Hector and the Secrets of Love (15 page)

‘Excellent!’ roared Professor Cormorant. ‘But you have only spoken about one component of love. Two at the most. And you are speaking of attraction rather than love.’

Hector was pleased: in only a few words Professor Cormorant had given him a foretaste of everything interesting he had to say about love. But, just then, the Chinese chauffeur in the army cap informed them in English that they were being followed.

They saw a big German car behind them, or rather behind the car that was behind them, because the driver must be clever, but not as clever as Captain Lin Zaou of the People’s Liberation Army.

‘For God’s sake!’ said Professor Cormorant. ‘You were followed!’

‘Or perhaps you were,’ said Hector.

‘Impossible!’

They might have gone on arguing about it, but their car swerved abruptly towards an exit, so fast it felt like it was falling, and for the next five minutes all Hector and Professor Cormorant could do was hold on to the door handles, amid a screeching of tyres. Then the car slowed down.

‘We’ve lost them,’ said the captain.

Hector and Professor Cormorant sat up straight.

They were now driving along a narrow street lined with plane trees and cottages – you’d have thought you were in Hector’s country, which was understandable, because a long time ago that part of town had belonged to his country. The car drove through a gateway and parked in a courtyard with two plane trees and what must once have been stables running along one side. At the foot of one of the trees, Hector noticed a shrine with fruit and sticks of incense placed in front of a statue of Buddha. A pair of French windows opened and Not appeared, smiling, followed by two young, effeminate Chinese men.

‘My assistants,’ exclaimed Professor Cormorant.

The two young Chinese men greeted Hector. One of them had very untidy hair that stood up on end as though he had just got out of bed, except that it was done on purpose, and the other was wearing purple glasses and an earring.

‘Nice to meet you. Professor Cormorant very good,’ they said to Hector in English.

‘Never mind the compliments,’ said Chester, ‘let’s take you straight to the lab,’ and Hector knew he wasn’t going to be bored.

A
NOTHER person who wasn’t bored was Clara, who had gone directly to Hector’s hotel. She was perfectly aware of its name, since Gunther had given it to her.

Clara was in the lobby, which looked like an Indian palace, with lots of comfortable settees, which were so pretty that the thought occurred to Clara that one of them would look good in Hector’s consulting room, before she realised how inappropriate that thought was. She decided to sit on one of these splendid couches while she waited for Hector to come back.

Of course, this was what Clara told herself, that she had come here to wait for Hector, but it would have been much easier to ring him and arrange a meeting. In fact, Clara had only one thought in her head: to catch sight of the pretty Asian girl she had seen at Hector’s side.

She began to watch people coming and going, and what with the businessmen and -women assembled at one of the lobby bars before going off to a meeting, the tourist couples arriving exhausted from their morning excursions and the hotel staff dressed in their white, faintly Indian-looking uniforms, it made for quite a crowd, and suddenly, coming out of the arcade of boutiques, she saw the charming young Asian girl. Clara had to admit it: she really was lovely.

Vayla was carrying rather a lot of bags with the names of the various boutiques on them, and Clara felt a little pang as she wondered whether all this expenditure was a gift from Hector or whether it was being paid for by the company, in which case Gunther, in a sort of poetic justice, was footing the bill for Hector’s new lover’s purchases.

Vayla felt a bit tired after all that shopping, and so she sat down with a graceful little movement in one of the armchairs in the lobby, a few yards away from Clara, who was still watching her.

Clara looked for any defects, but because she was essentially honest, she recognised that there weren’t many to find.

A waiter approached Vayla with a menu and asked her what she would like. She looked embarrassed. The waiter spoke in English then Chinese then English again, but Vayla still had the embarrassed look of someone who is afraid of making a blunder. Finally, she asked for an orange juice in the voice of someone who has learnt the words off by heart. The waiter went away and Clara began to fret.

