Travelling to Infinity (39 page)

Not for the first time, I sharpened my eyes and my ears, on the lookout for similar situations, words of advice or crumbs of comfort. My hopes were raised on a rare visit to Lucy Cavendish not
long after kind Kate Bertram’s retirement, when the new President was to introduce herself at a feast, a singular event for that College, and one which, despite my reservations about my own
academic failings, I was reluctant to miss. After dinner, the new President rose to her feet and recounted the events of her life and of her academic career. Tears came to my eyes as she spoke of
her marriage: her husband, too, had suffered from an incurable, disabling disease. Again it seemed for a brief moment that I had met someone with whom I might be able to talk freely, someone who
would intuitively understand the tiredness and the despair behind the smiling but now hesitant façade. To my confusion, I heard her inviting the audience’s sympathy for a choice that
had faced her – between her academic career and her husband – when she was offered a prestigious American Fellowship. She had taken up the Fellowship.

Finally, in embarrassed desperation, I spoke to Dr Swan in the clinical atmosphere of his morning surgery. If his tone was one of concerned detachment, his words were as candid as Thelma
Thatcher’s. “The problems you are facing, Jane, are much like the problems associated with old age,” he said candidly, “the irony is that you are a young woman with normal
needs and expectations.” He paused. “All I can suggest,” he said, glancing up at me over his gold-rimmed spectacles, “is that you should make a life of your own.”

In an unparalleled moment of chumminess that same autumn, Philippa coolly advised me that the time had come for me to leave Stephen. “Really, no one would blame you.” she added
condescendingly, as if in such facile advice lay the solution to all the problems. Whatever her motives – and certainly I had little enough cause to trust them – her advice struck me as
being singularly ill judged. Certainly such a solution would have expelled me from the Hawking family circle with alacrity. She failed to understand that I could no more have left Stephen than I
could have abandoned a child. I could not break up my family, the family that I myself in my optimism had created. This would effectively destroy the one achievement of my life and with it
myself.

To pretend that I had never found other men attractive would be dishonest; however, I had never had an affair and my only relationship had been with Stephen. Those passing attractions had never
been more than the briefest of encounters that consisted of no more than a fleeting eye contact. Indeed, I had long since lost my sense of individuality and any sense of myself as an attractive or
desirable young woman. I saw myself as part of a marriage, and that marriage had grown from the original bond between two people into an extensive network, like a garden full of diverse plants and
flowers, not only comprising parents and children but grandparents, loyal friends, students and colleagues. The central tree in that garden was the home, which I had created over the years, whether
in Little St Mary’s Lane, Pasadena or West Road. The relationship from which it had all sprung was now but one aspect of that complex diversity and, although that relationship had changed
dramatically, the marriage itself was of much wider import and transcended the personal needs of the two people who had initiated it. A brittle, empty shell, alone and vulnerable, restrained only
by the thought of my children from throwing myself into the river, I prayed for help with the desperate insistency of a potential suicide. The situation was such that I doubted that even God
himself, whoever he was or wherever he was, could find a solution to it, if indeed he could hear my prayer – but some solution had to be found if our family were to survive, if Stephen were
to be able to carry on with his work and live at home, and if I were to remain a sane and capable mother to the children.

It was an exceptional friend, Caroline Chamberlain – Stephen’s former physiotherapist – at once sensitive and practical, who suggested that I might benefit from some diversion,
such as singing in the local church choir. “Come and sing at St Mark’s,” she said, “we need extra sopranos for the carol service.” Late one afternoon in mid-December
we left the children with her husband Peter, while we went to the final rehearsals. This was the first time that I had sung in a real choir, as opposed to the choral class in Pasadena, and although
my voice was developing nicely, sight-reading and counting were conspicuously absent from my skills, soberly reminding me of my teenage experiences as a hopelessly incompetent secretary. The other
sopranos patiently measured the beat for me, a musical dyslexic, while the young conductor, pale and thin, politely internalized his dismay at the musical ugly duckling that Caroline had introduced
into his organization. With practice my efforts improved, so that, come the carol service, my contribution was not as dire as he feared, and I was invited to join the choir for carol-singing round
the parish later that week.

