Travelling to Infinity Read online

  Stephen was pleased to see me on my return. Intuitively I understood that he had begun to view our relationship in a more positive light and had perhaps decided that all was not lost, that the future did not have to be as black as his worst fears had painted it. Back in Cambridge, one dark wet Saturday evening in October, he hesitantly whispered a proposal of marriage to me. That moment transformed our lives and consigned all my thoughts of a career in the Diplomatic Service to oblivion.

  6

  Backgrounds

  Once the momentous decision had been taken, everything else began to fall into place, if not automatically, then with some determination and effort. We sailed through the next year, carried high on a tide of euphoria. Whatever misgivings my friends and family may have had about Stephen’s state of health, they kept them to themselves, and the only comments I received concerned the eccentricity of the Hawking family.

  Such comments did not worry me too much, because I liked the Hawkings and regarded their eccentricities with a respectful fascination. They made me welcome, already treating me as one of the family. They may have economized on material goods, preferring the old and tried to the newfangled, and they certainly did compromise on heating to the extent that people who were cold were brusquely told to follow Frank Hawking’s example and wear more clothes, a dressing gown for example, even during the day. Moreover, as I had already discovered, there were areas of the house which could be charitably described as distinctly shabby. However, none of this was particularly new to me. It simply indicated that this household had a set of priorities which were not so very different from those I was used to. My own parents had scraped and saved for years. We were not wealthy, and we often had to make do and mend because so much of Dad’s income went on our education and on those wonderful summer holidays. We did not have central heating at home, and I was well used to sitting by the fire with my face and toes burning while a freezing draught whistled down the back of my neck. At night in bed I would rest my numbed feet on my hot-water bottle, in the full knowledge that blistering chilblains would be the price of such small comfort the next morning, when an exquisite ice garden of opaque fronds and ferns would cover the window panes. If our house was smarter than the Hawkings’, it was both because it was smaller and because Dad had given up all pretensions to any prowess whatsoever as a handyman – and for good reason, since his attempts at repairs usually made matters much worse, bringing ceilings down on his head for example, while his attempts at interior decorating usually sent the paint flying everywhere except on the target – and had long decided that it was cheaper in the long run to pay professionals to do his odd jobs for him.

  Rarely when I was present did members of the Hawking family bear out the stories about their habit of bringing books to the table. Mealtimes were generally sociable occasions, calmly presided over by Stephen’s mother, who kept remarkably cool in the face of her husband’s frequent displays of temper. Although he could be sharp and demanding, Frank Hawking was not hard-hearted. His outbursts were usually directed at the crass inadequacies of some inanimate object, like a blunt carving knife or a spilt glass or a dropped fork, never at people within the family circle. In fact, in handling young Edward, who was given to tantrums particularly at bedtime, he was a model of patience and forbearance. As for Stephen, apparently no longer subject to the savage black moods of the past, his placid, more philosophical nature promised a quieter lifestyle.

  The talk at mealtimes was predictably intellectual, ranging over political and international issues. As Philippa had gone up to Oxford to study Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was a frequent topic. I knew little about oriental history or politics and thought it expedient to keep quiet rather than betray my ignorance. Spain and France seemed very parochial and unglamorous by comparison with the Orient, and nobody expressed any interest in them or in their cultures at all. The Hawkings, in any case, knew all there was to know about France, since Isobel had French relatives. They also knew all there was to know about Spain, since she and the children had spent three months living in close proximity to Robert Graves’s household in Deià, Majorca, in the winter of 1950, when Frank was away in Africa, engaged on research in tropical medicine. Beryl Graves was a friend of Isobel’s from her Oxford days, and Robert Graves was regarded as an icon in the family.

  When the supper table was cleared away, we, the younger generation, would settle down to play a board game. A fanatical games player since his early childhood, Stephen had, with his close friend John McClenahan, devised a long and complicated dynastic game, complete with family trees, landed gentry, vast acreages, bishoprics for younger sons and death duties. This game unfortunately had not been preserved, so we were reduced to playing games such as Cluedo, Scrabble and occasionally the notoriously difficult Chinese game, mah-jong, with its delicately carved ivory tiles. Not only had I already been exposed to Stephen’s prowess at croquet but I had also received similar treatment when he offered to teach me to play chess. However, when it came to Scrabble, I did not need a mentor as I was confident of being reasonably competent at word games, an art learnt as a very small child from numerous games of Lexicon with my loquacious and inventive Great Aunt Effie when we lived in her house in north London.

