Travelling to Infinity (55 page)

The grants from the MacArthur Foundation came in six monthly instalments. Every sixth months the University accountants would prepare a balance sheet to show the Trustees of the Foundation how
their money had been spent, and I would submit a report on Stephen’s health and care, together with another begging request for a further grant for the next half-year. In my second letter to
the Foundation in March 1986, I explained how we had tried to engage our own team of nurses by placing regular advertisements in the local paper. I referred to the “indescribable
problems” that this method had occasioned, with the result that we had often had to resort to the agency – hence the considerable bills for agency nursing. The grants, though generous,
were only just enough to cover the bills. They certainly were not adequate to meet the demands which some mischief-maker among the nurses was now devising and which Judy thought to answer by
calling the first meeting. Having thanked those present for all their help, I explained how the finances were obtained and organized in the hope that they might have a better idea of the
difficulties we had experienced. I pointed out that the nursing bill came to at least £36,000 a year and was financed from the United States. I also emphasized that there was never any
certainty that it would be renewed. It was therefore impossible to provide the nurses with anything more than casual employment on a part-time basis, which was strictly how the work was advertised.
Consequently there was no scope for sickness pay, holiday pay, pensions or any of the other perks for which they had begun to agitate.

Thereafter a more subdued audience concentrated their attention on practical requests for laundry baskets, towel rails, adequate lighting, shelving and suchlike, and repairs to the potholes in
the driveway. Judy and I took the opportunity to distribute the UK Council of Nursing’s code of conduct, and asked the assembly to give its fourteen clauses their attention. Those
recommendations had as much impact as the concerns I had already voiced about keeping the home, our home, a happy and well-balanced environment for Stephen and the children alike.

Despite the mayhem wrought in the home by outside intervention, Stephen rose like a phoenix, and by early December 1985 he was well enough to attempt short sorties to the
Department. At first I drove him there by car but, unless the weather was bad, he was soon wheeling himself in his chair over his usual route across the Backs, the only difference being that he was
accompanied by a nurse instead of a faithful student. All expeditions took longer than before, involving much careful preparation of the patient before setting out. Many essential accoutrements had
to be strung onto the back of the wheelchair, giving the whole contrivance an extraordinarily cumbersome appearance. Lumbering and festooned with eccentric appliances, rather like a tinker’s
cart, the chair dwarfed its occupant who, small and wasted, drove it fearlessly into battle to reassert his sovereignty over his intellectual domain.

It was unwise to dwell for too long on the Stephen’s vulnerability, though it was difficult not to fall into the snare of sentimental overprotection: many had fallen into that trap. Some
of us had striven to achieve a balance between a deep concern for the minimal, evanescent, physical presence and a somewhat mischievous irreverence for the immense psychological and intellectual
power. This delicate balance, so essential to a healthy family life where no one person should claim to be more important than anyone else, had become impossible to maintain. At best, it entailed
nerve-racking attention to every detail of Stephen’s care, yet a healthy scepticism at some of his more outlandish and outrageous pronouncements. On a Sunday evening, for instance, Jonathan
would bring in the usual takeaway curry. Though neurotic and mistrustful of the ingredients of my carefully prepared, guaranteed gluten-free home cooking, Stephen would on Sundays consume a huge
plateful of curry with gusto, with never a thought as to the ingredients. The children and I considered this glaring inconsistency fair game for a little gentle teasing.

These were also occasions for wide-ranging discussions. Private conversation had become impossible, but in the relaxed atmosphere of those Sunday evenings – sometimes too at Sunday lunch
when Robert, who came back to study in Cambridge in 1987, would bring his undergraduate friends home for a square meal – questions of science and faith would form the basis of sustained,
good-natured argument. Cecil Gibbons had pointed out in one of his sermons that scientific research required just as broad a leap of faith in choosing a working hypothesis as did religious belief.
Stephen usually grinned at the mention of religious faith and belief, though on one historic occasion he actually made the startling concession that, like religion, his own science of the universe
required such a leap. In his branch of science the leap of faith – or inspired guesswork – centred on which model of the universe, which theory, which equation one chose as the most
appropriate object of research. Then this, at the experimental stage, had to be tested against observation. With luck, the guess – or leap of faith – might, in Richard Feyman’s
words, prove “to be temporarily not wrong”. The scientist had to rely on an intuitive sense that his choice was right, or he might be wasting years in pointless research with an end
result that was definitively wrong. Any further attempts to discuss the profound matters of science and religion with Stephen were met with an enigmatic smile.

