in which people were freed from pain sometimes seemed as mysterious as their pains themselves. Did she need to believe in the powers of a man such as Ariel for his healing to work on her?

Just before the bottom of Spui, where a little street turning off to the right would lead her back to the hotel, there was a bar, like many still strung with orange streamers, its windows open. From inside came the sound of men and women singing. Claire stepped through the door. On impulse, she made her way to the counter and, in English, ordered a small bottle of mineral water.

“American?” asked the young man standing next to her at the bar.

“Canadian.”

“Nothing stronger?” He indicated her glass.

“I can't drink alcohol,” she said.

He was American. Tall. From Boston. He was in town for an ultimate frisbee competition. He travelled the world as a competitive ultimate frisbee player. Had she seen any of the soccer? No, she said, she'd arrived too late. She was sorry she hadn't. She was here looking for her sister. They stepped outside where the noise was less ferocious and it was easier to talk. She described Rachel to him. He looked at her with a directness that was not
immediately off-putting, different again from the blunt gaze of Ariel, and said, “I can see you thinking before you speak.” This was startling. It was startling because it was as if, without preamble, he'd looked inside her and recognized something true about her. He was not making fun of her but demanding her attention in return. He walked her to the banks of the Singel, the canal next to the Herengracht, where her hotel stood. He kissed her – on one cheek, then the other, then, leaning further over her, buried his nose against her neck and under the lobe of her right ear, as if to inhale her scent.

Breathless, Claire stopped running only when she reached the doorway of the Ambassade Hotel.

Upstairs, still breathless, she leaned against the back of a chair. What exactly had happened? Had she done anything to feel guilty about? She stepped in front of the gilt-framed mirror, her hair still askew from where, earlier in the day, Ariel had worked his hands against her scalp. What had changed – had Ariel done something to her, or had the city infiltrated her in some fashion, or had she done something to herself?

T
he hills rose and fell, rearing out of the golden land that Claire drove through. She zigzagged up ascents towards the Tuscan villages that clutched the peaks, their stone walls and the jut of roofs and church towers forming jagged jigsaw lines.

Above her, swallows flew like arrowheads, strafing the air.

Up or down, the hills afforded such views that she grew dizzy at the sight: the sweep of fields below, and other hills, banks of olive trees, the silhouettes of cypresses and ilexes along the rises, rocky cliffs that fell away into gorges so steep that your stomach dropped when you looked at them. From far in the distance came a glimpse of the sea.

Ever since the morning's flight from Schiphol to Rome, Claire had been in transit: by train from Roma Fiumicino to Roma Termini, from Roma Termini to Grosseto, where she'd rented the car. In Grosseto, on her short walk from the train station to the car rental office, three people had stopped to ask her for directions, two men and an old English woman who confided that
she was on her way to visit the cathedral, a level of attention that Claire, with her bags and nearly helpless Italian, could only think of as the Ariel effect. Not that people weren't generally friendly to her or she to them, but this was something else, something more. Her head was holding up, shaky at moments, the shakiness then subsiding. Now elongated evening sunlight flushed the olive trees that grew in rows on either side of the road and turned the tops of their leaves silver. The swallows banked and darted. Crickets sawed in the grass. For the last hour, there had been no other car behind hers as she followed the signs for Saturnia.

She passed a waterfall. On her right appeared a sign for the hotel at the Terme and another indicating that the town of Saturnia lay two kilometres farther on. Although her destination was the Terme, she took the route that led to the town, approaching up a slope and along a crest of hill until she found herself, first among houses, then entering a piazza where sweetly scented linden trees were strung with white lights, and outdoor tables were set in front of the restaurants that bordered the square. Already people had begun to fill these tables. A crowd clustered outside a gelateria. The sight drew her on. Perhaps she should have stayed here.

She wondered if Rachel had passed this way. Claire roused herself and nosed the car out of the town again. Below her lay what must be the Terme: a complex of white rectangular buildings, one larger than the rest, set regimentally in a green swathe of field. She approached at last at dusk through a long
allée
of trees.

At the front desk she asked for Hannah di Castro. The young man uniformed in a black suit who was attending to her appeared, like the young man to whom she had spoken by phone, to speak perfect English. He ran his finger down a list of names and phone extensions. He searched through a large appointment book. He asked Claire what sort of therapy Hannah di Castro performed and Claire said she wasn't sure but the day before she had spoken by phone to another young man, who clearly knew of Hannah's work and told her he would leave a message for Hannah. To whom did she speak? She didn't know. She swallowed her frustration. This young man gave a neat little frown. He consulted in Italian with all the other elegant young men in uniform hovering around the reception desk (none of them seemed to be the one to whom she had spoken yesterday). They agreed, in English, that Hannah's name was familiar, she had certainly worked at the Terme, in fact until very recently, they just didn't think she worked here now. They did not know what had happened to her. Claire's best recourse was to inquire – the first young man pointed behind her to an open doorway, beyond which, as she later discovered, was a dim and aqueously lit room containing a single desk – tomorrow between nine and seventeen hundred hours. There were so many other therapists, all marvellous. She must not let this little problem spoil her time at Terme di Saturnia.

