Travelling to Infinity (46 page)

When Stephen’s name appeared as a Commander of the British Empire in the New Year’s Honours List of 1982, we decided that, given the potential for calamity involved in controlling
the wheelchair, Stephen should not go forwards to meet the Queen alone, but that Robert should accompany him. The investiture at Buckingham Palace was arranged for 23rd February. The occasion
demanded new clothes for all of us, except for Timmie who was too young to qualify for an invitation and had to stay with my parents. Robert was kitted out with his first suit – which he
never wore again since by the time another formal occasion arose he had outgrown it. Lucy, who was going through a tomboy phase, made it quite plain that she would only allow herself to be forced
into a dress and a coat as a never-to-be repeated exception to her usual jeans and T-shirt.

As Robert and I were managing the exercise alone, we knew that we would be hard-pressed to arrive at the Palace from Cambridge at 10 a.m., so we drove down to London the evening before. There we
stayed in the flat reserved for the use of Fellows on the top floor of the Royal Society, overlooking the tree tops of the Mall and the turrets and crenellations around Horseguards Parade. It was
not until I was busily stowing all the new garments and their accessories away in the wardrobes late at night that I realized Lucy’s new patent leather shoes were missing. She was innocently
lounging in her scuffed, old-school clodhoppers and seemed quite content to go to the Palace looking as if she had just come in from climbing trees in the garden. The caretaker’s wife thought
there might be a shoe shop at the end of Regent Street, but doubted whether they sold children’s shoes. We resigned ourselves to starting even earlier than planned the next morning. Leaving
Robert to feed Stephen his breakfast, Lucy and I dashed up to Regent Street as the shops were opening – to buy the only pair of shoes available in Lucy’s size. Sensible and unremarkable
in brown leather, they were suitably smart but not as pretty as the shiny buckled pair that had been left at home. Ironically, they were to see plenty of wear, whereas the patent leather shoes lay
untouched at the bottom of the wardrobe and were eventually given away.

Despite the last-minute crisis, we were still just on schedule when we set out for the Palace. We had not reckoned, though, on joining the mother of all traffic jams in the Mall: the whole
population appeared to be converging on Buckingham Palace, giving the Mall the same air of frenzied urgency as the roads leading to Heathrow airport. Just as at the airport, most of the arrivals
were being dropped at the gate, but it was our privilege to drive through those ornate, oft televised portals into a world apart. This was a world which seemed to operate on a different timescale
from our own, a world where everything ran with a clockwork precision yet where no one showed the least signs of fluster or impatience, a bland courtesy and an easy charm being the hallmarks of all
encounters.

Leaving the car, which suddenly looked embarrassingly old, battered and dirty, in the middle of the courtyard, we were shown to a different entrance from the other arrivals and were taken up
several floors in an ancient lift. Lackeys ushered us with a genteel rapidity through a maze of corridors where we were able to pause only momentarily to glance at the furniture, the paintings, the
Chinese vases and the exquisite, glass-cased ivories which lined the walls. When we came out into the main gallery, we were separated: Robert and Stephen were led away to join the waiting queues of
national heroes and heroines, while Lucy and I were shown to our plush pink seats at the side of the magnificent ballroom.

There was plenty to absorb our attention while we waited for the proceedings to begin. Huge crystal chandeliers sparkled against the white and gold decorations. One end of the immense room
consisted of a sort of red velvet temple, bathed in a soft gilded light, where elderly beefeaters from the Tower mounted guard over the dais where the Queen was to stand. On a balcony at the other
end, a military band played a festive repertoire before launching into the National Anthem on the Queen’s arrival. The morning’s business was briskly introduced and the investiture
assumed a remarkably familiar format, combining the time-honoured British traditions of school-prize-givings and degree ceremonies with the national penchant for pageantry on a grand scale, as each
candidate stepped forwards from a seemingly endless line for his or her moment of glory face to face with Her Majesty the Queen. Lucy nudged me in alarm when she saw an elderly beefeater, who was
standing behind the Queen, keel over – a victim of the heat, the weight of his costume and the hours spent on his feet. He was discreetly removed from the scene, feet first, without any
disruption to the ceremony.