Lucy came carol-singing with me and trotted along from street to street, from house to house, calling at many homes, where the members of the choir and their choirmaster seemed to be not only
well known but well received also. This was the area of Cambridge where Lucy went to school, yet apart from the school and the shops, I scarcely knew it at all. Here was a tightly knit community of
friends and neighbours, elderly people and families, for whom the red-brick Edwardian church seemed to represent a nucleus, whether or not they attended it regularly.

In the dark winter night, as the choirmaster, Jonathan Hellyer Jones, walked beside Lucy and me, balancing on the edge of the pavement to protect us from the passing traffic, we struck up
conversation. I talked as I had not in years and had the uncanny sensation that I had met a familiar friend of long acquaintance, a shadowy recollection brought sharply back into focus, given shape
and form by this stranger. We talked about singing, music, mutual acquaintances – of whom there were several – and travels, particularly in Poland, where he had sung with the University
Chamber Choir in the summer of 1976. He told me about St Mark’s and its extraordinarily dedicated, warm-hearted vicar, Bill Loveless, who had given him great support and strengthened his
faith through a very difficult period. He did not say what that period was, but I already knew from Caroline that eighteen months previously, Janet, Jonathan’s wife of one year, had died of
leukaemia.

We did not meet again for several weeks and our next encounter was quite by chance. In January 1978, while Stephen was away in America with his entourage for three weeks, I went with Nigel
Wickens and a group from his singing class to an evening of Victorian entertainment given by the baritone soloist Benjamin Luxon at the Guildhall. In the crowded auditorium, I noticed Jonathan
immediately, a strikingly distinctive figure, tall, bearded and curly-haired, on the other side of the hall. I was surprised when in the interval he recognized me and I introduced him to Nigel.
“What a nice man!” Nigel remarked on the way back through King’s College to West Road where he had parked his car. I agreed guardedly, preferring to concentrate on the other main
topic of conversation, Nigel’s forthcoming marriage to a talented American singer, Amy Klohr.

As a result of that chance meeting, Jonathan came to teach Lucy the piano on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, depending on his availability. She quickly warmed to him and his serious-minded
hesitancy was soon dispelled by her liveliness. At first he came strictly for the length of the lesson, then he stayed a little longer to accompany me in the Schubert songs I was learning –
while Stephen alternately directed the railway operations in Robert’s bedroom and provided us with an audience of one for our own private
Schubertiades,
as we called them. After a
few weeks of this routine, Jonathan began to stay for lunch before or supper afterwards, and to help with Stephen’s needs, relieving Robert of all the chores which had oppressed him for so
long. Then when we had got to know Jonathan a little better, Robert would lie in wait by the front door and pounce on him on his arrival, throwing him to the floor and wrestling with him. Jonathan
took this unconventional form of greeting in good part and responded in kind to a growing boy’s need for a good rough-and-tumble to release his excess energies.

Often during the course of each week we would come across each other quite by accident and wonder at the extraordinary coincidences which seemed to be bringing us together. We would stand by the
roadside, talking, oblivious to what it was we were supposed to be doing or where we were going. We had so much to discuss, his bereavement, his loneliness, his musical ambitions on the one hand,
and my fears for Stephen and the children and my despair at the difficulty of doing everything that was required of me with tolerance and patience on the other. Although younger than me, he had so
much wisdom, so broad a perspective on life with which to enlarge my restricted view, so strong a faith and so luminous a spirituality with which to light my black horizon, that we truly trod the
holy ground which, in Oscar Wilde’s words, is present where there is sorrow. I had met someone who knew the tensions and the intensity of life in the face of death.

