Travelling to Infinity (16 page)

For some time, in a spirit of nervous self-preservation, I restricted my excursions only to the Battelle Institute and the corner stores – notably, of course, the dry-cleaner’s. I
drove the massive car with such trepidation that eventually, despite the heat, I decided to do what no American mother would have dreamt of doing: I walked down to the stores pushing my
carrycot-pram and loaded the shopping into it beside the baby.

With the jubilation of a shipwrecked sailor sighting a rescue boat, I greeted the arrival of the Penrose family. Eric, the latest addition to the family, was somewhat more mobile than Robert,
but frequently recumbent. When the two prams stood side by side, or the two babies were placed down together on a rug, Joan would remark that they were continuing the Hawking-Penrose dialogue.
Thanks to Joan, my social scene brightened considerably. She introduced me to some of the other wives of the delegates and took me on various excursions to downtown Seattle, where I browsed in the
department stores and bought baby clothes. Under her influence, my confidence grew as I began to find my way up and down the north-south axis of the freeway through the centre of Seattle, even
managing to locate an old childhood playmate from Norwich, who had married a Boeing engineer.

Then one Sunday, even more adventurously, Stephen’s map-reading guided us to a ferry port, and we crossed Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula, where I took Robert down to the
water’s edge and dipped his toes in the shimmering but icy waters of the Pacific Ocean. Another weekend, with Robert propped up between us asleep on the bench-seat in the front of the car, we
drove the hundred and fifty miles north, across the border to Vancouver, to visit our Australian friends from Cambridge, the Youngs, who had come to rest in the University of British Columbia.
Vancouver was as cold and misty as Seattle was hot and dry, and had the Canadian charm of being more relaxed than its American neighbour.

Back in Seattle, we assembled with the rest of the group one hot Saturday morning down on the Waterfront for one of the few excursions organized by the Battelle Institute – a ferry ride to
the Indian reservation on Blake Island. While waiting for the ferry, Jeannette Wheeler, the wife of a leading American physicist, came up to introduce herself. That very year, in a flash of
inspiration worthy of Archimedes, John Wheeler had lighted upon the name
black hole
for the phenomenon that Stephen and many others were studying, while he was having a bath. Down on the
Seattle Waterfront, Jeannette – a regal, grey-haired lady who, by all accounts, was a member of that select group, the Daughters of the American Revolution – took charge of
Robert’s pram while Stephen leant on my arm. Two little old ladies peered lovingly into the pram, and one of them reached out to tickle the toes of the sleeping infant, uncovered in the heat
of the day. Horrified, Jeannette Wheeler barked at her not to disturb the sleeping baby. The poor little lady jumped out of her skin and, with her companion, edged away nervously into the crowd.
Personally, I thought a bit of tickling of Robert’s toes to wake him up during the day might be a very good idea. Then I might get some sleep at night. As it was, he slept for most of that
day, waking only to gaze angelically into the weather-beaten face of the elderly Indian squaw who rocked him on her knee while I ate dinner at the long communal table in a big old-fashioned
barn.

At least on this particular excursion, my only responsibility, apart from attending to the baby’s needs, was to push the pram with one hand and support Stephen with the other. The other
interesting excursions where I had to drive long distances left me so tired and so strained that I was on my knees with exhaustion by the time Gillian, my school friend, came over to Seattle from
Vancouver Island, where her husband Geoffrey, an engineer, had a two-year appointment. Gillian – and Geoffrey, who was able only to spend a weekend with us – were my salvation. Geoffrey
took over the driving, taking us on long journeys – not least a day trip to Mount Rainier – collected shopping and helped Stephen in and out of the car, while Gill willingly gave a hand
in the running of the kitchen. For one week, I could relax a little.