When Robert and Stephen appeared at the side entrance awaiting their turn, about halfway through the proceedings, my spine tingled with love and pride. As they crossed the floor to the centre
and turned towards the Queen, they made a dramatically impressive pair – the indomitable but frail scientist slouched in his chair grinning broadly, accompanied by our tall, shy, fair-haired
son. Stephen had every right to grin in pleasure at his own achievements. Perhaps he was also grinning at the irony. The formerly iconoclastic, angry young socialist had been nominated by a Tory
government to receive one of the highest honours from the sovereign and was being taken into the bosom of the Establishment which he used to despise so vehemently.

Afterwards, over lunch in a posh hotel in central London, we inspected the insignia, a cross finely worked in red-and-blue enamel suspended from a red ribbon edged with a grey stripe. The
inscription, “For God and Empire”, like the Palace itself, belonged to the mysteries and the mythology of another age. When we studied the booklet of information that came with the
“badge”, as it was officially called, the only privilege we could discover that might be remotely relevant to us was that Lucy, as the daughter of a CBE, could be married in the
Order’s chapel in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. “Let’s hope she remembers her shoes,” Robert observed drily.

It was not only the British Establishment which was keen to number Stephen among its scions. He had already received the Papal medal in 1975, and in the autumn of 1981 he was invited to attend a
conference organized by the Jesuits at the Pontifical Academy in the Vatican. The Pontifical Academy is the close-knit group of eminent scientists of unimpeachable character who advise the Pope on
scientific matters. This conference was called by way of a papal updating on the state of the universe. At that early stage Stephen’s nurses had not yet begun to accompany him on trips
abroad, so Bernard Whiting, the Australian postdoctoral researcher who had been working with Stephen, agreed to accompany him to the conference, interpret his lecture to the audience and help me
with his general care.

Since Timothy’s birth, all my anxieties about leaving the children had returned and I could only reconcile myself to going to Rome by taking one or all of them with me – if not
Robert, for whom school was now serious business, at least Lucy and Timmie. Happily, Mary Whiting, who knew Rome well, came too. Without the Whitings, the trip would have been an unmitigated
disaster. The Hotel Michelangelo, supposedly the closest hotel to the Vatican though by our standards a good twenty minutes away from the conference venue, served no meals, not even breakfast.
There was a lift but to get to it one had first to surmount a flight of steps. As if that were not enough, Rome was in the throes of cataclysmic rains. The mornings would dawn bright and sunny and
we would cheerfully accompany Stephen into the Vatican, bowling along past the Swiss Guards at the gate, through the grounds to the Residence of Pius IV, a beautiful, rustic Renaissance building,
constructed for the Pope in the sixteenth century. Later it accommodated female visitors to the Vatican and, since 1936, had housed the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy. There we would leave
Stephen gleefully preparing to fight the Galilean corner and instruct the papal cosmologists in his revised view of the universe which had neither beginning nor end, nor any role for a
Creator-God.

Until lunchtime at the Academy, the one reliably good meal of the day, I would stroll through the groves of bay trees and the children would play in the ornamental streams which trickled down
the hillside. But the fine mornings would deteriorate into sultry, overcast afternoons when majestic clouds, worthy of Michelangelo, would billow over the dome of St Peter’s. They would burst
spectacularly amid dazzling lightning and crashing thunder, and would go on rending the heavens apart well into the night. Mary took us on guided tours to the places she loved and knew so well
– to the Colosseum, the Forum, the Baths of Caracalla and out to the Catacombs of San Calixto – but our excursions were always tempered by the knowledge that we would be drenched to the
skin if we were not back in the hotel by four o’clock in the afternoon. Thereafter we would have to hope for a break in the clouds around dinner time to allow us to dash out, wheelchair and
pushchair in tow, for supper. Needless to say, the permanently gridlocked state of Roman traffic made it impossible to get anywhere near the hotel before the rains descended. Usually four
o’clock and the first flash of lightning and roll of thunder found us in the vicinity of the railway station, searching for a bus to take us back across the Tiber.