  If there were not a quorum for board games, Stephen and I would sit by the fire after supper while his mother regaled us with episodes of family history. I enjoyed listening to her and admired her as a role model. An Oxford graduate and, before her marriage, an income-tax inspector, she was intelligent and witty, yet totally devoted to her family, appearing to have no ambitions for herself at all. At the time she was teaching history in a private girls’ boarding school in St Albans, where her very considerable intellectual qualities were definitely underrated. With a bemused detachment, she took upon herself the task of introducing me to her own past and that of the Hawking family. The second child of seven, she was born in Glasgow, where her father, the son of a wealthy boiler maker, was a doctor. Although her family moved by boat to Plymouth when she was still a young child, she had vivid memories of her grandfather’s austere house in Glasgow, where family prayers in the parlour, attended by every member of the household staff, constituted the only form of diversion. On her mother’s side, she claimed descent from John Law of Lauriston, who after bankrupting France in the seventeenth century took himself off to Louisiana. In the telling, multifarious and far-reaching family feuds came to light, most of them concerned money, for it appeared that cutting a miscreant out of one’s will was considered an automatic and quite acceptable means of expressing profound and puritanical displeasure.

  Stephen’s father’s family were of God-fearing Yorkshire-farming stock. Their claim to distinction had come through an ancestor in the early nine-teenth century who had been steward to the Duke of Devonshire. In recognition of this elevated position he had built himself a sizeable house in Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, and had called it Chatsworth. The family fortunes had fluctuated somewhat since those days, with the consequence that, in the twentieth century, Stephen’s grandfather’s farming ventures had led to financial ruin and it was left to his grandmother to rescue her family of five children – four boys and a girl – from penury. This she did by opening a school in her house. Its success was said to be a measure of her strength of character. Money, wealth and its creation and loss were prominent elements in Isobel’s story-telling, as was her marked tendency to judge others by their intelligence rather than by their integrity or kindness. Charm was regarded as a severe flaw in character, and those unfortunate enough to possess it were to be deeply mistrusted.

  As his mother was one of seven children and his father one of five, Stephen naturally had legions of first cousins and a whole army of second cousins. My parents, on the other hand, were both only children, so I had no first cousins: all I possessed were a few second cousins, one in Australia and the rest in rural Norfolk. It therefore came as quite a shock to meet so many people who not only were closely related, but who also bore remarka
ble facial similarities to each other. On Stephen’s mother’s side, they characteristically had high cheekbones, close-set blue eyes and wavy, chestnut hair, while the faces of his father’s relations were all long and heavily jowled. Only my brother bore any slight resemblance to me, yet here were allof thirty-three cousins who looked like each other, depending on which side of the family they belonged to, and who were all closely connected to Stephen.

  Although quite a number lived abroad and divorce had been rather fashionable among them, I met many of them, their friends, husbands, wives and even their former spouses, during the course of that winter’s succession of family parties. They treated me in an open and friendly manner, and I began to realize what an advantage a large family network could be: the loss of individuality in appearance was more than compensated by the sense of security which such a network could create. The novelty of this sense of extended family was exhilarating. By comparison my own immediate family circle of parents, brother and one grandmother and two great-aunts seemed a bit limited.

  There was however one Hawking who notably lacked the self-assurance of the rest of the family. On hearing of our engagement, Stephen’s Aunt Muriel announced that, as she put it, she “just had to come down from Yorkshire to see what sort of girl Stephen was marrying”. Muriel was Frank Hawking’s only sister. The most timid member of the family, she had stayed at home to look after her ageing parents despite being a gifted musician. Now in her sixties, she wore the marks of frustration in her sad, drooping face and large, soft brown eyes. She was devoted to her brother, Frank, and to his eldest son, and dutifully admired the family’s intellectual qualities, although she herself did not share them. Her homely way of speech was often ignored by the other members of the family, though Stephen, who was her Methodist equivalent of a godson, always treated her with a good-natured tolerance. Frequently I would sit and chat to Auntie Muriel, just as I would sometimes escape to Granny Walker’s attic, to get away from the competitive intellectual atmosphere of the dining room.

  Stephen could be highly critical of people other than his closest relatives. His self-confidence restored, he delighted in bringing his Oxford ways into any conversation, deliberately setting out to shock with his provocative statements. His comment that Norwich cathedral was a very ordinary building profoundly upset my mild-mannered Grandma when I took him to stay with her for a weekend. He considered my friends to be easy victims and had no compunction in monopolizing the conversation at parties with his controversial opinions, often dominating the social scene with vociferous and tenacious arguments.

  With me he would argue that artificial flowers were in every way preferable to the real thing and that Brahms, my favourite composer, was second-rate because he was such a poor orchestrator. Rachmaninov was good only for the musical dustbin and Tchaikovsky was primarily a composer of ballet music. So far, my knowledge of composers was embryonic: all I knew about Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky was that their music had the power to move me profoundly and I knew nothing about Brahms’s orchestration. It was only later that I found out, to my silent amusement, that although Wagner had despised Brahms, the feeling was mutual.