Insensitive to the subtleties of our relationship and unable to distinguish the mind from the body, the nurses, on the other hand, tended to smother Stephen in a blanket of sentimentality. This
belied his strength of mind and undermined my attempts to keep the correct balance. For them he had become an idol, immune from criticism or even from the healthy scepticism which the psychiatric
nurses had generated. They concentrated on the calamity of the illness rather than the victory over it, kowtowed to the patient’s every whim and interpreted any innocent bantering as an
insult to their idol.

The same sentimental mistake had been made earlier in 1985 by an artist commissioned jointly by the College and the National Portrait Gallery to paint Stephen’s portrait. The paintings,
unveiled that summer, showed the pathos of the body, slumped disjointedly in the chair all too clearly, but failed to show the willpower and the genius, conveyed with such persuasion in the set of
the face and the light of the eyes. I regarded the portraits as a travesty and said so – to the exasperation of the bodies who had commissioned them. However, in the early months of 1986, the
light of determination returned to those eyes as Stephen recovered his mobility and with it his unassailable position in the Department. The effect of his period of illness was not unlike the
effect that exile from Cambridge had on Newton when the University was closed because of the plague in 1665. In the isolation of the manor house at Woolsthorpe near Grantham, Newton had found time
for the contemplation and calculation needed to develop his theory of gravity. In those months when he was too weak to leave home, Stephen had learnt to use the new computer with the same
single-minded motivation which he had shown in memorizing lengthy equations when, in the late Sixties, he lost the ability to write.

Through the loss of his voice, he discovered that he had gained a much improved method of communication. He could converse with anyone, not just the small band of family and students as in the
past, and he was no longer dependent on having a student at hand to interpret his lectures for him. By turning up the volume on the speaker, he could address an audience as effectively, if not more
so, as anyone else. His synthesized speech was slow, since it took time to select the vocabulary, but there was nothing unusual in that since his speech had always been measured. Stephen had always
taken time to think before speaking to avoid cliché or inanity, and to ensure that the last word on any subject was his and his alone.

Not only was he empowered to express his own thoughts directly, deliver his own lectures and write his own letters, he was also able to work again on his book. His former student, Brian Whitt,
had over the past months begun to help him with the methodical organization of the material and continued to help, particularly with diagrams and seeking out research material; but the project was
now firmly back in Stephen’s grasp. The book gave him the motivation to exploit the full potential of the computer, and the computer gave him the means of writing a revised version of the
manuscript, incorporating the suggestions of the American editor. It began to look as if the book might become a reality: not only should we not have to repay the advance, we had, at long last, the
prospect of financial security. The book might not make a fortune, but it might bring in a regular supplementary income, heralding the end of nearly a quarter of a century of economizing.

At home I endeavoured to juggle my own interests, teaching, music and the children, with the tiresome demands of wayward nurses. With Judy’s stalwart help, I fended off impending chaos by
conducting weekly interviews with new candidates and by attending to the requests for improvements from those already on the rota. We sensed that we had become the scapegoats for the frustrations
which the nurses could not vent on Stephen himself. I discussed our predicament with an old school friend who lectured in nursing. She recognized the syndrome. “Nurses, like soldiers, are
trained to act, not to think,” she said. “If there is a patient needing treatment, their first duty is to that patient to the exclusion of all else. They act at an intensely physical
level, which does not involve the intellect. Imagination is not a quality that is prized in nursing.” This information certainly clarified the problem, but offered scant comfort, since it
implied that nurses operated at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from the rest of us and, however much we might try to compromise, they, by definition, were unable to do so.