Other circumstances conspired to bring us together in the strangest of ways. I still attended dinners once a term or so in Lucy Cavendish – simply to maintain the contact rather than
because I derived any pleasure from them. On one such occasion, having exhausted my own limited fund of conversation, I was listening to the talk across the table when I heard a distinguished
elderly Fellow of the college, Alice Heim, singing the praises of a young man who visited her house regularly to play piano duets with her. The warmth with which she described him, his kindnesses
to her and his musical talent startled me. He was unique, a veritable Apollo. Her ageing companions were more than a little perplexed by the effusions of their colleague. “What was his
name?” they asked. When she replied, “Jonathan, Jonathan Hellyer Jones,” my ears burned and I felt myself colouring with pleasure, as though I was the only person present who
could share her appreciation of this champion who had entered our lives. Nor could anyone have been more surprised than I was, as much at my own blushing reactions as at Alice Heim’s
enthusiasm. I was uncomfortably aware that the warm glow resulted as much from embarrassment as from pleasure, as if I stood accused of a guilty secret. Yet there was no apparent reason for this
friendship either to be a secret or to be tinged with guilt. It was based on our shared interests, on our concern for each other’s situation, on the support we could bring to each other, and
above all, on music. Nevertheless, though we had never touched and would not do so for a very long time, we were both aware that the guilty secret was an admission of the potentially physical
nature of the relationship. The attraction between us was strong, but adultery is an ugly word, contrary to the ethical basis on which our lives were built. Was this the price I should have to pay
to rekindle the flame of my passionate spirit? Was it a price that, in all honesty, I could allow Jonathan to pay? If I were to find myself in the company of the adulterous heroines of the
nineteenth century, the price might be even higher. The end result might be only the jarring sound of Flaubert’s cracked kettle rather than music to move the stars to pity.

During the following term Jonathan suggested that I might like to join the church choir, which was rehearsing excerpts from
Messiah
for an orchestral performance at
Easter. As Robert and Lucy were old enough to be left for an hour in front of the television in the early evening, I joined the handful of choral parishioners for the Thursday rehearsals in the
church. To me, a comparative beginner, the graphic complexity of Handel’s choruses – in which sheep ran astray with alarming rapidity “turning everyone to his own way”
– represented a challenge which I countered with an obsessive enthusiasm. In joining the choir, I also joined the church, where services fell loosely within the bounds of the Church of
England formats that I had known since childhood. But this was Anglicanism devoid of sanctimonious dogma and stifling pedantry, thanks to the visionary dynamism of the vicar, Bill Loveless, whose
surname could not have been more ill suited to his personality. Once a journalist on the
Picture Post
, actor, soldier and businessman, Bill had come to ordination in middle age. Happily
still blessed with phenomenal vitality, he brought all his experience from other walks of life – and all his contacts too – to assist him in his pastoral work and in his unending search
for relevant themes for his sermons, while for his monthly forum on topical matters he invited a succession of guest speakers – doctors, policemen, social workers, political activists and so
on.

For Bill, true Christianity did not deal in absolutes, bargains with God or divine punishments. Its one guiding principle was a passionate love of humanity, affirming God’s unequivocal
love for all people, whoever they were, whatever their imperfections. The only command of this loving doctrine was to love one’s neighbour. In this realm there was rest for all the weary and
heavy-laden, and there I found solace. At last the crumpled rag of my spiritual being began to revive, but, although I derived comfort from my return to the Church, it also set me imponderable
questions. What was being asked of me? How great a sacrifice was required of me? The circumstances in which I had met Jonathan, when I was at breaking point, were so extraordinary – and yet
so ordinary – that I could not avoid the bizarre, perhaps naive impression that that meeting had been deliberately engineered by a benevolent power, acting through our good and caring mutual
friends. We were both lonely, deeply unhappy people, in desperate need of help. Could that meeting really have been part of a highly unorthodox divine plan? Or was I just being absurd, even
heretical and hypocritical? I knew my Moliere too well to want to find either myself or Jonathan being cast in the role of Tartuffe, the arch hypocrite.