Travelling to Infinity (40 page)

Some people might regard the support that had appeared at my side, lifting the burden from my shoulders, as a happy chance, for others it might seem just a coincidence. For me, tense and
overwrought to breaking point, it had the hallmark of divine intervention – although at that stage, in the spring of 1978, Jonathan and I had scarcely begun to confront our feelings, let
alone give them any expression. The fundamental question was how to handle this heaven-sent gift. It could be used hurtfully, destructively, with the potential to break up the family in which I had
invested so much of myself, if Jonathan and I even momentarily contemplated going off and setting up a home together. It would not be enough to claim that I had fulfilled my promise to Stephen in
outrageously difficult circumstances over a very long period, because this was not a viable rationale in terms of the teachings of our church, which both I and Jonathan believed were the only true
basis for human living. The alternative course was the only one we could follow. Then, that special gift could be used well, for the benefit of the family as a whole – for the children and
for Stephen, if he were prepared to accept it as such. The latter course would not be easy since it would require a rigorous amount of self-discipline. In caring for Stephen we would have to try to
maintain a distance from each other, living apart and not allowing ourselves to show any outward signs of affection for each other in public. In principle, our social lives would always focus on at
least three, if not five people, never an exclusive twosome. The well-being of Stephen and the children would be the justification for our relationship with no thoughts for the future. In effect
there was no obvious future for anyone who became involved with me. If it was selfish of me to monopolize the life of a young man who had already suffered so much tragedy, the answer was always the
same: with his help we could survive as a family, without it we were doomed.

As, hesitantly, we began to admit to the attraction that was drawing us to each other, Jonathan would dispel these doubts by reassuring me that through us – all of us – he had found
a purpose which was helping him to alleviate the hollow pain of his own loss. It was during the course of a rare visit to London, sitting in a quiet side chapel of Westminster Abbey, that he
announced that he was prepared to commit himself to me and to my family, come what may. That most selfless and most moving of pledges lifted me out of the dark void that my life had become. The
relationship was ennobling and liberating. It was still platonic and would long remain so. The mutual attraction, and the unruly emotions it threatened to provoke, were sublimated in the music we
practised and performed together, usually in Stephen’s presence at the weekends and sometimes on weekday evenings as well. It was enough that someone had come into my life on whom I could
depend implicitly.

Stephen at first reacted to Jonathan with a certain male hostility, trying in true Hawking fashion to assert his intellectual superiority, just as he might when faced with a new research
student. He was soon disarmed on discovering that this technique was unavailing, since Jonathan was not competitive by nature. Highly sensitive to the needs of others, he responded much more
readily to Stephen’s helplessness and to the charm of his smile than he did to the sonority of his reputation. Stephen became gentler, calmer, more appreciative, more relaxed. It even became
possible, in the dead of night, for me to confide in him in an unprecedented manner. Generously and gently he acknowledged that we all needed help, no one more than himself, and if there was
someone who was prepared to help me, he would not object as long as I continued to love him. I could not fail to love him when he willingly showed such understanding and, most importantly,
communicated it to me. On the occasional days when Jonathan was attacked by the black dog of depression, it was Stephen who would reassure me that Jonathan would never let me down. Otherwise, once
accepted, the situation was rarely mentioned. It was however greatly reassuring to me that I could trust Stephen with my confidence.

All pulling together, the three of us embarked upon an exceptionally creative period. There were still those times when the combination of my tiredness and Stephen’s innate cussedness
would bring me to the verge of collapse, but generally we operated on a much more even keel. For Stephen, it seemed as if the respectability conferred on him by his Fellowship of the Royal Society
and by the Papal medal constituted an automatic passport to a cornucopia of other honours. While he continued to advance his understanding of the universe, all sorts of august bodies continued to
trip over each other in their eagerness to cover him with medals, prizes and honorary degrees. These had already included the honorary doctorate from his Alma Mater, the University of Oxford, and
to his special gratification, an honorary fellowship at University College. The atmosphere at the six-monthly feasts in the College was warm and friendly, and Stephen’s undergraduate excesses
were a recurring topic of jovial reminiscence. As if to lend substance to the recollections, we were regularly accommodated in undergraduate rooms at some distance from the nearest bathroom across
cold, damp flagstones.

