Travelling to Infinity Read online

  I listened in amused fascination, drawn to this unusual character by his sense of humour and his independent personality. His tales made very appealing listening, particularly because of his way of hiccoughing with laughter, almost suffocating himself, at the jokes he told, many of them against himself. Clearly here was someone, like me, who tended to stumble through life and managed to see the funny side of situations. Someone who, like me, was fairly shy, yet not averse to expressing his opinions; someone who unlike me had a developed sense of his own worth and had the effrontery to convey it. As the party drew to a close, we exchanged names and addresses, but I did not expect to see him again, except perhaps casually in passing. The floppy hair and the bow tie were a façade, a statement of independence of mind, and in future I could afford to overlook them, as Diana had, rather than gape in astonishment, if I came across him again in the street.

  2

  On Stage

  Only a couple of days later, a card came from Stephen, inviting me to a party on 8th January. It was written in a beautiful copperplate hand which I envied but, despite laborious efforts, had never mastered. I consulted Diana, who had also received an invitation. She said that the party was for Stephen’s twenty-first birthday – information not conveyed on the invitation – and she promised to come and pick me up. It was difficult to choose a present for someone I had only just met, so I took a record token.

  The house in Hillside Road, St Albans, was a monument to thrift and economy. Not that that was unusual in those days, because in the postwar era we were all brought up to treat money with respect, to search out bargains and to avoid waste. Built in the early years of the twentieth century, 14 Hillside Road, a vast red-brick three-storey house, had a certain charm about it, since it was preserved entirely in its original state, with no interference from modernizing trends, such as central heating or wall-to-wall carpeting. Nature, the elements and a family of four children had all left their marks on the shabby façade which hid behind an unruly hedge. Wisteria overhung the decrepit glass porch, and much of the coloured glass in the leaded diamond panes of the upper panels of the front door was missing. Although no immediate response came from pressing the bell, the door was eventually opened by the same person who used to wait wrapped in a fur coat by the zebra crossing. She was introduced to me as Isobel Hawking, Stephen’s mother. She was accompanied by an enchanting small boy with dark curly hair and bright blue eyes. Behind them a single light bulb illuminated a long yellow-tiled hallway, heavy furniture – including a grandfather clock – and the original, now darkened, William-Morris wallpaper.

  As different members of the family began to appear round the living-room door to greet the new arrivals, I discovered that I knew them all: Stephen’s mother was well known from her vigils by the crossing; his young brother, Edward, was evidently the small boy in the pink cap; the sisters, Mary and Philippa, were recognizable from school, and the tall, white-haired, distinguished father of the family, Frank Hawking, had once come to collect a swarm of bees from our own back garden. My brother Chris and I had wanted to watch, but to our disappointment he had shooed us away with a gruff taciturnity. In addition to being the city’s only beekeeper, Frank Hawking must also have been one of the few people in St Albans to own a pair of skis. In winter he would ski down the hill past our house on his way to the golf course, where we used to picnic and gather bluebells in spring and summer and toboggan on tin trays in winter. It was like fitting a jigsaw together: all these people were individually quite familiar to me, but I had never realized that they were related. Indeed there was yet another member of that household whom I recognized: she lodged in her own self-contained room in the attic, but came down to join in family occasions such as this. Agnes Walker, Stephen’s Scottish grandmother, was a well-known figure in St Albans in her own right on account of her prowess at the piano, publicly displayed once a month when she joined forces in the Town Hall with Molly Du Cane, our splendidly jolly-hockey-sticks folk-dance leader.