Little Tim proved to be the unexpected hero of the hour: he loved the buses, grindingly slow, packed with bodies and suffocatingly steamed up though they were, and the Italian passengers adored
him. “
Che bel bambino!
” they would exclaim, making space for me to sit down with him on my knee. “
Carissimo, carissimo!
” they would smile, stroking his
blond hair and tickling his chin. He had just begun to discover the art of stringing sentences together in precise, grammatical English and was delighted to have a captive audience on whom to
practise his new-found talent. “Do you have a house?” he would searchingly ask the adoring, though uncomprehending secretaries, students, businessmen and corpulent grandmothers.
“Do you have a car?” He would continue with his own answers. “We have a house. We have a car. We have a garage. We have a garden.” They would laugh, nodding sentimentally,
while the rain streamed down the windows and the Roman traffic honked and hooted itself to a standstill in the darkening evening outside.

Mary took her role as guide so conscientiously that she would not rest until Lucy, Timmie and I had seen every church of note in Rome, including her favourite, the church of San Clemente. The
medieval church, noted for its radiantly colourful eleventh-century mosaic of the Triumph of the Cross in the apse, is built above the ancient church, with its early frescoes dating from the sixth
century, beside the remains of a Roman house. Having admired the brilliance of the mosaics, we followed Mary warily down into the dimly lit, red-brick lower church which, unaccountably, echoed with
the sound of running water. “Oh,” said Mary blithely, “that’s the Cloaca Maxima, the main drain built by the Romans. It comes through here.” The main drain sounded to
me more like a rushing mighty river, but I supposed that Mary knew what she was talking about.

The bus ride back to the hotel in the pouring rain took even longer than usual that evening. The whole city had ground to a halt. From the conversation of the other passengers with the driver,
Mary found out that the delay was caused by flooding – the Cloaca Maxima had burst the bounds of its Roman conduit and was pouring out into the streets of the city. In idle amusement to pass
the time, we discussed whether this was a portent, a sign, an indication of divine wrath at Stephen’s temerity in professing his heretical theories within the sanctified walls of the Vatican
itself.

The Vatican – one of the most powerful, dogmatic and wealthy city states ever known – was presided over by a man whose personal attributes of holiness and courage were not in doubt,
yet he sought to impose limitations on freedom of thought – just as rigidly as those atheistic scientists who would dispute our right to ask the question “why” the universe
exists. The very man who should have been addressing the question “why” was busy telling the scientists that they had no right even to ask the question “how” about certain
aspects of creation. At the end of the conference, the Pope told the assembly in his address that, although scientists could study the evolution of the universe, they should not ask what happened
at the moment of creation at the Big Bang and certainly not before it, because that was God’s preserve. Neither Stephen nor I was impressed by such injunctions; they were all too reminiscent
of the attitudes behind Galileo’s arrest and confinement three hundred years earlier. Only now was the Church beginning to catch up with the history of Galileo’s discoveries. There was
detectable embarrassment that his theories had lain proscribed for so long. Though they were kept under lock and key, the papers relating to his fate were readily, almost apologetically, produced
for Stephen’s scrutiny – the implication being that it was simply an oversight that no one had thought of rehabilitating his reputation sooner. Nevertheless, the papal pronouncement
indicated that the Church was still seeking to restrict thought, giving the undeniable impression that not much had been learnt from the lessons of those three hundred years.

Music, through which I had come back into the Church of England, had become the gateway to my spiritual rebirth and growth, and it was thanks to Mary Whiting that I was able to
take up my singing lessons again soon after Timothy’s birth. She positively begged to be allowed to take him out for a walk once a week in the hope that association with babies might help her
have a baby of her own. On Wednesday afternoons therefore, though often tired, I resumed my lessons with Nigel Wickens, who was no stranger to the demands of parenthood after the birth of his
daughter Laura. Under his guidance and to Jonathan’s sensitive accompaniment – as and when his teaching commitments allowed – I returned to the joys of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms
and Mozart. Variously they intensified then assuaged those emotions competing within my deepest self. Meanwhile Mary and Tim went to feed the ducks, walk in the park, sit on the swings and bury
their faces in ice cream.