The girl didn’t speak English, and as it was unlikely she spoke Hector’s language, and he didn’t know any Asian languages, this provided an insight into their relationship which worried Clara. She tried to say to herself: So that explains it, she’s just a bed friend; his lordship is enjoying himself with a woman who isn’t capable of answering back. At the same time, she knew Hector and realised it couldn’t be true; it wasn’t his style to make love several times without becoming involved. He must be attached to this girl in a way that wasn’t just physical. Perhaps he wanted to help her, to protect her, to take her away from the place where he had found her? Clara realised it was this thought that caused her the most pain. Hector having a passionate liaison with a pretty local girl wasn’t exactly pleasant, but the idea that he could be attached to her for other reasons, and above all because he wanted to take care of her, was absolutely unbearable.

And what about you, missy, with your Gunther, are you in any position to criticise
? Of course not. Life really was very complicated. Clara suddenly felt overwhelmed by the vastness of the lobby, by all these people coming and going, and by the presence right next to her of Vayla ensconced in her enormous armchair, like a precious jewel nestling in its case.

Just then, Vayla sensed she was being watched and glanced at Clara.

When you come from a country like Vayla’s you learn early on to read people, to sense who will be kind to you and who won’t, because, in countries like that, a child’s life is quite precarious.

She saw a Western woman, quite pretty, older than her, but still young, gazing at her with surprising intensity.

Vayla felt uneasy because she had the impression Clara was a nice person and at the same time she sensed waves of hostility radiating towards her. She felt dazed for a moment, leaving the waiter to put a large glass of orange juice full of sparkling ice cubes down in front of her, and then all of a sudden the only possible explanation dawned on her, as clear as day.

‘Darling Hector?
’ This was the expression Vayla had used in order to ask Hector if there was another woman in his life in his faraway country. And from the awkward way he had said ‘
sort of
’, she had understood that even if only ‘
sort of
’ there was another woman in his life and he loved her.

She started feeling afraid. How could she hope to compete with this woman whose skin was so pale – a sure sign of refinement and beauty – who knew about a whole world of which she was ignorant, who could no doubt drive and use a computer, and who knew Hector much better than she did? Vayla knew Hector found her pretty, but that must be because he had forgotten his partner’s milkywhite complexion. Confronted with such a powerful rival, even Professor Cormorant’s love potion would be useless.

Vayla began to resign herself to defeat. It was her destiny to have met Hector, her incredible good luck. And it was her destiny to have him taken away from her again. A tear dropped into her orange juice.

I
N a huge Plexiglas cage, dozens of little mice were copulating furiously. They looked like some sort of vibrating fur carpet.

‘Look,’ said Professor Cormorant, ‘they’ve been given compound A. Lots of sexual desire. I put a bit too much in my first concoction.’

Hector remembered what the hotel manager had said about the professor’s tendency to chase after the female staff at the hotel.

In another cage, a couple of mandarin ducks were lovingly rubbing their beaks together.

‘Compound B. Affection. Oxytocin — slightly modified of course,’ the professor added, winking.

The ducks were a touching sight and, with their crests and multicoloured plumage, they reminded Hector of characters in an opera declaring their love.

‘The problem is they’re so keen on canoodling it stops them eating. Too strong a dose at the beginning, or perhaps the formula’s still not quite right.’

‘But won’t it kill them if they don’t eat?’

‘
Of loving at will, of loving to death, in the land that is like you
. . . Actually, we’re obliged to separate them from time to time, and we take the opportunity to force-feed them.’

‘Force-feed them?’

‘Have you ever eaten mandarin duck pâté?’ the professor asked, and immediately burst out laughing, as did the two young Chinese men, for this was clearly one of their favourite jokes.

‘Professor Cormorant very funny!’ said Lu, the one with the ruffled hair.

‘Very very funny!’ added Wee, the one with the purple-tinted glasses.

And their laughter echoed under the vaulted brick ceiling. The laboratory had been set up in a series of cellars belonging to a former wine merchant from the time of the International Settlement, who had made his deliveries to his customers by horse-drawn cart, hence the old stables in the courtyard.