  Dancing and tennis had been just about my only social activities throughout my teenage years. Through them, I had acquired a group of friends of both sexes from various schools and differing backgrounds. Out of school we went everywhere in a crowd – coffee on Saturday mornings, tennis in the evenings and socials at the tennis club in summer, ballroom-dancing classes and folk dancing in the winter. The fact that our mothers also attended the folk-dance evenings along with many of St Albans’ elderly and infirm population did not embarrass us at all. We sat apart and danced in our own sets, well out of the way of the older generation. Romances blossomed occasionally in our corner, giving rise to plenty of gossip and a few squabbles, then usually faded as quickly as they had bloomed. We were an easygoing, friendly bunch of teenagers, leading simpler lives than our modern counterparts, and the atmosphere at the dances was carefree and wholesome, inspired by Molly Du Cane’s infectious enthusiasm for her energetic art. Fiddle on her shoulder, she called the dances with authority, while Stephen’s grandmother, her corpulent frame upright at the grand piano, applied her fingers with nimble artistry to the ivories, not once allowing the sausage bang of tight curls on her forehead to become ruffled. An august figure, she would turn to survey the dancers with a curiously impassive stare. She, of course, came downstairs to greet the guests at Stephen’s twenty-first birthday party.

  The party consisted of a mixture of friends and relations. A few hailed from Stephen’s Oxford days, but most had been his contemporaries or near contemporaries at St Albans School and had contributed to that school’s success in the Oxbridge entrance exams of 1959. At seventeen, Stephen had been younger than his peer group at school, and consequently was rather young for university entrance that autumn, especially as many of his fellow undergraduates were not just one year older than him, but older by several years because they had all come up to Oxford after doing National Service, which had since been abolished. Later Stephen admitted that he failed to get the best out of Oxford because of the difference in age between him and his fellow undergraduates.

  Certainly he maintained closer ties with his school friends than with any acquaintances from Oxford. Apart from Basil King, Diana’s brother, I knew them only by repute as the new elite of St Albans’ society. They were said to be the intellectual adventurers of our generation, passionately dedicated to a critical rejection of every truism, to the ridicule of every trite or clichéd remark, to the assertion of their own independence of thought and to the exploration of the outer reaches of the mind. Our local paper, The Herts Advertiser, had trumpeted the success of the school four years earlier, splashing their names and faces across its pages. Whereas I was just about to embark on my undergraduate career, their student years were now already behind them. They were, of course, very different from my friends, and I, a bright but ordinary eighteen-year-old, felt intimidated. None of this crowd would ever spend their evenings folk-dancing. Painfully aware of my own lack of sophistication, I settled in a corner as close to the fire as possible with Edward on my knee and listened to the conversation, not attempting to participate. Some people were seated, others leant against the wall of the large chilly dining room, where the only source of heat was from a glass-fronted stove. The conversation was halting and consisted mostly of jokes, none of which were even remotely as highbrow as I was expecting. The only part of it I can remember was not a joke, but a riddle, about a man in New York who wanted to get to the fiftieth floor of a building but only took the lift to the forty-sixth. Why? Because he was not tall enough to reach the button for the fiftieth floor...

  It was some time before I saw or heard of Stephen again. I was busily engaged in London following a secretarial course in a revolutionary type of shorthand, which used the alphabet instead of hieroglyphs and omitted all vowels. Initially I accompanied my father to the station at a sprint to catch the 8 a.m. train every morning, until I discovered that I was not required to be at the school in Oxford Street quite so early. I could travel at a more leisurely pace than my dedi
cated, hard-working father, so I ambled to the station for the nine o’clock train and met a completely different commuting public from the jam-packed, harassed-looking, middle-aged breadwinners in dark suits. Rarely did a day go by when I did not meet someone I knew – unhurried and casually dressed, either going back to college after a weekend at home or going up to London for an interview. This was a welcome start to the day, because for the rest of it, apart from a short break for lunch, I was confined to the classroom, surrounded by the clatter of massed old-fashioned typewriters and the chatter of ex-debs whose main claim to distinction seemed to be the number of times they had been invited to Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace or Clarence House.

  The revolutionary form of shorthand was easy enough to pick up, but the touch-typing was a nightmare. I could see the sense of the shorthand, for that was going to be useful for note-taking at university, but the typing was tiresome in the extreme and I was hopeless at it, still struggling to reach forty words a minute when the rest of the class had finished the course and mastered all the additional skills of the secretarial art. Actually the shorthand would be of short-term value while the typing skills would prove themselves over and over again.

