Travelling to Infinity (5 page)

As Sylvia and I recounted these tales to the captive audience of British expatriates on my final evening in Madrid, Mrs Lewis spluttered over her gin and tonic, while her other guests grinned in
amusement. Immediately the tendrils of the local grapevine started reaching out to find new lodgings for Sylvia as a matter of urgency. Most of the Lewis regulars, like Sylvia, worked at the
British Embassy, though she had not met any of them before. They were amusing but modest, a good advertisement for the Diplomatic Service, which began to beckon as an exciting career prospect. I
returned to England the next day, by student flight, sad to have left behind so many experiences, sights, sounds, acquaintances and intrigues, but dazzled at the array of contrasting, maybe even
conflicting, possibilities that were opening up before me.

My attempts to get in touch with Stephen on my return home from Spain were unavailing. According to his mother, he had already gone back to Cambridge and was not at all well. I
was busy preparing to leave home to embark on a new stage of my life in London and, for the next few weeks that autumn, my attention was totally absorbed as I was drawn into the academic and social
whirl of the Westfield scene in particular, and London in general. Concerts, the theatre and the ballet were all within easy reach. This was how I came to be travelling on the London Underground
with a group of friends when we glimpsed the headlines announcing President Kennedy’s assassination. It was at about that time, November 1963, that I heard from Stephen again. He was coming
to London for dental treatment and asked if I would like to go to the opera with him. This was a much more enticing prospect than any of the Freshers’ hops, which despite Beatlemania were
dire occasions where the boys stayed stuck to the walls until the last dance. Though I had loved music since early childhood, I had had little formal training and had been to the opera only once
– with the school to a performance of
The Marriage of Figaro
at Sadler’s Wells. My single attempt to learn an instrument, the flute, had been quickly aborted at the age of
thirteen, when I broke both arms trying to ice-skate on the frozen lake in the park at Verulamium, the site of the Roman city on which St Albans was founded.

One Friday afternoon that November, I met Stephen in Harley Street, where Russell Cole, his Australian uncle by marriage, had his dental practice. He walked haltingly, lurching from side to
side, making taxis an expensive necessity for journeys of any great distance. Curiously, as his gait became more unsteady, so his opinions became more forceful and defiant. On our way to visit the
Wallace Collection, only a short distance from Harley Street, he announced quite adamantly that he did not share the general hero-worship of the assassinated President. In his opinion, the manner
of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis could only be described as foolhardy: he had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and it was he, not the Russians, who had
threatened a military confrontation. What’s more, Stephen declared, it was preposterous for the United States to claim a victory, because Kennedy had agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey
to appease Kruschev. Despite the force with which he expressed his ideas and his difficulty in walking, Stephen was indefatigable, so, from the Wallace Collection, we made our way down Regent
Street in search of a restaurant. We were just crossing Lower Regent Street when, in the middle of the road, as the lights were turning green, he stumbled and fell. With the help of a passer-by, I
dragged him to his feet and thereafter gave him my arm to lean on. Shaken, we hailed a taxi for Sadler’s Wells.

The opera for which Stephen had tickets was
The Flying Dutchman.
It was magnificent, sweeping us away in the power of its music and the drama of its legendary tale. The Dutchman, cursed
to roam the seas through storm and wind until he could find someone who would sacrifice herself for love of him, was a wild, hounded figure, loudly lamenting his fate from the rigging of his
tossing ship. Senta, the girl who fell in love with him, was pure and innocent. Like most Wagnerian sopranos, however, her weight kept her pretty firmly moored to her spinning wheel. Sensing that
Stephen identified closely with the hero, I began to understand his demonic driving tactics. His father’s car was the vehicle for his fury at the trick that Fate had dealt him. He too was
flying hither and thither in search of rescue – in a manner that could only be described as foolhardy.

