The Love Drug

A short story by Vanessa Wu.

Smashwords Edition.

Copyright © Vanessa Wu 2011.

Edited and published by Ambergris Books.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The Love Drug

“So your son will be here tomorrow, Andrew.” Lydia Chen observed the old professor across the laboratory. Her words brought a smile to his lips and he shuffled towards her with a gleam in his eyes.

She was standing by the pots of centella asiatica. The sun was slanting in from the big windows and making the little green leaves shine.

“Tomorrow, yes,” said Professor Wayland. He was wearing a white lab coat. He liked the traditional accoutrements.

Lydia was dressed simply in a cotton batik dress. “You must be excited,” she said.

She could see he was. She had known him for nearly ten years and she knew his moods well. She had a deep affection for him for she had always admired his work. He was one of the best herbalists in his field and she felt privileged to have him on her staff.

They worked in the herbal research centre in Kuala Lumpur. It was funded by the government and was very prestigious. Herbs were big business in Malaysia.

Lydia was proud of her position there, which was partly due to the influence of her parents and partly due to her excellent academic record. She had made many sacrifices for her career. The biggest sacrifice was perhaps her personal life. At thirty-four she was still single and her experiences with men had been limited.

“I hope you can still come to the hotel tomorrow night,” said Professor Wayland. He had invited a number of the institute’s staff for dinner at the hotel, along with his wife’s relatives and some of her friends from her work. His son’s visit to Kuala Lumpur was a big event. It was his first visit to see his parents since they had come to Kuala Lumpur three years ago.

“Of course I can. But I wonder if I’ll have much of a chance to speak to Tony. He will be popular with all the guests I think.”

“Oh, he will want to speak to you,” said the professor. “I have told him about you.”

She was intrigued. “Really? What did you tell him?”

The professor chuckled softly. “You can’t expect me to tell you that. I’m afraid you would think I was flattering you. Of course, amongst other things, I told him what good work you do here.”

It was the other things that intrigued her the most. But she said only, “You are very kind.”

“It isn’t kindness, it’s the truth. And, you know, I like to drive it home to him that his kind of science is not the only way.”

“I’m sure he’ll need more than his father’s words to convince him.”

“You’re right. He doesn’t listen to me.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t listen to me either.”

“It is a source of great sadness to me,” said the professor, “that my own son doesn’t understand the value of my work.”

“Perhaps we had better not talk of it tomorrow then,” she said. “But I hardly see how it can be avoided with so many herbalists at the dinner table with him. He might feel somewhat outnumbered.”

“That won’t bother him a bit,” said Professor Wayland. “He’s a headstrong boy. He’s so steeped in the western tradition that he believes western medicine is the only true medicine. He will shut his ears to anything we say, I can assure you.”

Professor Wayland had told her with mingled pride and sadness that her son was working for the Bray Foundation in Middlesex, England. It was a pharmaceutical giant and one of their great adversaries in journals and scientific conferences.

The pharmaceutical companies had massive research budgets and staked them on even more massive profits. Medicine was a commercial business. Their job was to create new medicines out of chemical compounds, prove them in clinical trials and then get them into the market place as fast as possible in order to claw back their massive investment.

The work she did with Professor Wayland in Kuala Lumpur was very different. They worked with the pure herbs. There were commercial considerations, it was true, because the herbs were native to Malaysia and the work they did helped the country’s economy; but there were nothing like the same kind of figures at stake. It was a softer approach. To dismiss it as unscientific was, in her view, iniquitous.

She didn’t want to think about it because it made her upset. If she thought about it before bedtime she would get herself into a state and lie awake all night feeling anxious and indignant.

She drove back to her apartment trying to think of something else, therefore. She cast her mind back to her days as a student in Toulouse. That was where she had first met Professor Wayland. He was one of the lecturers at the university. That was ten years ago. And now he worked for her in Kuala Lumpur. How the world changes, she thought.

And it was in Toulouse that she had known her first lover, Henri.

Perhaps she shouldn’t think about Henri either.

At the age of twenty-four, Lydia had been a mature student at the University of Toulouse. The vast majority of students were younger than her and she was therefore a little bit isolated. The young men she encountered didn’t interest her at all. The ones in her year were very immature and when she talked to them she felt like she was old enough to be their mother.

Henri was different. He was twenty-six. His history was somewhat obscure but he was very gifted both academically and artistically. His botanical drawings were breathtaking in their accuracy and she loved to watch him while he drew, for the look of concentration on his face was wonderful to behold. It was as if he became a different person.

Socially he was very reserved. He shied away from groups and only became talkative in one-to-one encounters. Being the only two mature students in their year, Lydia and Henri were often drawn to each other and became quite close due to their relative isolation from the younger classmates. Henri started to confide in her.

He had been an awkward, gawky child with no friends. His school days had been torture. Due to a combination of poverty and negligence, his mother had often sent him to school without any socks and even sometimes without a shirt on his back, just dirty, sleeveless vests. He was ridiculed and bullied by the other children, who made no allowances for his poverty. To make matters worse, he was an immigrant. At home he spoke only Hungarian and his command of French was poor. In fact he had changed his name to Henri in order to make himself appear more French. His mother had named him Tibor. He had never known his father, who was still in Hungary as far as he knew.

These revelations tugged at Lydia’s heartstrings. Henri’s status as an immigrant gave them something in common. Her command of French was also less than perfect and she enjoyed talking to Henri because he spoke clearly and slowly and she could understand every word he said.

Their friendship soon progressed to the next stage. Their emotional closeness became physical. It began innocently enough one evening in her room with Henri sketching her while they talked. He couldn’t only draw plants she discovered. He had a wonderful gift for drawing people.

He offered to do her portrait in charcoal and she was delighted to accept. Watching him as he worked, she could easily imagine him to be a famous artist, such was the light of intelligence in his eyes.

“How did you become such a great artist,” she asked him, “since you hated school so much?”

“It was simply because I had no friends,” he told her. “No-one wanted to talk to me so I withdrew into my own world. I spent all my time drawing and I became good as it. It was something I could do and I worked at it until I could do it better than anyone else. It was something no-one could take away from me.”