  At weekends I could forget the horrors of typing and keep up with old friends. One Saturday morning in February, I met Diana, who was now a student nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital, and Elizabeth Chant, another school friend, who was training to become a primary-school teacher, in our favourite haunt, the coffee bar in Greens’, St Albans’ only department store. We compared notes on our courses and then started talking about our friends and acquaintances. Suddenly Diana asked, “Have you heard about Stephen?” “Oh, yes,” said Elizabeth, “it’s awful, isn’t it?” I realized that they were talking about Stephen Hawking. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I haven’t heard anything.” “Well, apparently he’s been in hospital for two weeks – Bart’s I think, because that’s where his father trained and that’s where Mary is training.” Diana explained, “He kept stumbling and couldn’t tie his shoelaces.” She paused. “They did lots of horrible tests and have found that he’s suffering from some terrible, paralysing incurable disease. It’s a bit like multiple sclerosis, but it’s not multiple sclerosis and they reckon he’s probably only got a couple of years to live.”

  I was stunned. I had only just met Stephen and for all his eccentricity I liked him. We both seemed shy in the presence of others, but were confident within ourselves. It was unthinkable that someone only a couple of years older than me should be facing the prospect of his own death. Mortality was not a concept that played any part in our existence. We were still young enough to be immortal. “How is he?” I enquired, shaken by the news. “Basil’s been to see him,” she continued, “and says he’s pretty depressed: the tests are really unpleasant, and a boy from St Albans in the bed opposite died the other day.” She sighed, “Stephen insisted on being on the ward, because of his socialist principles, and would not have a private room as his parents wanted.” “Do they know the cause of this illness?” I asked blankly. “Not really,” Diana replied. “They think he may have been given a non-sterile smallpox vaccination when he went to Persia a couple of years ago, and that introduced a virus to his spine – but they don’t really know, that’s only speculation.”

  I went home in silence, thinking about Stephen. My mother noticed my preoccupation. She had not met him, but knew of him and also knew that I liked him. I had taken the precaution of warning her that he was very eccentric, in case she should come across him unannounced. With the sensible assurance of the deep-seated faith which had sustained her through the war, through the terminal illness of her beloved father and through my own father’s bouts of depression, she quietly said, “Why don’t you pray for him? It might help.”

  I was astonished therefore when, a week or so later, as I was waiting for a 9 a.m. train, Stephen came sauntering down the platform carrying a brown canvas suitcase. He looked perfectly cheerful and pleased to see me. His appearance was more conventional and actually rather more attractive than on past occasions: the features of the old image which he had doubtless cultivated at Oxford – the bow tie, the black-velvet jacket, even the long hair – had given way to a red necktie, a beige raincoat and a tidier, shorter hairstyle. Our two previous meetings had been in the evening in subdued lighting: daylight revealed his broad, winning smile and his limpid grey eyes to advantage. Behind the owlish spectacles there was something about the set of his features which attracted me, reminding me, perhaps even subconsciously, of my Norfolk hero, Lord Nelson. We sat together on the train to London talking quite happily, though we scarcely touched on the question of his illness. I mentioned how sorry I had been to hear of his stay in hospital, whereupon he wrinkled his nose and said nothing. He behaved so convincingly as if everything were fine, and I felt it would have been cruel to have pursued the subject further. He was on his way back to Cambridge, he said, and as we neared St Pancras, he announced that he came home quite often at weekends. Would I like to go to the theatre with him sometime? Of course I said I would.

  We met one Friday evening at an Italian restaurant in Soho, which in itself would have been a sufficiently lavish evening out. However Stephen had tickets for the theatre as well, and the meal had to be brought to a hasty and rather embarrassingly expensive conclusion to enable us to make our way south of the river to the Old Vic, in time for a performance of Volpone. Arriving at the theatre in a rush, we just managed to throw our belongings under our seats at the back of the stalls when the play began. My parents were fairly keen theatre-goers, so I had already seen Jonson’s other great play The Alchemist and had enjoyed it thoroughly; Volpone was just as entertaining, and soon enough I was totally absorbed in the intrigues of the old fox who wanted to test the sincerity of his heirs but whose plans went badly wrong.