While Gill was still with us, an incident occurred which we both still remember with distaste. The token monument which Seattle retained from the World Fair of 1962 was the Space Needle, a
concrete pylon some three hundred feet high, topped by a viewing platform in the shape of a flying saucer. On Gill’s last Saturday with us, we went up the Space Needle in the express lift and
admired the views – over the sparkling green waters of Puget Sound and the white crests of the Olympic Peninsula to the west, the rugged Cascade range of mountains to the east, and to the
south Mount Rainier, the massive dormant volcano. The views were majestic, but with Gill carrying Robert and Stephen leaning on my arm we soon wilted in the sweltering sun and returned to the lift
to join the queue for the descent. Near us there stood a couple of girls, teenagers perhaps, but not so very much younger than Gill and me. They watched us, nudging each other; then, as we were all
standing together in the lift, they started making spiteful, rude remarks about Stephen’s appearance, as he leant languidly against the wall, in temperatures that were enough to make anyone
look bedraggled. As they laughed and giggled, my anguish grew. I wanted to slap their faces and make them apologize. I wanted to shout at them that this was my courageous, dearly loved husband and
the father of the beautiful baby, and a great scientist, but in my English reticence I neither did nor said any of these things: I simply looked away, busying myself with Robert, trying to pretend
that they were not there. Never did an express lift, travelling at four feet per second, take so long to reach the ground. As we emerged from the lift, one of the girls glanced over Gill’s
shoulder at Robert. “Is that your baby?” she asked me in perplexed admiration. “Of course!” I snapped. She and her companion hurried away, I hoped in shame. Gill remarked,
“What strange people!” understating what she and I both felt. Fortunately Gill and I had stationed ourselves between Stephen and those girls, so he was unaware of what had happened.

After this episode I was ready to go home forthwith. Nonetheless, one evening towards the end of the summer school, at the Battelle cocktail hour, Stephen was offered the tantalizing possibility
of a two-week stay at the University of California in Berkeley, and immediately a Brazilian participant in the Battelle summer school offered us the empty flat of an absent friend. The offer was
attractive in financial terms and, since we had already come so far, another two weeks on the West Coast, in California of all places, did not seem a great hardship. I had not entirely lost the
spirit of adventure which had taken me round southern Spain in my student days, and this would be our opportunity to discover for ourselves that Utopia with which Abe and Cice Taub had tempted us
in Cornell in 1965.

Encumbered by masses of paraphernalia – the pram and inordinate amounts of luggage – we flew down to San Francisco, where I was required to master yet another enormous car and
negotiate yet another maze of freeways. Fortunately Stephen was a better navigator than he had been a driver – except on those occasions when he would spot an exit at the last minute and yell
at me to cross four lanes immediately. After swerving a few times and bumping over a few kerbs in good Keystone-Cop style, we at last found the address of our absent landlords, a homely two-room
flat in an old wooden house with a distant view, through the haze and the mist, of the Golden Gate bridge. The accommodation, though much more in keeping with our style and age than the sumptuous
middle-class, middle-aged house in Seattle, posed a fearsome logistical problem as it was on the top floor of the house, on the second storey. The routine which we had hoped to leave behind in
Seattle had to come into play again, except that every outing now required not two but three trips up and down – not one but two flights of stairs. Robert, at fourteen weeks, was too heavy to
be carried in the carrycot, so that had to be taken down to the car first, then Stephen – leaving Robert on a rug on the floor – then Robert himself. In compensation for all this
inconvenience, we maximized the use of the car and often, of an evening or exceptionally of a late afternoon, we would drive up into the parched hills behind Berkeley, or sometimes, more
adventurously, north along the San Andreas Fault – a deserted, marshy area where the cracks in the road testified to the tremendous natural forces lying beneath the surface. Once we drove
down to a desolate cove on a coastline not unlike Cornwall, where, defying the American way of life, hippies lived free of the constraints of a materialistic society in shacks on the beach.

Abe Taub, the Head of the Relativity Group in Berkeley, secured a temporary appointment for Stephen in his department, and one evening he and Cice invited us to dinner in their house high up in
the hills overlooking the bay. It was further away than we expected, and by the time we arrived the evening was already drawing in. Unable to see where to park, I drove into a gully by the side of
the road. The wheels locked and the car was stuck. After trying unsuccessfully to heave the car out of the ditch on my own, I went to seek help from the Taubs and their distinguished guests, among
them a highly sophisticated and influential Parisian mathematician, Professor Lichnerowicz. The men took off their smart jackets, rolled up their sleeves and set to the task with chivalrous gusto.
When at last we were extricated from the ditch and shown into the house – embarrassingly late and very dishevelled – Robert started to whimper. He had played this trick on us once
before in Seattle. Sleeping soundly until the very moment when his carrycot was put gently down in a darkened side-room, he would suddenly start to protest, as though sensing that there was a party
elsewhere from which he was being excluded. The only remedy was to allow him to spend the evening on my knee at the table, alongside all the other guests. Cice Taub remained unflustered by so many
disruptions to her genteel gathering and, perhaps taking pity on my haggard appearance, invited me to accompany her and Mme Lichnerowicz to the Berkeley Rose Garden the next day.