In March 1978, Caius College, not to be outdone, commissioned a line-drawing portrait of Stephen from David Hockney. While Hockney sketched and drew, Lucy sat curled up, reading and drawing, in
an armchair in a corner of the living room. Doubtless to the surprise of the Fellows of Caius, Hockney included her in the final version, a gentle acknowledgement of Stephen’s family
background to offset the official formality of the portrait. On the second day of the sitting, Lucy paid her own tribute to Hockney. We were sitting on the lawn, drinking coffee and taking
advantage of a brief spell of spring sunshine, when she burst out of the house, bouncing across the lawn on her hopper, a big balloon made of tough rubber. Her dungarees were pulled up to the knee,
deliberately revealing that like Hockney she was wearing odd socks, one white and one brown.

One cold wintry evening that February, Stephen and I had joined the distinguished gathering of Fellows on the coach going down to the Royal Society for the admission of Prince Charles as an
honorary Fellow. (Before coaches were fitted with wheelchair lifts, Stephen had to be hauled aboard bodily – by the coach driver and me. This however was easier than driving and parking in
London.) The occasion gave Stephen cause for much mirth, a welcome reminder of the old irreverent student, scarcely discernible under the present, weighty trappings of Establishment recognition. At
the ceremony, the new President of the Royal Society complimented the Prince on the dedicated royal patronage of the Society, founded as he said by Prince Charles’s namesake, Charles II, and
“continued by his son James II”. Stephen guffawed and, in the loudest stage whisper of which he was capable, gleefully announced, “He’s got it wrong! James II was Charles
II’s brother!” At the reception after the ceremony, Stephen enjoyed himself even more by demonstrating the turning circle of the wheelchair to Prince Charles and in so doing, ran close
to – or over – the highly polished royal footwear, an exercise which he was to inflict at a later date on the Archbishop of Canterbury at a dinner in St John’s College,
Cambridge.

Jonathan’s career was much less meteoric than Stephen’s; in fact it had scarcely begun. Quite apart from the devastating tragedy he had suffered, the frustrations of being a
struggling musician contributed to the gloom of the bleak, black days he sometimes endured. A former chorister and prize-winning scholar of St John’s College, he was sufficiently ambitious to
find the prospect of a life spent teaching the piano disheartening, yet his natural reticence and modesty tended to conceal his very real talent as an organist and harpsichordist. His intense love
and knowledge of baroque music, particularly Bach, especially when performed on authentic instruments, found scant outlet in the humdrum routine of piano teaching in schools. Convinced that he had
a mission to wean the ears of the public away from resonant modern instruments and Romantic interpretations to the subtleties of baroque performance technique, he hardly knew where to begin.
Authenticity in performance became one of the subjects under discussion at mealtimes, when the children’s chatter allowed the adults to get a word in edgeways. Stephen would tease Jonathan
about the difficulties of managing a harpsichord, insisting that a steel frame would solve all the delicate time-consuming problems of tuning and retuning. Jonathan would point out that the
instrument would then not only be unsuitable for authentic baroque performance, it would no longer be portable either. In fact it might as well be a piano.

Good-humoured banter notwithstanding, Stephen and I inevitably became more and more involved in music and encouraged Jonathan to take the plunge, to move away from teaching into performing. This
proposition presented him with a dilemma of which he was already only too well aware. To become a performer he would have to give up most of his teaching and devote the time to practising and
rehearsing, yet he depended on teaching for his income. It would be a long time before he could make enough money from performing alone. He did have one great advantage however: he possessed his
own instrument. Not only did he have a fine upright piano in his tiny house – so reminiscent of 6 Little St Mary’s Lane – on the other side of Cambridge, but most of the rest of
the living space was taken up with a harpsichord which he himself had built. He was therefore well equipped to begin performing; he simply lacked the right opportunity.