  Elated by the performance, we stood discussing it afterwards at the bus stop. A tramp came by and politely asked Stephen if he had any loose change. Stephen felt in his pocket and exclaimed in embarrassment, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I have anything left!” The tramp grinned and looked at me. “That’s all right, guv’,” he said, winking in my direction, “I understand.” At that moment the bus drew up and we clambered on. As we sat down, Stephen turned to me apologetically, “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but I don’t even have the money for the fare. Have you got any?” Guiltily aware of how much he must have spent on our evening, I was only too happy to oblige. The conductor approached and hovered over us as I searched for my purse in the depths of my handbag. My embarrassment equalled Stephen’s as I discovered that it was missing. We jumped off the bus at the next set of traffic lights and fairly ran all the way back to the Old Vic. The main entrance to the theatre was closed, but Stephen pressed on – to the stage door at the side. It was open and the passage inside was lit. Cautiously we ventured in, but there was no one to be seen. Directly at the end of the passage we found ourselves on the deserted but still brightly lit stage. Awestruck, we tiptoed across it and down the steps into the darkened auditorium. In no time at all, to our joint relief, we found the green leather purse under the seat where I had been sitting. Just as we were heading back towards the stage, the lights went out, and there we were in total darkness. “Take my hand,” said Stephen authoritatively. I held his hand and my breath in silent admiration as he led me back to the steps, up across the stage and out into the passage. Fortunately the stage door was still open, and as we tumbled out into the street we burst into laughter. We had been on the stage at the Old Vic!

  3

  A Glass Coach

  Some weeks after the Old Vic episode, as the speed-writing course was officially coming to an end, my mother met me on my return home one evening excitedly waving a message from Stephen, who had telephoned to invite me to a May Ball in Cambridge. The prospect was tantalizing. In the Lower Sixth at school, a girl had been invited to a May Ball, and the rest of us were green with envy lapping up every detail of a gala occasion which
seemed to be the stuff of fairy tales. Now, unbelievably, my turn had come. When Stephen rang to confirm the invitation, I accepted with pleasure. The problem of what to wear was soon solved when I found a dress in white-and-navy silk in a shop near the speed-writing school in Oxford Street, which was just within my means.

  The May Balls, which with typical Cambridge contrariness take place in June, were still some months away. In the meantime I had to start replenishing my funds, depleted by the purchase of the ball gown, for my travels around Spain later in the summer, so I signed on with a temporary-employment agency in St Albans. My first assignment was a one-and-a-half-day stint – Thursday afternoon and the whole of Friday – in the Westminster Bank in Hatfield, where the manager of the branch, Mr Abercrombie, a patient, kindly man, was a friend of my father’s. I was first directed to the telephone switchboard, but with no inkling of what to do, I panicked at the flashing lights and frantically pulled out some leads on the board while desperately trying to push others into the vacant holes. I succeeded only in cutting off all outside callers and in connecting up the telephones of people who were sitting opposite each other. After that, I gradually settled into a variety of temporary jobs as the spring advanced into early summer and the night of the May Ball approached.

  When Stephen arrived one hot afternoon in early June to take me to Cambridge, I was shocked by the deterioration in his condition since that evening of the Old Vic escapade, and I doubted that he was really strong enough to drive his father’s car, a huge old Ford Zephyr. Built like a tank, it had apparently forded rivers in Kashmir when the family – minus Stephen who had stayed at school in England – had lived in India some years earlier. I feared that the snorting vehicle might well go much too fast for the present driver, a slight, frail, limping figure who appeared to use the steering wheel to hoist himself up to see over the dashboard. I introduced Stephen to my mother. She showed no signs of surprise or of alarm, but waved us away as if she were the fairy godmother, sending me off to the ball – with Prince Charming – in a runaway glass coach.