Hector had noticed numerous new-fangled-looking machines, some with flat screens where you could see spinning molecules, computers unlike any you might have at home, and a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging machine like the one he had seen at Professor Cormorant’s university, and of course an animal house, containing different species, which stared at you mournfully from their Plexiglas cages. It all looked like it had been set up very recently, and since Gunther had blocked all Professor Cormorant’s accounts Hector wondered where he had found the money for it all. Who was paying the young Chinese men and women working in one of the rooms in front of their flat screens?

‘Our biggest problem is estimating how long the effects will last. In humans, it is difficult to differentiate between a lasting effect of the product and a lasting effect of the early stages of the love experience. Not and I, for example: do we continue to love each other because the initial dose is still active in our brains or because we’ve got used to such an amazing degree of harmony that now it’s become a habit?’

‘And how can you find out?’

‘By studying the effects on animals that have no emotional memory. I’ll show you a pair of rabbits in a minute . . .’

‘But does it really matter either way?’ asked Hector. ‘The end result is the same, whether it’s an effect of the product or an effect of learning together: a love that lasts.’

‘How can you be sure it will last? After all, our recent relationships, yours and mine, are only a few weeks old . . .’

Hector saw a glimmer of hope – maybe the effects of the drug would wear off.

‘. . . but I can also tell you that six months ago, at the university, I made two ducks fall in love, just like the ones you saw, and the faculty have written to inform me that the little darlings still love each other tenderly! And, what’s more, that drug hadn’t been perfected!’

Hector’s hopes were instantly dashed. He and Vayla would be together indefinitely. The professor’s roguish expression, like an overgrown child pleased at having played a clever prank, suddenly made him angry.

‘But, Professor Cormorant, we aren’t ducks! And what about freedom of choice?’

‘Hang on, people will always be free to — ’

‘Love isn’t simply a question of drugs! What about commitment? And compassion? We aren’t rabbits, and we aren’t pandas!’

‘For heaven’s sake, calm down, everything’s fine!’

‘You can’t play around with love! Love is a serious matter!’

‘Indeed, and we take it very seriously, Dr Hector.’

It was a tall Chinese man in a suit who had spoken. He had come in noiselessly and was watching them with a smile, flanked by Lu and Wee. He looked older than Hector, but younger than the professor, and he had intelligent eyes behind his fine titanium glasses, and a smile like a film star’s. His suit was so immaculate you wondered if he would dare sit down in it, but he had the look of a man who was in the habit of daring when he judged it necessary.

‘Dr Wei,’ said Professor Cormorant, ‘the one sponsoring all this research!’

‘I am only a humble intermediary,’ said Dr Wei, narrowing his intelligent eyes.

H
ECTOR returned to his hotel, all alone in the back of the big car driven by Captain Lin Zaou. He watched the amazing Shanghai skyscrapers glide by in the hazy late-afternoon light, but he didn’t care about them. He was very worried by the association between Professor Cormorant and Dr Wei.

‘We see love as a cause of social chaos,’ Dr Wei had said. ‘Instead of starting families or helping the economy to thrive, young people waste their energy flitting from one person to the other, a hedonistic, selfish pursuit. Or else they suffer from heartache, and as a result some of our most brilliant students miss the opportunity to attend the best universities, throwing away their futures and their contribution to their country. And those who do marry in accordance with their parents’ wishes (as always used to be the custom until recent times) mope about, particularly the girls, it has to be said, wondering if it is right to stay with a man they don’t feel sufficiently in love with! And all this, of course, is the fault of the media, turning their heads with all their talk of love!’

Hector was sure that this sort of torment had existed long before the media came along, and that you could find lots of Chinese poems dating back centuries about women weeping because their husbands were unkind, and grieving for their first loves. However, he didn’t say anything because he wanted to hear the whole of Dr Wei’s argument, and Dr Wei was obviously a man who was used to talking for a long time without being interrupted.