After that evening, I felt that I needed to find out more for myself about Stephen’s condition. I made several sorties into London, searching out old acquaintances who had become medical
students, and investigating the poky offices of various charities dealing in neurological illnesses. Everywhere I drew a blank. Perhaps it was better not to know. Was Stephen’s fate any
worse, I wondered, than the fate which loomed over us all? We lived under the shadow of the nuclear cloud, and none of us could count on our full threescore years and ten.

In the lull of the bleak winter days between Christmas and the New Year, I called on Stephen at home in St Albans. He was on the point of leaving for London to go to the opera with his father
and sisters. However he was so obviously delighted to see me that I readily accepted his spontaneous invitation – to accompany him and his father in a week’s time to yet another opera,
Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
. The opera seemed to be an established family pastime in the Hawking household, whereas I, a newcomer, was still assessing this hybrid art form. Though
undoubtedly it could exert tremendous emotional power through the combination of music and drama, it could also appear ludicrous if for the merest second one’s concentration lapsed. During
the next term Stephen seemed to have access to an inexhaustible supply of opera tickets and was forever coming to London to take me to Covent Garden or Sadler’s Wells. I once ventured to
suggest that I would rather like to go to the ballet, as the ballet had been my passion since the age of four, but that suggestion was quashed with withering scorn. Ballet was a waste of time, and
the music was trivial, not worth the effort of listening, I was told. Chastened, I refrained from telling Stephen when I managed to get myself a ticket for Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and
Juliet
, with Fonteyn and Nureyev, through the student union. We went in a party of girls and sat in the cheap seats, far back and high up in the amphitheatre at Covent Garden, way above the
Grand Circle where the Hawkings usually sat. That performance was sublime, and it left me deeply moved.

Stephen was still coming to London frequently for seminars or for dental appointments and, increasingly, I found myself travelling to Cambridge to visit him on Saturdays or Sundays. Those
visits, though urgently awaited, often proved disappointing to both of us. The fare – at ten shillings return – made quite a hole in my allowance of ten pounds a month, and the course
of love did not run at all smoothly. It did not need much imagination to realize that Stephen could not contemplate embarking on a long-term, stable relationship because of the dismal prognosis of
his illness. A quick fling was probably all he could envisage, and that was not what I – in my innocence and in the puritanical climate of the early Sixties, when the fear of an unwanted
pregnancy was a potent constraint – dared imagine. These opposing perspectives led to such tension between us that I often returned to London in tears, and Stephen probably felt that my
presence was rubbing salt into the wound of his trauma. He revealed little where emotional matters were concerned and he refused to talk about his illness. For fear of hurting him, I tried to
intuit his feelings without forcing him to voice them, thus unwittingly establishing a tradition of non-communication, which eventually would become intolerable. I met him yet again in Harley
Street later that winter, after an appointment with his consultant. “How did you get on?” I asked. He grimaced. “He told me not to bother to come back, because there’s
nothing he can do,” he said.

At Westfield, Margaret Smithson, my room-mate, came with me to the meetings of the Christian Union, where I hoped to gain some supportive insights for a situation which was becoming very
confusing as I became more and more involved in it. Like his parents, Stephen had no hesitation in declaring himself an atheist, despite the strong Methodist background of his Yorkshire
grandparents. It was understandable that, as a cosmologist examining the laws that governed the universe, he could not allow his calculations to be muddled by a confessed belief in the existence of
a creator God, quite apart from the confusion his illness might be creating in his mind. I was quite glad to get away from the tedium of regular Sunday church-going, but was not inclined to abandon
my beliefs completely. Even then, possibly under my mother’s influence, I was convinced that there had to be more to heaven and earth than was contained in Stephen’s cold, impersonal
philosophy. Although by this stage I was completely under his spell, bewitched by his clear blue-grey eyes and the broad dimpled smile, I resisted his atheism. Instinctively I knew that I could not
allow myself to succumb to such a negative influence, which could offer no consolation, no comfort and no hope for the human condition. Atheism would destroy us both. I needed to cling to whatever
rays of hope I could find and maintain sufficient faith for the two of us if any good were to come of our sad plight.