Meanwhile Stephen celebrated his return to normality. In the immediate short term, this took the form of a visit to the pantomime for his birthday and to the College Ladies’ Night two days
later. In the long term, he was already planning his travels for the forthcoming year, rashly undaunted by the Geneva experience. Paris and Rome were on his itinerary for the autumn, to be preceded
by an experimental trip abroad in June – to an island off the Swedish coast for a conference in particle physics. How all this was to be achieved was another matter, especially since the
dates for the Swedish conference coincided with Lucy’s first O-level papers and I was reluctant to leave her at such a critical time.

In fact attention shifted dramatically from Stephen to Lucy in the spring of 1986. In March, she set off with a school party to Moscow, but not, as we had all expected, under the exuberant
auspices of her Russian teacher. Each year it was Vera Petrovna’s custom to dress up her charges like Michelin men, in layer upon layer of clothing acquired from second hand shops and jumble
sales. In Moscow the girls would tour the city, visiting all her friends and relations, peeling off a layer of charitable clothing at each stop. However in 1986 she was refused a visa for the first
time, so other non-Russian-speaking teachers had to accompany the party to Moscow and Leningrad. It was therefore a potential catastrophe when Lucy fell ill in Moscow with only her own knowledge of
Russian to help her. Terrified of being abandoned in a Russian hospital, she told no one how ill she was feeling; she ate nothing and clutched her stomach for ten days. When she arrived home, she
was too ill with a high fever and excruciating abdominal pain to go anywhere except straight to bed. The doctor came and diagnosed acute appendicitis. So there we were again – walking the
all-too-familiar corridors of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, sitting on the same plastic chairs, though for a dangerously inflamed appendix rather than a dangerously obstructed respiratory tract. We
were told the next day, when Lucy was already recovering, that she was very lucky not to have had a burst appendix in Moscow.

Nevertheless, the arrival of warmer weather alleviated some of the tensions associated with winter susceptibilities, and life began to assume at least a thin veneer of its former hard-won
normality. Defiantly determined that the home should still be worthy of that name, I tried to consign the complexities of full-time nursing attendance to the background, pretending, as we had so
often in the past, that it was just another minor inconvenience. Once more we gave dinners and drinks parties for scientific visitors and participated in local activities at the schools and the
church. Tim invited seventeen of his classmates to his birthday party, where a good, old-fashioned Punch and Judy show kept the guests enthralled for part of the time while, for the rest of the
afternoon, my father, in time-honoured tradition at the piano, kept them amused with musical games.

As Stephen’s health gradually improved, I ventured to take up some of my old activities, notably singing in the church choir and with the choral society which I had joined in the early
Eighties. Since the latter’s weekly rehearsals took place in Caius College Chapel by kind permission of the Dean, John Sturdy, this activity was quite compatible with Stephen’s
movements. He, accompanied by a nurse, would dine in the College while I sang – or tried to sing my way through an endless succession of colds – in the Chapel. Often he would call in at
the Chapel after dinner to listen to the final stages of the rehearsal and we would then go home together. Lucy was adopting an increasingly independent lifestyle, which revolved more and more
around the theatre and kept her out of the house.

Three nurses and a doctor were engaged for Stephen’s trip to Sweden, stretching the MacArthur budget to its limit. It was however a profitable investment, since Murray Gell-Mann, one of
the trustees of the MacArthur Foundation, was also a participant at the conference. He could see at first hand just how dire Stephen’s circumstances were and just how much costly professional
care was needed to sustain his life and his contribution to physics. In my next application to the Foundation in September of 1986, I was able to refer to our meeting with Murray Gell-Mann and to
report that Stephen’s health, though much more stable, continued to require the same degree of professional nursing: I predicted that it would be required indefinitely. Thereafter, the
MacArthur Foundation agreed to support Stephen’s nursing expenses on an indefinite basis and accepted my explanation that the National Health Service provided only a fleeting morning visit
from the District Nurse to check the supplies, a weekly visit from the GP, one eight-hour shift out of the twenty-one, and additional help with bathing on a couple of mornings a week.