Travelling to Infinity (49 page)

If Paris was the first step on my road to liberation, California was but another short step away in psychological terms. There in the summer of 1982, we renewed old friendships the length and
breadth of the state and revisited old haunts. Jonathan had arranged to attend a conference on early music in Vancouver that August and combined the conference with a visit to us in Santa Barbara,
where he was often taken for one of Stephen’s students. Indeed, he lived with the students in their accommodation and to all intents and purposes shared their rota of duties, although, unlike
them, he was paying his own way.

Little Tim was amazed at the size of the country. “They did build a big country!” he would mutter to himself as he gazed out of the car window over deserts and mountains. As we
watched the sun setting over the Santa Inés range from our apartment every evening, he would declare solemnly, “It’s the end of the world, it’s the end of the world.”
Some time later, I asked him what he liked best about California – the J. Paul Getty Museum, the deserts, the mountains, the sea or the Huntingdon Museum and gardens. It was a stupid question
to ask a three-year-old. He answered me in what he considered to be my own terms, for, as quick as a flash he replied, “The Mickey Mouse Museum…”

I was now ready to fly east again as well as west. With a cautious eye on employment possibilities, Lucy had begun to study Russian for O level. In retrospect, this was not a good choice since,
despite changing times, it did not lead to a brilliant career and produced only much frustration. However, the rigours of studying seventeenth-century church Russian at Oxford and a winter spent in
Moscow amid the privations of 1992 were still on the distant horizon when Lucy flew with her father, a bevy of nurses and me to a conference in that city in October of 1984. Lucy’s attempts
to speak Russian were met with ecstatic delight, especially when she stood up to propose a brief toast to “
mir i drujba
” – “peace and friendship” – at
the closing banquet of the conference. It was one of those Russian banquets where the hors d’oeuvre are lavish – caviar, smoked fish and meats, nuts, pickles and, of course, the
ubiquitous cucumber – and last for hours, interrupted by toasts, speeches and, in the case of one misguided Japanese delegate, an endless dirge delivered in a monotone which he himself had
composed in unintelligible English. The main course, the usual lump of unidentifiable meat and mashed potato, arrived at the tables just as everyone was leaving.

Eleven years earlier, our acquaintances had demonstrated the utmost caution in their dealings with us. Now they seemed not to care a fig for officialdom. The young guide who was sent to
“mind” Lucy and me was much more interested in accompanying us to buy clothes in the hard-currency shops to which we had access than in directing our movements. Two of Stephen’s
closest colleagues, Renata Galosh and her husband, Andrei Linde, openly invited us to dinner in their small flat on the outskirts of Moscow. They provided a delectable meal, in part down to an
amicable relationship with the manager of some restaurant or other, and in part because of Renata’s preserves from her dacha in the country, among them home-made strawberry juice strained
from precious home-bottled fruit.

Although the flying phobia was more or less under control, it was simply not practicable for me to accompany Stephen on each one of his international expeditions: travel had become an obsession
with him and he regularly seemed to spend more time in the air than he did on the ground. He found it hard to accept that, quite apart from Lucy and Tim, I was not prepared to abandon either Robert
or my students as their A levels approached in the spring of 1985, a period which he had designated for an extensive tour of China. Bernard Carr and Iolanta, one of his nurses, manfully took
charge, heaving Stephen on and off aeroplanes and trains, and valiantly manoeuvring the wheelchair up onto the Great Wall. They came back exhausted – nor was Stephen in the best of health,
though he was triumphant at his achievement. He coughed frequently and appeared to be even more sensitive to irritants in foodstuffs. Many a night would be spent nursing him in my arms, trying to
calm the panic which itself precipitated even worse choking fits.

