Travelling to Infinity (6 page)

It was painful but perhaps beneficial that we were soon to be parted again: Stephen was about to set out for Germany, with his sister Philippa, on a pilgrimage to the Wagnerian shrine, the
Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, with tickets for the complete
Ring Cycle
. Thence they were to travel by rail behind the Iron Curtain to Prague. Meanwhile I was to accompany my father to an
international governmental conference in Dijon, where I was to stay with a local family, an elderly couple with a highly sophisticated twenty-five-year-old daughter who had a job and a boyfriend. I
was not at a loss for diversion however, because Dad’s conference, after a day or two of lectures and study sessions, generated its own entertainment in which I was privileged to share. Since
we were in Bourgogne, that naturally revolved around the vineyards, the famous
Clos
of the region.

Consequently there began yet another stage, arguably one of the most enjoyable of my education – the cultivation of a discerning palate in the course of which I was pleasurably introduced
to the great names and the great bouquets of Bourgogne, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Côtes de Beaune, Clos de Vougeot. The advertising slogan for Nuits-Saint-Georges aroused my innocent curiosity:
tantalizingly the deep velvety wine was said to resemble “
la nuit des noces, douce et caressante
...”

From Dijon we drove to Geneva airport to meet my mother and then spent a couple of days in our favourite retreat, high in the Bernese Oberland, at Hohfluh, a tiny village atop the Brenner Pass
overlooking the valley of the Aare at Meiringen and enjoying the most spellbinding scenery. Before we left Switzerland for Italy, Dad took us to Lucerne, the medieval city on the edge of the lake,
and showed us the sequence of paintings of the Dance of Death, in the roof beams of one of the wooden bridges which spanned the river. He pointed out the white-clad figure of Death, selecting its
victim and capturing him in a deadly embrace and then whirling him faster and faster to his doom.

Italy was ravishing, a feast for the mind and the senses. Art, history, music, light and colour met us and pursued us everywhere we went – Como, Florence, San Gimignano, Pisa, Siena,
Verona, Padua – in a vertiginous display of florid exuberance. One evening in Florence, after a day in the presence of Michelangelo, Botticelli, Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, my mother and I
were leaning out of the hotel window, looking across the Arno to the Pitti Palace, where we were to attend a concert. It was then, in an expansive moment, that she confided to me her reasons for
marrying my father at the beginning of the War. If he were wounded, she said, she wanted to be able to care for him herself. That remark was prescient for, only a few days later, when we arrived at
our hotel in Venice, the Hotel Della Salute on a secluded canal behind the church of the same name, the manager produced a postcard addressed to me. It was a view of the castle at Salzburg and it
was from Stephen.

I was overjoyed. Could Stephen really have been thinking of me as I had been thinking of him? It gave me grounds for daring to hope that he was looking forward to seeing me at the end of the
summer. The postcard was uncharacteristically full of news. He had arrived in Salzburg for the tail end of the Festival, which was quite a contrast to Bayreuth. Czechoslovakia had been wonderful
and remarkably cheap, a good advertisement for communism. He did not mention that a bad fall on a train in Germany had deprived him of his front teeth and that many hours of painstaking dentistry
by his uncle in Harley Street would be required to replace them. In the glow of romance, albeit conducted at a distance, Venice, its canals, lagoon, palaces, churches, galleries and islands –
became even more gloriously scintillating – yet, impatient for the possible opening of a new chapter in my life, I was not sorry to leave it and return to Switzerland. From Basle we were to
fly home with the car on board an aeroplane, in a well justified stroke of extravagance after the many thousands of miles my father had driven single-handedly across the Continent over the
years.

Stephen was pleased to see me on my return. Intuitively I understood that he had begun to view our relationship in a more positive light and had perhaps decided that all was not lost, that the
future did not have to be as black as his worst fears had painted it. Back in Cambridge, one dark wet Saturday evening in October, he hesitantly whispered a proposal of marriage to me. That moment
transformed our lives and consigned all my thoughts of a career in the Diplomatic Service to oblivion.

