Travelling to Infinity (15 page)

Earlier in the academic year, Dr Dorothy Needham, the distinguished wife of the Master of Caius, had taken me under her wing and introduced me to a fledgling academic society, Lucy Cavendish
College, pioneered by two scientists, Dr Anna Bidder and Dr Kate Bertram; their aim was to promote academic opportunities for mature women students in Cambridge. Association with Lucy Cavendish
College allowed me to acquire MA status in the University, and this in turn, most importantly, allowed me to borrow books from the University Library. By late spring, the Celestina paper inspired
by Stephen, ‘Madre Celestina’, was at the printer’s, and I saw no reason to suppose that I would not be able to combine motherhood with research. On the last Friday in May, true
to my usual routine, I spent most of the day blithely working in the University Library, assembling material for the thesis. I did not suspect that this was to be my last visit to the Library for
quite a long time.

That evening, disregarding the strange tightening sensations in my thighs, I went with Sue Ellis, who was also pregnant, to a party for wives given by Wilma Batchelor, the wife of the Head of
the Department. On the Saturday morning, after an uncomfortable night, the tightening sensations became stronger and more frequent, so I dashed into town to do a copious amount of shopping for
Stephen before I was out of action. Feeling rather ill as I heaved it all home, I called in at the butcher’s for a few final purchases. Chris the butcher took one look at me and insisted on
serving me ahead of the queue. “Jane,” he said, “I think you had better go straight home!” I gladly followed his advice.

Later that day, at the height of a thunderstorm, How Ghee, who was the father of two little daughters, drove Stephen and me to the nursing home, but I soon wished that I had stayed at home or
applied for a bed at the maternity hospital – which, in those days, admitted only women from deprived backgrounds or those with complications. The ageing midwives were every bit as crusty as
the spinster school ma’ams of my teenage years. As I walked down the corridor with Stephen leaning on my arm, I felt the onset of a strong contraction, like the tentacles of an octopus
embracing and squeezing my abdomen. Assiduously following the techniques acquired in the newly introduced antenatal classes, I leant against a door post and focused my attention on the
much-practised breathing exercises.

“What on earth’s the matter with you?” the steely-eyed Sister enquired harshly. She was much younger than the rest of her staff and should have known better. There, after the
procedure came to a standstill for the next twenty-four hours, the baby was finally delivered, not by one of the midwives but by John Owens, a cheerful young doctor from the surgery where I was
registered. Meanwhile Stephen was my faithful companion, sitting at my bedside for long hours and even sneaking in on his mother’s arm by the garden entrance at six o’clock the next
morning.

I lay in bed, bored and frustrated, transported only by the magnificent, overpowering themes of the Brahms double concerto for violin and cello which I had memorized as my mantra, the music on
which I had learnt to concentrate to distract my mind from the pain. The music took me back to the week’s holiday arranged for us by my parents that Easter, just two months before the birth.
The cottage they had rented was down on the edge of the cove at Port St Isaac in Cornwall, a very long way from Cambridge. They probably thought, mistakenly as it happened, that this would be my
last opportunity to travel for a long time. During that week Stephen, in concession to my tastes, had given me the recording of the Brahms concerto for a birthday present.

As Stephen’s self-confidence had grown, so he had gained in fierce determination. During our stay in Port St Isaac, an afternoon’s drive took us to Tintagel, one of the reputed homes
of the Arthurian legend, perched remotely on the north coast of Cornwall. Disappointingly, the ruined castle was not visible from the village and, according to the postmistress, the only approach
was down the steep rocky gully, the Vale of Avalon. Stephen insisted on seeing the castle and – unable to deny him anything, so conscious were we of his shortened life expectancy – my
mother and I, one on each side, guided, lifted, bore him down the wild, uneven descent, stumbling over the stones in our path with the wind blowing off the sea into our faces. The sapphire band of
sea at the end of the path seemed to recede, and the castle proved elusive. After we had struggled on for about three-quarters of an hour, my mother was getting short of breath and was worrying
about me in my advanced state of pregnancy, but Stephen refused to give up. By a happy chance, a Land Rover appeared from nowhere, climbing the rough track back up to the village, so we hailed the
driver. He was reluctant to stop, but paused to tell us that the castle was still a long way off, round a headland. The castle was evidently beyond our reach, but we pleaded with him to take us
back to the village. Finally with brusque impatience he agreed to take just one passenger. There was no question but that that passenger had to be Stephen. With similar single-mindedness, Stephen
was pursuing plans to attend a summer school at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Seattle that July. With never a moment’s hesitation, I agreed to the plans, seeing no reason why the three
of us, Stephen, myself and the baby, should not enjoy seven weeks on the Pacific coast. After all, babies just ate and slept.

