let alone write.
But the air hostess only spoke English. She asked Hector if he was visiting her country as a tourist or on business and Hector said ‘tourist’, and wondered how the young woman would have responded if he had told her he was going in search of a mad professor.
Talking a little to the air hostess and drinking champagne did Hector good; it stopped him from thinking about Clara.
Before leaving on this mission, he and Clara had had a long talk. Or rather he had started off asking Clara a lot of questions to find out why she often looked sad. At first she had said no, it was nothing, she wasn’t sad, Hector was imagining things, and then she had finally told him she still loved him, but she wondered whether she was really in love with him. Hector hadn’t taken it too badly, because when you are a psychiatrist you are used to remaining calm while you listen to what people say, and people say very strange things sometimes, but even so, there on the plane he needed to drink champagne and talk to the air hostess in order to repress the urge to pick up the telephone fitted to his seat and call Clara at half-hourly intervals. Especially because he knew it wouldn’t have done much good and he would quickly have run up a phone bill that would have shocked even Gunther.
Love is universal – saying this might make us wonder whether we have made any progress at all, but of course we have, because it allows us to jettison all those silly cultural prejudices, hey presto. Regardless of race, culture or the regime imposed on us, love sets us all aquiver. Just take a look at all the world’s love poems throughout the ages and I guarantee you will find in them universal themes: the sorrow of being parted from the loved one, the joy of seeing him or her again, odes to his or her beauty and the promise of ecstasy it brings, the desire to see him or her triumph or escape from danger. Do it and you will see I am right and that will shut you up, you dimwits.
Before writing this message, it would seem Professor Cormorant had taken another type of pill. Hector had quivered slightly when he read the sorrow of being parted from the loved one, but he managed to focus again in order to read all the professor’s most recent emails since he had gone missing. There were about fifty of them and Hector thought that by examining them he might discover what was going on in the professor’s mind, understand what he wanted, and eventually find him.
Others at the company had tried this of course, but without any success; in their view, Professor Cormorant had gone mad, and that was that.
The only thing they could do was find out where the emails had been sent from, and this was very clever of them, because the professor had done some quite complicated things to prevent them from discovering which computer he had used. As a result, it took the people from the company several days to locate the computer and by the time they sent somebody there the professor had gone.
Hector had a map of the world recording the professor’s movements.
It was evident that all the most recent emails had been sent from Asia, so there was a chance they would find him there. But what Gunther was counting on most was the professor wanting to talk to Hector. Before leaving, Hector had sent the professor an email.
Dear Professor Cormorant,
Some people you know well want to find you. They are sending me after you in the hope that I will have a better chance of finding you than they do. It would give me great pleasure to talk to you anyway and to hear how you are getting on. You may reply to me at this address, which only I have access to.
Yours sincerely
Hector didn’t really know what he would do if he found Professor Cormorant. Of course, he was being paid by Gunther to find him and bring him back, but, as you have already guessed, Hector liked the professor more than he liked Gunther, and also he said to himself that the professor might have had very good reasons for disappearing.
The air hostess brought him more champagne with a smile, and Hector felt a sudden flash of love for her. Perhaps he could ask her for her number?
He told himself he was pathetic.
He opened his little notebook and wrote:
Seedling no. 4: True love is not wanting to be unfaithful.
He looked at the air hostess walking away in her pretty oriental outfit then he mused some more and wrote:
Seedling no. 5: True love is not being unfaithful (even when you want to be).
HECTOR DOES SOME HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
AFTER taking another plane, this time one with propellers that juddered quite a lot, Hector arrived in a small town in the middle of the jungle. The town centre had been built a long time ago by people from his country and it looked just like a sleepy town from his childhood, with its post office and town hall, a canal lined with tall trees, and the Café des Amis. But, of course, the people who lived here were Asians who strolled in a leisurely manner and drank at the Café des Amis and other bars, particularly the men, because in this country, like many others, it was mostly the women who did the work. As soon as you went a little way from the centre, the roads were no longer tarmacked, except in the hotel district where they widened out again and were lined with palm trees. Because in this country they had built a lot of hotels in huge gardens full of marvellous trees. Beautiful hotels made half out of wood with roofs that blended in with the local architecture and balconies on stilts, because they had been built not very long ago, after the period when architects were crazy and planted huge cement blocks all over the world.
The architects who certainly weren’t crazy were the ones who, a few centuries earlier, had conceived the huge stone temples you found in the forests near the town, at around the same time that people in Hector’s country were building cathedrals. There were dozens of temples scattered over several miles and people came from all over the world to see them. It was the architects of those temples, then, who had provided work for their colleagues who had built the hotels centuries later, and who should perhaps have raised another little temple to their predecessors.
The manager of one of the town’s most delightful hotels was quite young and cheerful; he wore a shirt with button-down pockets and looked a bit like Tintin. He clearly remembered the professor who often sent emails from the business centre at his hotel.
‘He left three days ago. He told me he was going to Laos. Why are you looking for him?’
‘He’s a friend of mine,’ said Hector. ‘My other friends and I have been a bit worried about him lately.’
‘Ah,’ said the hotel manager.
He nodded without saying anything and Hector could see that several thoughts were flashing through his mind. Hector understood at once: hotel managers are a bit like psychiatrists: they see and hear many things they mustn’t tell anybody. It’s called professional confidentiality. Hector had always got on well with hotel managers – to start with because he liked hotels and it is always better when you know the manager, but also because, with all their guests and staff, hotel managers end up learning a thing or two about human nature, a bit like psychiatrists, but they’re often cleverer.
Hector knew how to put the hotel manager at his ease (we won’t tell you how because psychiatrists have to keep some things to themselves, a bit like magicians) and the manager began to talk about Professor Cormorant.
‘At first, we found him charming. Also, he picked up a few words in Khmer quite quickly and everybody was impressed. The staff adored him. He always had a kind word for everyone. He visited the temples in the late afternoon when the crowds of tourists have left and the light is at its most beautiful. And he spent a lot of time working in his room. One evening, I invited him to dinner.’
The professor had explained to the hotel manager that he was an expert in butterflies and was in search of a very rare species which all the other experts