Once the momentous decision had been taken, everything else began to fall into place, if not automatically, then with some determination and effort. We sailed through the next
year, carried high on a tide of euphoria. Whatever misgivings my friends and family may have had about Stephen’s state of health, they kept them to themselves, and the only comments I
received concerned the eccentricity of the Hawking family.

Such comments did not worry me too much, because I liked the Hawkings and regarded their eccentricities with a respectful fascination. They made me welcome, already treating me as one of the
family. They may have economized on material goods, preferring the old and tried to the newfangled, and they certainly did compromise on heating to the extent that people who were cold were
brusquely told to follow Frank Hawking’s example and wear more clothes, a dressing gown for example, even during the day. Moreover, as I had already discovered, there were areas of the house
which could be charitably described as distinctly shabby. However, none of this was particularly new to me. It simply indicated that this household had a set of priorities which were not so very
different from those I was used to. My own parents had scraped and saved for years. We were not wealthy, and we often had to make do and mend because so much of Dad’s income went on our
education and on those wonderful summer holidays. We did not have central heating at home, and I was well used to sitting by the fire with my face and toes burning while a freezing draught whistled
down the back of my neck. At night in bed I would rest my numbed feet on my hot-water bottle, in the full knowledge that blistering chilblains would be the price of such small comfort the next
morning, when an exquisite ice garden of opaque fronds and ferns would cover the window panes. If our house was smarter than the Hawkings’, it was both because it was smaller and because Dad
had given up all pretensions to any prowess whatsoever as a handyman – and for good reason, since his attempts at repairs usually made matters much worse, bringing ceilings down on his head
for example, while his attempts at interior decorating usually sent the paint flying everywhere except on the target – and had long decided that it was cheaper in the long run to pay
professionals to do his odd jobs for him.

Rarely when I was present did members of the Hawking family bear out the stories about their habit of bringing books to the table. Mealtimes were generally sociable occasions, calmly presided
over by Stephen’s mother, who kept remarkably cool in the face of her husband’s frequent displays of temper. Although he could be sharp and demanding, Frank Hawking was not
hard-hearted. His outbursts were usually directed at the crass inadequacies of some inanimate object, like a blunt carving knife or a spilt glass or a dropped fork, never at people within the
family circle. In fact, in handling young Edward, who was given to tantrums particularly at bedtime, he was a model of patience and forbearance. As for Stephen, apparently no longer subject to the
savage black moods of the past, his placid, more philosophical nature promised a quieter lifestyle.

The talk at mealtimes was predictably intellectual, ranging over political and international issues. As Philippa had gone up to Oxford to study Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was a frequent
topic. I knew little about oriental history or politics and thought it expedient to keep quiet rather than betray my ignorance. Spain and France seemed very parochial and unglamorous by comparison
with the Orient, and nobody expressed any interest in them or in their cultures at all. The Hawkings, in any case, knew all there was to know about France, since Isobel had French relatives. They
also knew all there was to know about Spain, since she and the children had spent three months living in close proximity to Robert Graves’s household in Deià, Majorca, in the winter of
1950, when Frank was away in Africa, engaged on research in tropical medicine. Beryl Graves was a friend of Isobel’s from her Oxford days, and Robert Graves was regarded as an icon in the
family.

When the supper table was cleared away, we, the younger generation, would settle down to play a board game. A fanatical games player since his early childhood, Stephen had, with his close friend
John McClenahan, devised a long and complicated dynastic game, complete with family trees, landed gentry, vast acreages, bishoprics for younger sons and death duties. This game unfortunately had
not been preserved, so we were reduced to playing games such as
Cluedo
,
Scrabble
and occasionally the notoriously difficult Chinese game, mah-jong, with its delicately carved
ivory tiles. Not only had I already been exposed to Stephen’s prowess at croquet but I had also received similar treatment when he offered to teach me to play chess. However, when it came to
Scrabble
, I did not need a mentor as I was confident of being reasonably competent at word games, an art learnt as a very small child from numerous games of
Lexicon
with my
loquacious and inventive Great Aunt Effie when we lived in her house in north London.