However, the summer holidays promised a respite. We were to spend the whole of August in Geneva, where Stephen was planning to have discussions with the particle physicists at Cern, while the
rest of us could enjoy the environs of Lake Geneva. At Cern Stephen would be working on the implications for the direction of the arrow of time of quantum theory and of the observations from the
particle accelerator. This was a topic upon which he had expatiated at some length, with Robert’s help, to the Astronomical Society at the Perse School. It was at this lecture that I resigned
myself to the realization that physics had become so abstract that, even when explained in pictorial form, it was beyond my comprehension. No amount of film played backwards of broken cups and
saucers jumping back onto tables and reassembling themselves could persuade me that the direction of time could be reversed. Such a supposition could potentially alter the course of human history
if visitors from the future could interfere with the past. It seemed however that it was essential to prove mathematically that this was not a possibility, since the proof would ensure that nothing
could travel faster than light.

Stephen’s travels in time and space notwithstanding, it had been a good summer: it had begun when the cat had a large litter of kittens on the kitchen floor. The prettier specimens were
farmed out to various friends and acquaintances, until eventually all that remained was one undistinguished black-and-white tom, which one of my more susceptible students, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, a
young Peruvian, insisted on taking to join his uncaged rabbit in his room. Lucy completed her first French exchange with a Breton girl whose boatman father had won the lottery, and there were
parties. Robert set the style by celebrating his eighteenth birthday, just before the onset of his exams, with a ceilidh on the lawn on a warm clear night under a full moon. There were also
concerts of every description, choral and instrumental, recitals and even a pop concert at the Albert Hall to celebrate Tim’s sixth birthday, as he had become a great fan of Sky, devoting
himself single-mindedly in his every waking moment to emulating their tremendous, sustained drum rolls. An unscheduled concert of a different nature took place on our back lawn when, one Sunday at
the beginning of July, just as Stephen and I were returning home from an expedition into medieval Suffolk with the delegates to that summer’s physics conference, the lights failed in the
University Concert Hall up the road. Jonathan was to play the harpsichord in the concert that evening and brought news of the disaster. The weather was fine and dry, so the obvious solution was for
the players to set up their instruments on the lawn while the audience grouped round, sitting alfresco on whatever rugs, cushions and mats we could muster.

Although Jonathan was regularly asked to play with modern and amateur orchestras such as the one which performed on our lawn, he had long lamented the lack of authentic baroque performance in
Cambridge, where many young hopeful keyboard players vied for the few opportunities available. On the other hand, he was too remote from the London scene for involvement there to be a feasible
prospect. Had it not been for his commitment to us, particularly to me, clearly he might well have moved to London, where he could have advanced his career much more easily. The only course was for
him to start his own orchestra, but that was a daunting prospect in terms of the time, the commitment and the money required. He was becoming so frustrated by the musical isolation in which he
found himself, and he hankered so desperately to perform as part of an ensemble that when, in the spring of 1984, he went into hospital for an operation, I decided to take charge of the situation.
First I picked up the telephone and booked the University Concert Hall, and then I rang round various contacts and booked a small but complete orchestra of baroque players. Jonathan came round from
the anaesthetic to the news that, in his temporary absence from consciousness, he had been appointed the director of the newly formed Cambridge Baroque Camerata which was due to give its inaugural
concert on 24th June. Frenzied planning, programming and publicity filled the intervening weeks, which were also the weeks of his convalescence.

On the night, Robert ran the box office, Lucy sold programmes and various friends acted as ushers while I ran to and fro, liaising between front of house and backstage and attending to Stephen
who sat at the side of the platform. To our amazement, the queue for tickets stretched out into the forecourt. We counted each and every member of the audience as they filed into the concert hall
that June evening, since a full house was crucial to the financial success of the enterprise. “Financial success” did not mean making a profit; it merely signified breaking even. All
seats were taken and the performance, entitled
The Trumpet Shall Sound
, received rapturous applause. Emboldened by the success of the 1984 concert, the Cambridge Baroque Camerata ventured
onto the concert platform again in 1985 with another own-promotion, a programme to mark the tercentenary of the births of Bach, Handel and Scarlatti. Fortunately the gamble paid off a second time
– although on some later occasions, unexpected rival attractions such as televised football finals would decrease the size of the audience dispiritingly. The London debut of the ensemble,
planned for October 1985 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, had to be regarded as an investment for the future, as it certainly would not break even, but it would bring the Cambridge Baroque Camerata to
the attention of a wider public.

