Hector and the Secrets of Love (16 page)

As if to demonstrate this, Lu and Wee were listening to him with an air of great respect, giving little nods of agreement. And yet Hector had the impression they were only pretending; there was something strange but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The only enjoyable thing about the situation was imagining Gunther’s face when he discovered that the vast Chinese market had just slipped through his fingers. Should Hector send him a report informing him of this catastrophe?

The car dropped him in front of his hotel, and suddenly he remembered another problem he had to deal with, one that was as complicated as the future of China and Taiwan: Vayla and Clara.

He felt rather depressed and wondered whether it might not be a side effect of the drug. He was about to go through the revolving door when he bumped into Jean-Marcel.

‘Are you all right? You don’t look so good.’

‘Oh, just a few problems.’

‘Come on, I told you mine, now you tell me yours,’ said Jean-Marcel, leading him over to the bar.

In the lobby Hector noticed a half-finished glass of orange juice and remembered it was the only drink Vayla knew how to order.

They found themselves sitting at the bar, and as it was nearly evening they ordered a couple of Singapore Slings in memory of their visit to the temple.

‘My friend has arrived from France,’ explained Hector. ‘She wants to see me.’

‘Oh boy! And where’s Vayla?’

‘I don’t know. I expect she’s gone back to our room.’

‘And what is it you want out of all this?’

This question amused Hector — it was the kind of thing he asked his patients. Had Jean-Marcel consulted one of his colleagues before?

‘I don’t know. I feel I love them both, but that’s completely impossible. It’s all the fault of the chemistry.’

‘Chemistry?’ Jean-Marcel asked, looking very intrigued.

‘Yes, the chemistry of love, I mean. Little molecules spinning round in our heads like copulating mice . . . or ducks, for that matter.’

Jean-Marcel looked at Hector uneasily.

Just then a young man from reception came over and handed Hector an envelope. A letter a young woman had left for him, he explained.

Hector paused for a moment, but Jean-Marcel gestured to him to go ahead and open it. Hector took the letter out and began reading it, while Jean-Marcel sent a text message from his mobile.

‘Is everything all right?’ asked Jean-Marcel.

Hector flushed with anger. Gunther. Gunther with his big two-faced grin. Gunther who had sent him on a mission to discover the secrets of love.

He leapt to his feet, coiled like a spring, ready to go to the ends of the earth to find Clara.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the Peace Hotel.’

‘Let’s go there together!’

In the taxi, Jean-Marcel gave the driver the address, because, well, he spoke a bit of Chinese, too.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s making you so angry?’ asked Jean-Marcel.

‘My friend just told me she’s leaving me for her boss.’

‘Ah, I see . . .’

Outside, the Shanghai buildings glided past, like the ones in New York, as previously mentioned.

‘I don’t mean to be unkind,’ said Jean-Marcel, ‘but you aren’t exactly behaving like a saint either.’

‘It’s only chemistry,’ Hector repeated wearily.

And, at the same time, he felt it was unfair of him to reduce the gentle Vayla’s love to a question of chemistry. Knowing how sensitive she was to his moods, how happy she was each time she saw him, and that they managed to joke with so few words. But how could he be sure?

Because he was very upset, and in psychiatry they teach you that talking helps, he explained to Jean-Marcel about the recent uncertainties in his relationship with Clara. Jean-Marcel listened very attentively, frowning.

‘But why are we going to the Peace Hotel?’

‘To find Clara.’

Jean-Marcel paused. ‘Look, given the situation, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’

‘She’s cheating on me with her boss!’

‘Yes, all right. But let’s just say she stopped loving you as much and now she loves someone else.’

‘She’s deceived me.’

‘And what about you?’

‘It’s not the same. She had already told me things weren’t working between us.’

‘All right, but what will you gain from seeing her, especially in your present state?’

‘She has come all the way to Shanghai. To see me!’

‘Nevertheless, if I were you, I’d calm down first.’

Hector told himself that Jean-Marcel had taken on the role Hector usually had of helping people calm their emotions. But Hector was beginning to calm down. He had already considered the situation, and it was basically true that Clara had stopped loving him as much, and now she loved someone else. You can of course be angry with someone for that. (Some people are even driven to murder and Hector himself felt wound up enough to write something very blunt about the third component of heartache: anger!) But as love is involuntary, is it really fair to want to punish someone for a feeling over which they had no choice? In any case, Clara’s letter had absolved him of the second component, guilt, he told himself as the taxi dropped them outside the Peace Hotel.

‘You go ahead, I’ll follow,’ Jean-Marcel said, counting out the taxi fare.