If there were not a quorum for board games, Stephen and I would sit by the fire after supper while his mother regaled us with episodes of family history. I enjoyed listening to her and admired
her as a role model. An Oxford graduate and, before her marriage, an income-tax inspector, she was intelligent and witty, yet totally devoted to her family, appearing to have no ambitions for
herself at all. At the time she was teaching history in a private girls’ boarding school in St Albans, where her very considerable intellectual qualities were definitely underrated. With a
bemused detachment, she took upon herself the task of introducing me to her own past and that of the Hawking family. The second child of seven, she was born in Glasgow, where her father, the son of
a wealthy boiler maker, was a doctor. Although her family moved by boat to Plymouth when she was still a young child, she had vivid memories of her grandfather’s austere house in Glasgow,
where family prayers in the parlour, attended by every member of the household staff, constituted the only form of diversion. On her mother’s side, she claimed descent from John Law of
Lauriston, who after bankrupting France in the seventeenth century took himself off to Louisiana. In the telling, multifarious and far-reaching family feuds came to light, most of them concerned
money, for it appeared that cutting a miscreant out of one’s will was considered an automatic and quite acceptable means of expressing profound and puritanical displeasure.

Stephen’s father’s family were of God-fearing Yorkshire-farming stock. Their claim to distinction had come through an ancestor in the early nine-teenth century who had been steward
to the Duke of Devonshire. In recognition of this elevated position he had built himself a sizeable house in Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, and had called it Chatsworth. The family fortunes had
fluctuated somewhat since those days, with the consequence that, in the twentieth century, Stephen’s grandfather’s farming ventures had led to financial ruin and it was left to his
grandmother to rescue her family of five children – four boys and a girl – from penury. This she did by opening a school in her house. Its success was said to be a measure of her
strength of character. Money, wealth and its creation and loss were prominent elements in Isobel’s story-telling, as was her marked tendency to judge others by their intelligence rather than
by their integrity or kindness. Charm was regarded as a severe flaw in character, and those unfortunate enough to possess it were to be deeply mistrusted.

As his mother was one of seven children and his father one of five, Stephen naturally had legions of first cousins and a whole army of second cousins. My parents, on the other hand, were both
only children, so I had no first cousins: all I possessed were a few second cousins, one in Australia and the rest in rural Norfolk. It therefore came as quite a shock to meet so many people who
not only were closely related, but who also bore remarkable facial similarities to each other. On Stephen’s mother’s side, they characteristically had high cheekbones, close-set blue
eyes and wavy, chestnut hair, while the faces of his father’s relations were all long and heavily jowled. Only my brother bore any slight resemblance to me, yet here were allof thirty-three
cousins who looked like each other, depending on which side of the family they belonged to, and who were all closely connected to Stephen.

Although quite a number lived abroad and divorce had been rather fashionable among them, I met many of them, their friends, husbands, wives and even their former spouses, during the course of
that winter’s succession of family parties. They treated me in an open and friendly manner, and I began to realize what an advantage a large family network could be: the loss of individuality
in appearance was more than compensated by the sense of security which such a network could create. The novelty of this sense of extended family was exhilarating. By comparison my own immediate
family circle of parents, brother and one grandmother and two great-aunts seemed a bit limited.

There was however one Hawking who notably lacked the self-assurance of the rest of the family. On hearing of our engagement, Stephen’s Aunt Muriel announced that, as she put it, she
“just had to come down from Yorkshire to see what sort of girl Stephen was marrying”. Muriel was Frank Hawking’s only sister. The most timid member of the family, she had stayed
at home to look after her ageing parents despite being a gifted musician. Now in her sixties, she wore the marks of frustration in her sad, drooping face and large, soft brown eyes. She was devoted
to her brother, Frank, and to his eldest son, and dutifully admired the family’s intellectual qualities, although she herself did not share them. Her homely way of speech was often ignored by
the other members of the family, though Stephen, who was her Methodist equivalent of a godson, always treated her with a good-natured tolerance. Frequently I would sit and chat to Auntie Muriel,
just as I would sometimes escape to Granny Walker’s attic, to get away from the competitive intellectual atmosphere of the dining room.