  While I applauded Stephen’s refusal to be drawn into small talk, I was nervously aware that his arrogance was in poor taste and was putting me in danger of losing me my friends, if not my relations. There came a stage when I even feared that he was jeopardizing my chances of any future academic activity. I was content to abandon all my budding hopes of a career in the Foreign Office for his sake, but I was unhappy about letting him destroy whatever opportunity I might have had for pursuing some sort of research. When I took him to meet my supervisor, Alan Deyermond, who was at that time encouraging me to think about doing a PhD in medieval literature, Stephen really excelled himself. Waving his sherry glass around as if the point he was making was so obvious that only a fool could disagree with it, he revelled in the opportunity to tell Alan Deyermond and all my contemporaries that the study of medieval literature was as useful an occupation as studying pebbles on the beach. Fortunately, as Alan Deyermond was also an Oxford graduate, he willingly picked up the gauntlet thus offered and gave Stephen a good run for his money. The argument was inconclusive, and both sides parted on remarkably amiable terms. When I protested on the way home in the car, Stephen shrugged. “You shouldn’t take it personally,” he said.

  Stephen’s conviction that intellectual arguments were never to be considered a personal matter was tested during that same year. Professor Fred Hoyle, who had rejected Stephen’s postgraduate research application, was at the time pioneering the use of television to popularize science to great effect. He had become a household name and his success was enabling him to put pressure on the government to grant him his own Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. It was a foregone conclusion that if his demands were not met, he – like so many other British scientists – would join the brain drain to the United States. He had power and popularity, and his recent theories were eagerly followed in the press, especially those which he was developing with his Indian research student, Jayant Narlikar, whose office was near Stephen’s on the old Cavendish site in Cambridge.

  In advance of publication, Hoyle’s latest paper, expounding further aspects of the theory of the steady-state universe which he had developed with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, was presented to a distinguished gathering of scientists at the Royal Society. Then the forum was opened to questions, which on such occasions are usually fairly deferential. Stephen was present and bided his time. At last his raised hand was noticed by the chairman. He, a very junior research student who as yet had no academic research of any note to his credit, struggled to his feet and proceeded to tell Hoyle and his students as well as the rest of the audience that the calculations in the presentation were wrong. The audience was stunned, and Hoyle was ruffled by this piece of effrontery. “How do you know?” he asked, quite sure that Stephen’s grounds for disputing his new research could easily be dismissed. He was not expecting Stephen’s response. “I’ve worked it out,” he replied, and then added, “in my head.” As a result of that intervention, Stephen began to be noticed in scientific circles, and thus he found the subject for his PhD thesis: the properties of expanding universes. Relations between him and Fred Hoyle however never advanced after that incident.

  Arguments notwithstanding – scientific, impersonal or otherwise – everything we did in the course of that academic year contributed to a common purpose, our forthcoming marriage, for which a date in July 1965 was set. As it was by no means certain that I should be allowed to stay in Westfield as a married undergraduate, my top priority was to win the consent of the college authorities. Without it, the wedding would probably have to be postponed for another year, because we both knew that the promise my father had demanded of us on our engagement – that I would complete my undergraduate course – was not to be taken lightly. Since a year was a long time in the course of an illness such as Stephen’s, as his father persistently reminded me, his survival for that length of time could not be guaranteed. This unpalatable truth was a factor that I should have to bear in mind constantly whenever I looked to the future. In the first instance, it was now up to me to persuade Professor John Varey, the Head of the Spanish Department, and Mrs Matthews, the Principal, that the situation was urgent. Professor Varey’s response, when I tentatively broached the matter, was that the situation was most irregular, but that if the Principal gave her blessing, he would not object.

  As my previous – and only – encounter with Mrs Matthews had been at the interview in 1962, I was not hopeful of a propitious outcome. At the time appointed by her secretary, six o’clock one evening towards the end of the autumn term of 1964, I knocked with trembling hand at the green baize door which separated her flat in the Regency house from the administrative area of the College. Mrs Matthews evidently sensed my nervousness from the moment I walked through the door. She bade me sit down and thrust a cigarette into one hand and a sherry into the other. “Wha
t’s the matter?” she began, frowning and looking me straight in the eye with an anxious concern, “don’t worry, I’m not going to eat you.” I took a deep breath and did my best to explain my relationship with Stephen, his illness, the prognosis and our plans to make the most of whatever time we had left to us. She never took her eyes off me and betrayed very little emotion. When she had heard my tale through without interruption, she came straight to the point. “Well, of course, if you marry, you will have to live out of College, you understand that don’t you?” My heart lifted slightly, aware that she had not vetoed our plans outright, and I was able to nod confidently because I had already done my homework on that score. “Yes, I know that,” I replied, “I have found out that there is a room available in a private house in Platt’s Lane.” “Well, then, that’s fine,” Mrs Matthews replied, staring fixedly at the embers in the grate. “Go ahead and make the most of the chance you have.” She paused and then, changing her tone to one of uncharacteristic absent-mindedness, she confided that she herself had been in a similar situation. Her own husband had been severely disabled. She was only too well aware of how important it was to do whatever one knew to be right. Equally she agreed with my father that I must complete my education. She warned me that the future I faced would not be easy. She promised to help in whatever way she could – most significantly, by conveying her agreement to Professor Varey.