Hector went through the revolving door, which so many celebrities had gone through so long ago. Two Chinese women dripping with jewellery came out as he went in. He thought:

C
ROUCHED like a huntress in the jungle behind a huge armchair upholstered with pouncing tigers, Vayla saw Hector enter the lobby of the Peace Hotel. He walked over to reception and asked something of one of the staff, who evidently didn’t understand his pronunciation, unlike Vayla who understood everything. She had followed Clara to her hotel, out of a painful desire to dwell on her rival’s superiority, and because she wanted to know more about this creature who posed such a threat to her.

She had seen Clara go up and was steeling herself for one of the most painful experiences of her life: seeing Hector join her in her room.

Just then, Clara appeared in the lobby, followed by a bellboy pulling her suitcase on a luggage trolley.

Clara and Hector noticed each other at the same moment. Hector took three steps forward, but Clara suddenly hid her face with one hand and, raising the other, gestured to him not to come near. Vayla instantly realised it wasn’t a heartless gesture so much as the action of someone appealing for pity, as though speaking to Hector could only make her suffer even more. Hector stopped dead in his tracks while Clara, bowed down with grief, scarcely able to hold back her tears, walked towards the exit. Vayla went on deciphering the emotions on Hector’s face as he stood motionless, and she certainly recognised pity, but also anger, and neediness. She was unaware that her own face was clouded by the same emotions.

Finally, Hector seemed to rouse himself and he caught up with Clara. He steered her over to a couch, not far from where Vayla was still hiding, unseen. Hector and Clara remained silent for a while. Clara dried her tears.

‘How long has this been going on?’ Hector asked.

Clara shrugged, as if the question were unimportant.

‘A month, three months, six months?’

Clara made as if to get up and Hector realised he was taking the wrong approach.

‘Well, all right, I’ll have to live with that as well. With not knowing. At least tell me if you were already having an affair with him when we spent that weekend at your parents’?’

Clara bridled. ‘No!’

Hector saw the tears still rolling down the face he loved so dearly. Love was truly terrible; how could two people who had once loved one another and who perhaps still loved one another inflict such suffering on each other?

‘So why did you come to Shanghai?’

Clara shrugged, but this time as if laughing at herself.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘My plane . . .’

‘He could at least have let you fly in the company jet,’ said Hector.

He felt pathetic for having said it – but too late.

He was torn between the urge to embrace Clara and the thought that you don’t embrace a woman who has cheated on you.

And so he watched her cross the lobby and go outside, and his heart broke even more.

 

 

Jean-Marcel had seen the whole scene involving Clara, Hector and Vayla, and he slipped quietly out of a side exit, to go round and wait at the front of the hotel. He arrived just as Clara’s taxi was leaving. He knew Vayla wouldn’t come out from behind her armchair until Hector had left for his hotel. Jean-Marcel knew Asian women well. And that was one of his problems, because his wife suspected he knew them a bit too well.

 

 

In the taxi he said to Hector, ‘You know, things aren’t as bad as all that. I’m beginning to think you suffer from a rich man’s worries.’

‘Nonsense, she’s in love with another man!’

‘Hmm, she comes to Shanghai and cries as soon as she sees you.’

‘That means she’s attached to me, not that she still really loves me.’

‘So being attached to someone isn’t the same as being in love?’

Hector explained to Jean-Marcel the two main components of love according to Professor Cormorant. (Hector thought there were others, but as they weren’t clear to him yet he didn’t mention them.) The first component: desire, passion, the urge to make love, indomitable dopamine. The first component could manifest itself from the first encounter (and disappear after the next for that matter). And then the second component, which often took a bit more time to develop, anywhere from a few hours to a few days: attachment, the desire to show affection towards the other, to have him or her near, a very strong but slightly calmer emotion, no doubt similar to the emotion between parents and children, the sweet taste of oxytocin. And one of the biggest problems with love was that these two components were often out of step, in one partner or the other or in both, and that is where Professor Cormorant and his drugs came in. (But he didn’t talk to Jean-Marcel about that. Hector was on a mission, don’t forget.) Explaining all this calmed Hector; it stopped him from thinking about Clara’s tears.

‘Well,’ said Jean-Marcel, ‘that’s sort of what’s happened to me and my wife. A lot of attachment, but not much desire. And during my trips, it’s the exact reverse!’

‘How is your interpreter, Madame Li?’

Jean-Marcel looked uncomfortable.‘Never mix business with pleasure,’ he mumbled.

‘Once you start saying that it’s because they’re already a bit mixed, isn’t it?’

Jean-Marcel laughed slightly, and Hector knew he had fallen for his interpreter. When a man finds it difficult to talk about a woman, it is often a sign that he is in love with her. Because men – real men, traditional men, like Jean-Marcel – sense that love can weaken them. But ever since they were little they’ve been told they must always be strong.

 

 

Later, Hector felt sufficiently calm to begin writing, but he only had to say the name ‘Gunther’ from time to time and he would feel angry enough for it to cloud his inspiration.