Our household seemed to have recovered a considerable degree of equilibrium. For no one were the results more satisfactory than for Stephen himself, who had finished writing the first draft of a
popular book about cosmology and the origins of the universe. The book ranged wide, from a discussion of early cosmologies to modern theories of particle physics and the arrow of time – with
particular reference, of course, to the significance of black holes. In conclusion the author looked forward to the time when mankind would able to “know the mind of God” through the
formulation, at some not-too-distant date in the future, of a complete unified theory of the universe, the theory of everything. Stephen had been given the name of an agent in New York where the
book was being offered to publishers, and meanwhile in England we discussed tax-efficient methods of receiving royalties, which we expected to bring in a modest supplementary income regularly over
the years, like textbooks which were said to be far more reliable in the long run than bestsellers. It was unlikely to fulfil the original aim of paying Lucy’s school fees, as she was already
well into her secondary education.

At the end of July, a few days in advance of the rest of us, Stephen, his new secretary Laura Ward, some students and nurses, flew out to Geneva. I was anxious to stay to see Robert off on a
scout expedition to Iceland before leaving Cambridge myself. The plan was that within the week we would meet Stephen and his entourage in Germany at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian Mecca, for a performance
of the
Ring Cycle
, and then all travel back to Geneva to a house rented for the duration of the holidays. At last I had begun to achieve a happy balance in my life and felt that with the
help of Purcell, Bach and Handel, I could cope with the effects of Wagner’s sinister modulations in a spirit of good-humoured tolerance.

It was quite casually, without a second thought, that I waved goodbye to Stephen as he left home on 29th July. Geneva after all was no distance compared with China and it was renowned for its
standards of hygiene. We were all concerned for Stephen’s father, who was in the throes of a chronic illness, and feared that he might die during our absence. He bore his illness with the
same gruff pragmatic stoicism that he had brought to all situations and which he used to conceal pain or embarrassment. Despite the vicissitudes of my relationship with the Hawking family, I had
not ceased to respect him, the more so because of late he had begun to write me truly appreciative letters, praising my care of Stephen and the children and my management of the letting house.
However, my greatest anxiety at this time was for Robert, my eldest son, whom I saw off in the company of the Venture Scouts three days after Stephen’s departure. Their plans – to trek
across a glacier and to canoe round the north coast of Iceland – filled me with silent foreboding.

It was seldom that Jonathan and I were alone together for any length of time. We tried to observe a code of conduct in front of Stephen and the children whereby we behaved
simply as good friends, suppressing, sometimes with difficulty, any display of closer affection in our attempts to avoid hurting anyone. Each evening I would stand behind Stephen at the front door
as he saw Jonathan off, dispatching him to his own house on the other side of Cambridge. In our efforts to keep the home going by this unconventional method we had the support of many people, among
them my elderly home help, Eve Suckling. These were people who had witnessed the situation from the inside and who were wise enough not to draw hasty conclusions. Even Don, whose absolute values
had been shaken one evening in the spring of 1978, just before Tim’s birth, when he found Jonathan and me comfortably lolling against each other on the sofa, had conceded that the situation
often demanded of him much more than he had expected, and sometimes more than he could give – certainly more than he could give indefinitely. He admitted that he had lived with us long enough
to find that the ceaseless rigours of our way of life often brought him into uncomfortable conflict with his own conscience. Always we knew too that we could count on the guidance of Bill Loveless
to strengthen our resolve and help keep our perspective within the disciplined framework that we had tried to establish for it while viewing our weaknesses with compassion. More than once he was
heard to say that our situation was unique and that he could not say how we should deal with it.