Claire persisted. Did they ever release the names of guests or former guests? The young man mimed zipping his lips. Never, signorina. He winked at her. Sometimes people bring illegal girlfriends here. For such information you would have to corrupt
someone. He was kidding, being flirtatious even, but not, as far as Claire could tell, offering himself as someone to be corrupted.

The hotel corridor stretched so far into the distance that Claire gave up counting steps. Although she found her room without difficulty, the walk from the room back to the elevator seemed to take even longer than she remembered and she, who never got lost, kept feeling on the verge of becoming so. She was tired. The air in the hallway smelled faintly but distractingly of sulphur. There were no visible speakers yet the tremble of a string quartet was carried distantly but constantly towards her. For a moment, she thought she saw a young girl up ahead.

Downstairs, the floor tiles were large blocks of watery marble. To the right of the corner reception area, another hallway opened. A few metres along, where the hall turned left, through a glass wall and murkily floodlit, the thermal pools beckoned. At the end of the hall was a bar, also glass-walled, as was the restaurant beside the bar, the grounds outside growing inky as the last rays of light dispersed beyond the hills.

Claire found herself looking for children in a place where there didn't seem to be any. In the bar, men and women sat smoking cigarettes and slim dark cigarillos, despite the discrete
Vietate Fumare
signs. She did not hear much English spoken, mostly Italian. In a corner, a string quartet, three men and one woman dressed in black and white, were playing a disturbingly jaunty tune, a waltz, although most people appeared to be ignoring them. Everyone who wore jewellery – rings, necklaces, ankle
bracelets – wore gold. Claire sniffed the air, well-ventilated but faintly acrid with smoke, wondered what she would be able to eat, and how she was going to manage to corrupt someone.

As children, they would not have been brought to a place like this. Their parents would never have come to a place like this. (Claire had never before been to a spa. Rachel had. She wrote about such places in travel articles and for the health sections of women's magazines. She believed a woman should have at least one facial a year, to which Allison had replied that the only facial she was likely to get was a spattering of orangutan spit, but maybe that had undiscovered anti-aging properties.)

The summer Claire was nine, while they were visiting their parents' relatives in England, they'd spent a week as a family by the sea in Norfolk. They'd stayed in a dilapidated manor house owned by an English man and his Finnish wife, where, in a back room, deep within the maze of the house, there was a home-built sauna, which their mother had tried out one rainy afternoon. Claire had wandered by herself back through the warren of rooms and found Sylvia, shiny and flushed, in the room beside the sauna, lying on a cot wrapped in a towel, drinking a cup of tea and eating cold triangles of toast in the company of the Finnish woman.

On the days when it wasn't too cold they'd gone to the beach. Two days, Claire remembered, were blazingly bright. On the first, their father had taken off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trouser legs, before immersing himself in a book of mathematical puzzles, oblivious to the fact that by the end of the afternoon
the bottoms of both his feet would be sunburned. From under her hat, their mother watched them play, Allison in the brisk sea water, whose frigidity didn't seem to bother her, Claire at the shore, building inlets of sand to channel the tide. Not far from Allison, Rachel lay on a beach towel, in sunglasses and a bikini (a bikini, in England), reading magazines and eyeing boys.

Later, they would all walk along the beach together (this was before their father realized how badly burned his feet were). They made their way towards the boardwalk and the Hunstanton pier and stopped at the low-roofed penny arcades where Hugh gave them each a handful of one-pence coins and Claire watched hers be carried relentlessly one by one across the geometric black and white backdrops of the machines, her gaze gripped not by the tantalizing mounds of money into which her coins eventually dropped but by the backdrops' dizzying swirls.

(Only once had she been to a beach with Stefan, on St. Kitts, where they'd lain in the shade of a palm tree, taking turns to trace messages letter by letter on each other's back, the one who wrote waiting for the other to guess the secret words.)

The next morning, the elegant woman behind the single desk in the dimly lit room said that Hannah di Castro had departed Saturnia in April without leaving a forwarding number. She thought Signorina di Castro had gone travelling. She did not believe she was currently practising massage. She was sorry there had been this confusion. Perhaps one of the doctors knew more. They could be identified by their white coats. She could ring for someone, but if they were in their offices, they were likely with
clients, and if not, they were most likely to be somewhere about the grounds.

In daylight, most of the spa guests had donned white terry cloth robes, belted at the waist and thus distinguishable even at a distance from a doctor's white coat. Also, the spa-goers' legs were bare. Something about the robes made people appear even more
déshabillé
than if they had simply been in swimsuits, perhaps because swimsuits proclaimed a function – bathing whether in sunlight or water – and were so emphatically exposing, while the robes suggested a disguise or some unsettled state between being undressed and being clothed.

Ahead of Claire, a white-robed woman clicked along the hallway that led to the bar and thermal pools, her feet clad in small scarlet sandals, her skin darkly and cracklingly tanned.

Outside, people swam slowly through the water or rested, submerged, supine along the edges of the thermal pool, many with their eyes shielded behind dark glasses. Even in daylight, the water, which surged out of the earth below, was murky green and nearly hot and sulphurically pungent. Blobs of slimy algae floated on its surface, which some of the bathers scooped up and smeared over their skin. She could not see any doctors out here.