The Rose Garden became my haven of peace and solitude in the frenzied environment of the Bay area, and a respite from the strenuous routine demanded by our living arrangements. It had a calming
effect on Robert, who would lie in his pram under the pergolas watching the patterns of light on the roses and the leaves above his head. I sat by him in the shade, breathing in the perfume of the
roses, immersed in my book, Stendhal’s
The Charterhouse of Parma
, and gazing out over the Bay from time to time. My thoughts were drawn to Spain – to the gardens of the
Generalife above Granada where, only a few short years before, I had tried to imagine a future for myself with Stephen. That future had become a reality, and had exceeded our wildest hopes. I was
tired but resilient, and my happiness far outweighed my tiredness. Stephen was already recognized and sought after in scientific circles for his intuitive grasp of complicated concepts, his ability
to visualize mathematical structures in many dimensions and for his phenomenal powers of memory. The future stretched ahead of us, now physically embodied in the small, thriving person of our baby
son.

If the future had acquired a reassuring aura of certainty, the key to it lay in managing the present. Living each day as it came, rather than projecting some fanciful mirage on to the distant
future, was becoming a way of life. From that perspective, the general outline of the future was fairly clear-cut: in the short term our star was in the ascendant. In the long term, the huge
question mark that hung over the whole human race might well obliterate us all. The Vietnam war had escalated – to use the coinage then current – into the ugliest of conflicts in which
the horrors of modern chemical science were being cynically unleashed on a simple peasant population, propelled by the uncontrolled military industrial complexes of both East and West. A mere spark
somewhere else on our troubled planet could ignite a global conflagration.

We lived for the present, but even that had an annoying way of tripping us up with unforeseen obstacles. For example, the Brazilian couple who had, with the best of intentions, found us the
flat, offered to take us on a tour of the sights of San Francisco. For once, I looked forward to sitting back and enjoying a day out. They arrived early one Saturday morning, bringing with them a
Brazilian friend who spoke no English. I helped Stephen down the stairs, expecting to install him in the Brazilians’ car first before going back up for Robert, who would travel on my knee. As
we excitedly emerged into the street, we looked around for their car. Apart from our own Plymouth, there was only a decrepit grey Volkswagen parked in front of the house. “Where’s your
car?” I asked our Brazilian host for the day. He looked at me in surprise. “No, no, we are no going in our car, it too small for all of us. We take your car.” With sinking heart I
unlocked our car. Stephen sat in the back with the Brazilian ladies and our “host” settled himself in the passenger seat in the front, directing me, the chauffeur, while holding Robert
on his knee. One look at him was enough to make Robert bawl as he never had before. He bawled all day – across the Oakland Bridge, all through the hours of torrid, nose-to-tail traffic jams
in which we sat roasting, all through Haight-Ashbury, up and down all the steep streets of central San Francisco. I would gladly have bawled my head off too. Desperately wanting to comfort my
frantic, hot, uncomfortable baby, there I was, trapped in the driving seat in a senseless situation, not of our own making.

There was a lull when at last we reached Golden Gate Park. Distancing ourselves from our passengers, we joined a large hippy peace gathering and sat on the grass with the flower-power people,
swaying to the beat of the music. Around the lawns were people of my own age, yet somehow I was already much older than them. Stephen and I shared their idealism and hatred of violence. We, too,
had asserted a comparable freedom against a rigid society in our fight against bureaucracy and narrow-mindedness – yet, to maintain our difficult course, we were constrained to follow a
routine as organized and as rigid as any imposed by the society against which they were rebelling. The Vietnam war, though we shared their antagonism to it, was not our main target. Our efforts
were directed against illness and ignorance.