The meetings of the college Christian Union were not well attended, and soon they were to be even less so. The topic for the term’s discussions was the nature of divine grace, but it
quickly transpired that the leaders of the group, including the young chaplain, whose name we irreverently traduced to the Revd P. Souper, were firmly of the opinion that only baptized, confessed,
practising Christians could receive divine grace, salvation or whatever else they liked to call it, and only they had the right qualifications to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Margaret and I were so
indignant that we walked out, furiously compiling lists of all those dearly loved – good people, friends and relations – who did not fulfil all the correct criteria, and held our own
long discussions on these topics, which we continued into the vacations, when I went to stay with her and her family in Yorkshire.

Language students nowadays regularly spend a whole year abroad. In the Sixties it was a luxury to be able to spend even a term in the country of one’s target language. We Westfield
students set out by train and boat in late April to spend the summer on a pre-arranged course at the university of Valencia. We arrived to find that no such course existed and that all the
university could offer us was a few classes in Spanish on Shakespeare. The only obligation on us was to collect our certificates of attendance at the end of the term, whether we attended the
lectures or not. We went to just one class, which made a travesty of Macbeth, and decided that enough was enough. I had had a lifetime’s education in Shakespeare at school and could not bear
the thought of having a supplementary dose in Spanish. My companions agreed, so, thereafter, we went to the beach instead.

Only two weeks later, though the others still went to the beach, I was forced to stay at home, confined to my room in the seventh-floor apartment with a blinding headache which at first I
thought was sunstroke but which developed into a severe case of chickenpox. I was already feeling wretchedly miserable. I missed Stephen badly: communication by telephone was out of the question in
those days, and he did not write to me although I sent him many letters. The only comfort was afforded by my Westfield friends, whose visits kept me in touch with the outside world, and by my
landlady, Doña Pilar de Ubeda, and her middle-aged daughter Maribel, who were kindness personified. As I slowly started to regain strength, I wandered into the kitchen, where Doña
Pilar gave me lessons in Spanish cookery, a far more useful accomplishment than studying Shakespeare in Spanish. She taught me how to peel an orange tidily in quarters, how to make
gazpacho
and
paella
and she took me shopping with her. Luckily, with a spotty face and in the presence of such an august matron, I was spared the approaches of the men idly
lounging around in the streets. Back in the flat, I sat in the living room listening ad nauseam to the two records I had bought myself – Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony
and
excerpts from Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
. The latter reduced me to an exquisitely painful state of woe. At last the longed-for moment came. Setting out by train for Barcelona on the
first leg of the journey home, I was glad to leave Valencia behind: despite the succulence of its oranges and the all-pervasive perfume of its citrus groves, it left the nasty taste (of constant
sexual harassment and the bitterness) of a repressive regime that thought nothing of flinging students into jail overnight and removing uncomplimentary pages from imported copies of the
Times
.

My parents brought Stephen to meet me, and the initial moment of reunion was happy but short-lived. I soon became aware that in my absence he had changed: his physical condition had not altered
markedly, except that he now regularly walked with a stick, but his personality was overshadowed by a deep depression. This revealed itself in a harsh black cynicism, aided and abetted by long
hours of Wagnerian opera played at full volume. He was even more terse and uncommunicative, apparently so absorbed in himself that when he offered to teach me to play croquet on the Trinity Hall
lawn, for example, he seemed to forget that I was there. Throwing the stick, which had become his constant appendage, to one side, he gave out curt instructions as I aimed my ball towards the first
hoop, missing it. He then took up his mallet and, croqueting my ball round the whole course, reached the finishing post before I had even had a second turn. I stood open-mouthed, amused and
perturbed at one and the same time. This was indeed an impressive tour de force, in which he scarcely bothered to veil his hostility and frustration, as if he were deliberately trying to deter me
from further association with him. It was too late. I was already so deeply involved with him that there was no easy or obvious way out.