Читать книгу Hector and the Search for Happiness - Francois Lelord - Страница 8

HECTOR announced to his patients that he was going away on holiday.

When they heard the news, some of them, often those with the most serious disorders, said to him, ‘You’re absolutely right, Doctor, with the job you do you need a rest!’ But others seemed slightly put out that Hector was going on holiday. They said to him, ‘So, I won’t be able to see you for several weeks?’ They were generally the unhappy people whom Hector couldn’t make happy and who were wearing him out.

Hector had a good friend, Clara, and he also had to tell her that he was going away on holiday. He asked her whether she would like to go with him, not just to be polite, but because he liked Clara a lot and they both felt they didn’t spend enough time together.

Hector and Clara loved each other, but they found it difficult to make plans together. For example, sometimes it was Clara who wanted to get married and have a baby and sometimes it was Hector, but they almost never wanted it at the same time.

Clara worked very hard for a big company – a pharmaceutical company that produced the pills psychiatrists prescribe. In fact, that’s how she’d met Hector, at a conference organised to present the latest products to psychiatrists, and in particular the wonderful new pill her company had just invented.

Clara was paid a lot of money to come up with names for pills that would appeal to psychiatrists and their patients all over the world. And also to make them believe that the pills her company made were better than those made by other companies.

Although she was still very young she was already successful and the proof of this was that when Hector rang her at the office, he was almost never able to speak to her because she was always in a meeting. And when she and Hector went away for the weekend, she would take work to finish on her laptop while he went out for walks on his own or fell asleep beside her on the bed.

When Hector suggested to Clara that she go with him, she said that she couldn’t just leave like that out of the blue, because she had to go to meetings to decide on the name for the new pill her company was making (which would be better than all the other pills that had ever been made since the beginning of time).

Hector didn’t say anything; he understood. But he was still slightly put out. He wondered whether going away together wasn’t actually more important than meetings to find a name for a new pill. But since his profession was to understand other people’s points of view, he simply said to Clara: ‘That’s all right, I understand.’

Later, while they were having dinner at a restaurant, Clara told Hector how complicated life was at her office. She had two bosses who both liked her, but who didn’t like each other. This made it very difficult for Clara, because when she worked for one boss there was always a risk she might upset the other boss, and vice versa when she worked for the first boss, if you follow. Hector didn’t really see why she had two bosses at the same time, but Clara explained that it was because of something called ‘matrix management’. Hector thought that this sounded like an expression invented by psychiatrists, and so he wasn’t surprised that it created complicated situations and drove people a bit crazy.

He still hadn’t told Clara the real reason for his holiday, because since the beginning of their dinner it had mostly been Clara talking about her problems at work.

But as he was growing a little tired of this, he decided to begin his investigation into what made people happy or unhappy straight away. When Clara stopped talking in order to finish her meal, Hector looked at her and said, ‘Are you happy?’

Clara put down her fork and looked at Hector. She seemed upset. She said, ‘Do you want to leave me?’

And Hector saw that her eyes were shining – like when people are about to cry. He put his hand on hers and said: no, of course not (although actually there had been times when he had thought about it), he had only asked her that because he was beginning his investigation.

Clara seemed reassured, though not completely, and Hector explained why he wanted to understand better what made people a little happy or unhappy. But now there was another thing he wanted to understand, and that was why when he’d asked Clara whether she was happy she’d thought that Hector wanted to leave her.

She told him that she’d taken it as a criticism. As if Hector had said: ‘You’ll never be happy’ and that therefore he wouldn’t want to stay with her, because, obviously, nobody wants to live with a person who’ll never be happy. Hector assured her that this was not at all what he’d meant. In order to put Clara’s mind completely at rest, he joked around and made her laugh, and this time they both felt in love at the same time until the end of the meal and even afterwards when they went home to bed.

Later, as he was falling asleep beside her, he told himself that his investigation had got off to a good start, that he’d already discovered two things.

One of them he already knew, but it was good to be reminded of it: women are very complicated, even if you are a psychiatrist.

The other would be very useful to him during his investigation: you must be careful when you ask people whether they’re happy; it’s a question that can upset them a great deal.