The more the three of us discussed the dilemma, the more we realized that the only way for Jonathan to build up a repertoire and to become recognized as a performer, in a highly competitive
environment, while still earning an income from teaching, was for him to create his own opportunities. This he could do gradually by self-promotion and by offering his services to charities. A
symbiotic relationship developed between him and the various charities to which he subscribed, particularly the societies concerned with leukaemia and other cancers. He gave recitals free of charge
and in so doing trained himself in the techniques of performance, not simply in playing the notes but in overcoming nerves and in planning and presenting the programmes, while the charities
benefited from one hundred per cent of the takings, minus the costs of publicity.

Meanwhile I was at last catching tantalizing glimpses on the horizon of the end of my own intellectual pilgrimage. I scarcely liked to confess how long it had taken me to reach that point, for
it was all of twelve years and two children. Alan Deyermond, my supervisor, had been right to insist on registering me as a student at London University, as any other university would have thrown
me out long ago. The way had been hard and tortuous and just when I was despondently thinking that there was no end to it, Jonathan had appeared to cheer me along the final stretch. He showed a
sufficient interest in the subject to spur me on; he would ask me at the end of each day what I had achieved, listen to just a few lines of the poetry and lend a hand in sorting out the card index
and the masses of notes, scribbled on odd bits of paper. That interest and a little practical help was all I needed to bolster my resolve for the final hurdle, the last chapter of the thesis which
was to be an analysis of the language of the popular poetry of Castile in the later Middle Ages.

The Castilian lyrics were lively and colourful, full of the medieval iconography of gardens, plants, fruits, birds and animals, symbolizing the multiplicity of the aspects of love. Many of them
were also of religious significance and were common to the rest of Europe. The garden epitomizes the attractions of the beloved as well as the virtues of the Virgin Mary. The fountain at the centre
is both the spring of life and the symbol of fertility. The apple is the fruit of the Fall and the pear the fruit of divine redemption, but, in the secular context, both are potent metaphors for
sexuality. The rose is the emblem of the martyrs and of the Virgin, yet it is also the most appealing image of the sensual beauty of the beloved. Spain introduces its own set of vivid images, drawn
from its flamboyant landscape. The fruit which the unhappy nun tastes is the bitter lemon, while happy lovers walk in the shade of the sweet orange grove. The olive grove, similarly, becomes the
scene of lovers’ meetings. The fact that many of these images have reappeared in the poetry of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492, and in the poetry of the New World, is
indicative of their early folkloric composition. Thematically these poems present an unbroken tradition with their Galician and Mozarabic forebears, the
cantigas
and the
kharjas
.
The songs are usually sung by girls, the motif of the lover’s absence recurs, the lovers meet at dawn and the mother is a constant figure.

During sparse weekday minutes and half hours, the writing began to flow with an unaccustomed ease. At weekends, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the songs began to flow as well. I voraciously
attacked whatever Nigel, my personal Svengali, put before me, whether Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mozart, Britten, Bach or Purcell. Thanks to Stephen, I rapidly acquired my own library of music as
he showered me with volume upon volume of music for birthday and Christmas presents. Sometimes I would be called upon to sing a solo verse in church. Initially the stage fright was terrifying, but
eventually, with practice, it subsided and then the voice, which Nigel had painstakingly crafted into an instrument, surprised even me. I was producing the sound but it bore little relation to my
light, unsure speaking voice. It was strong and confident, the voice of someone else, poised and assured and affirmed.

One weekend that spring my brother Chris and his wife Penelope brought their baby daughter to stay and I introduced Jonathan to them as a new friend. They did not demand accounts of a situation
which I myself could not fully explain. They were also a receptive and appreciative audience for a few songs. Afterwards, Penelope remarked on the atmosphere in the living room that Sunday
afternoon. She said that it was magical, as if a great sense of peace and calm had descended on our house. That comforting remark increased my confidence in my new friendship. Chris was much taken
with Jonathan, and before he left he deliberately drew me aside to tell me what a wonderful person he thought Jonathan was, especially remarking on his magnificent Byzantine eyes. Later he rang
from Devon. We talked for a long time, discussing my situation and the way that it was changing. I took Chris’s advice very seriously to heart. “You have been steering your little boat
single-handedly across a very stormy, uncharted sea for many years,” he said, and then continued, “If there is someone at hand, willing to come on board and guide that boat into a safe
harbour, you should accept whatever help he can offer.”