The joy the baby brought was intoxicating. Within minutes of his birth he was lodged in the crook of my arm, looking slightly purple but observing his surroundings with consummate lack of
concern as if he had seen it all before. “A future professor” was my mother-in-law’s predictable verdict on her first grandchild. When he was next brought to me, he had recovered
from the birthing experience and had gained a healthy colour. His eyes were of the deepest, brightest blue, set in a neat elfin face with rosy cheeks and pointed ears. He had no hair, only an
incipient blond down in a whorl on the crown of his head and on the tips of his ears. The minute fingers, each equipped with its own tiny nail, clasped my own outstretched finger.

This beautiful little creature, the miraculous embodiment of perfection, had come into a painfully imperfect world. In the week after his birth, the Six Day War erupted in the Middle East with
violent consequences which were to last throughout the decades of the child’s upbringing and long into his adulthood. In my simple, post-natal frame of mind, I was convinced that if the world
were to be run by the mothers of newborn babies rather than hardened old men inciting brash youths to violence, wars would cease overnight.

Gradually in the days following Robert’s birth we acclimatized to a new reality. Grandparents helped out for a couple of weeks, and then we were on our own, evolving a dramatically changed
lifestyle. Henceforth expeditions – to the Department or into town – involved three people plus a pram and a walking stick. Luckily George Ellis came to the rescue. Not only did he
bring Stephen home at lunchtime, he also collected him after lunch and brought him home in the evening. One afternoon, after a couple of weeks, when we had begun to achieve some faint semblance of
normality, I considered that the time had come to return to my books and my growing card index of the language of the medieval love poetry of the Iberian Peninsula. The baby was fed and changed and
placed in his pram out in the backyard under the blue sky. He looked comfortable and drowsy in the warm afternoon air. I expected him to sleep for at least an hour. Stifling my own tendency to
yawn, I crept upstairs to my books and cards in the attic and spread them out on the table. No sooner had I found my place than a raucous cry came from below. I hurried down to Robert, picked him
up, fed him and changed his nappy again. He did not really appear to be very hungry. I laid him down gently in his carrycot-pram and went back upstairs, only to be followed by the same cry. This
little scene was re-enacted many times that afternoon until finally I realized that this tiny baby was neither hungry nor sleepy: he just wanted to be sociable. So at the age of one month he
started work on a PhD thesis, helping me by wriggling on my knee and gurgling while I tried to write. That single afternoon completely destroyed whatever illusions I might have held about combining
motherhood with some sort of intellectual occupation. Nor did I have any notion of the demands on the body of the birth process. I fully counted on being up and about my normal business within a
week, little realizing that the nine-month gestation and the trauma of the long birth would take their toll of my strength. I had no idea that feeding the baby would be such an exhausting and
time-consuming commitment which, combined with the topsy-turvy schedule of infant demands, day and night, would mean that I would often slip into a doze when eventually he went to sleep.

As July approached, I began to have severe qualms about the Seattle trip, especially as the arrangements were becoming more and more complicated. Charlie Misner, an American visitor to the
Department who had become Robert’s godfather at the christening in Caius Chapel in June, wanted Stephen to visit him at the University of Maryland after the Seattle summer school, to talk
about singularities. Both he and his Danish wife, Susanne, assured us that we would be welcome to stay with them and their four young children in their large house in the suburbs of Washington DC.
I could not allow myself to appear half-hearted, but I was not sure how we were going to get to Seattle in one piece, let alone further afield. The tiredness I felt as I tried to pack for Stephen,
myself and our six-week-old baby was devastating. I had not expected anything like this, nor had I expected that my own body, previously so utterly reliable, would let me down so
catastrophically.

Somehow, assisted by a posse of anxious parents, none more so than my mother, we managed to check in at London Airport on time on the morning of 17th July, 1967. Our goodbyes were hasty, because
the airline promptly provided a wheelchair for Stephen, who found himself obliged to sit in it and be wheeled directly through customs and passport control to the departure lounge. Laden with
Robert and with assorted bags of provisions for the flight, I hurried along behind. The ventilation system at Terminal Three had broken down that day, the hottest day of the summer, with the result
that hot air was being sucked into the building but none was being let out, making a veritable inferno of the departure lounge. We had just reached the lounge when the loudspeaker announced that
our flight was delayed.

While we sat waiting in the stifling heat, Robert eagerly gulped down the entire contents of the bottle of diluted rose-hip syrup which was supposed to last him all the way to Seattle. The first
announcement was soon followed by another, inviting Pan American passengers to collect complimentary refreshments from the bar. I deposited Robert on Stephen’s knee and went over to join the
queue for our free sandwiches. When I returned, I froze in absolute horror at the sight that met my eyes. Robert was still safely sitting on his father’s knee, smiling beatifically and
leaning comfortably back against Stephen’s chest, with Stephen’s arm around him. Stephen’s face wore an agonized expression. Down his new trousers there flowed a vast yellow
river. He sat helplessly trapped as the yellow tide streamed into his shoes. For the only time in my life, I screamed – I dropped the sandwiches and screamed.

Screaming sounds a pretty irrational reaction, but surprisingly it was the most sensible in the circumstances. My screams summoned much-needed help with amazing alacrity. A portly, green-clad
nurse appeared from nowhere and took charge. One severely critical glance at me was enough to convince her, quite rightly, that I was hopelessly unequal to the situation. She commandeered the
wheelchair and pushed it and its occupants, father and son, back through passport and customs, disregarding the officials in our path, to a nursery where she cleaned up the baby, leaving me the
task of rubbing Stephen down. While we were in the nursery, the last call for our flight was announced over the tannoy. Unmoved, the nurse rang through to central control and told them that the
flight would have to wait for us. Thus at the age of seven weeks, Robert acquired the distinction of having delayed the departure of an international flight.

Stephen had to sit in those trousers for the whole nine-hour length of that spectacular flight. He sat in them over Iceland, which was etched in the sea like a jewel in a satin case, over the
ice floes of the North Atlantic, over Greenland’s snow-capped mountains and glistening glaciers, over the frozen waters of Hudson Bay and the arid wastes of northern Canada. Then at last,
signalling the end of Stephen’s ordeal, Mount Rainier loomed on the horizon as we came in to land at Tacoma airport. A day or two later, I took the trousers to the dry-cleaner’s, but
Stephen refused to wear them ever again.

The provisions made for us in Seattle in 1967 by the Battelle Memorial Institute were very generous. As well as a spacious single-storey house, lavishly equipped with all mod
cons – including a dishwasher and a tumbler-dryer – and an enormous car with automatic controls, they provided a twice-weekly deposit of clean nappies and the corresponding collection
of the dirty ones by that singularly American institution, the diaper service. If such arrangements did not altogether fill me with confidence, it was not because I was unappreciative, but that I
was overwhelmed by being washed-up on an alien shore, albeit in luxurious isolation, deprived so soon after giving birth of the support and help of my mother, family and friends at home. Here I was
solely responsible both for my ailing husband and for my new baby, and there was no George Ellis to give Stephen a helping hand round the corner to work.

The Battelle Institute, the secretary assured me, was very close at hand, only two miles or so away – but two miles or twenty, it did not make much difference: Stephen had to be taken
there by car, and to take Stephen by car, I also had to take Robert. This meant helping Stephen dress and eat in the early morning, and then feeding and bathing Robert – in that order or in
reverse – depending on whose needs were the most pressing. Then the monstrous car – a Ford Mercury Comet – had to be backed round to the front of the house, and my two charges,
tiny but voracious Robert in his carrycot, and then Stephen on my arm, taken one by one down the steps of the long path and settled, the one on the backseat and the other in the front. Methodically
carried out, this routine could have been tolerable. As it was, although we tried our hardest to minimize the number of morning sessions that Stephen missed, the system was reduced to breaking
point – our darling baby, who had just learnt to sleep through the night in England, was now, in Seattle with an eight-hour time change, sleeping soundly all day and wide-awake and full of
sociable intentions all night. In addition Seattle was enjoying – or suffering – its most intense heatwave ever.