Travelling to Infinity (62 page)

The Moulin, welcoming us in its summer garb for the first time, opened its box of delights in a new guise. Further renovations had been completed, a bathroom had been added for Stephen’s
sole use, work on the barn had been started, and the garden was beginning to take shape. My dream of an English country garden was being realized in France so satisfactorily that even Claude, my
valiant workman, confessed that he had begun to plant flowers in his own garden where previously he had grown only vegetables. Even more significantly, the Moulin opened the door to another world,
the world of a past era, where the impossible whirlwind of our Cambridge lives slowed to a leisurely pace under the influence of the land and the sky, and where the only sound was the song of the
lark, soaring high into the blue above the green cornfield in the morning sun. The place had already engraved itself on my heart. Its clean air and broad patchwork of fields fading to a distant
grey horizon, its sleepy shutters and its aroma of newly chopped logs and old wood, its backdrop of tall conifers and shrubs shimmering in the sun, all sang of unaccustomed peace, solitude and
salvation. There I could be alone, undisturbed by nurses, by the press, by cameras, by the clamour of incessant demands. I could dig my garden. I could immerse myself in books without fear of
interruption and I could learn and listen to music without fear of criticism at such wasteful self-indulgence. There I could find my true centre, in close touch with nature, old-fashioned, perhaps,
contemplative certainly, a daydreamer whose favourite occupation was gazing out at the wide expanse of the western sky each evening, standing spellbound at the everchanging magnificence of the
setting sun as it dropped behind the silhouetted line of trees across the fields.

In those periods of reflection while I dug the garden, sowed seeds and planted rose bushes, I identified with the hero of one of the set texts that I had been teaching for the French syllabus in
the past year. Candide, Voltaire’s young hero, whose optimism in the “best of all worlds” – as taught by the philosopher Dr Pangloss – is sadly betrayed by experience,
finally turns his back on the world and takes refuge in his garden. “
Il faut cultiver notre jardin
...” is his ultimate, pessimistic, personal solution to the malfunction of
society. The clash of inexorable but often zany logic with searing, unresolved emotional problems lay like a corrosive material at the root of our existence in Cambridge, and that root was
succumbing to the insidious effect of the invasive poison of fame and fortune. In France the soil was fresh and fertile, and there the garden was full of the promise of a future, a cyclical
foreseeable future, decreed by the immutable laws of nature.

In the summer of 1989 all attention was concentrated on Stephen’s multiple triumphs and the avalanche of media interest in them. The date for the conferral of the
Honorary Doctorate by the Chancellor, the Duke of Edinburgh, was set for Thursday 15th June while, known only to ourselves, the royal honour from Buckingham Palace was to be confirmed the next day
and published in the media on Saturday 17th. By a fortunate coincidence, this was also the date of a concert to be performed in Stephen’s honour by Jonathan and the Camerata, two days after
the honorary degree ceremony, also in the Senate House. Although in 1987 the Newton celebrations and concert had provided an attractive lure for commercial sponsors to support the Camerata, the
sponsors themselves had become extremely vulnerable to the harsh vicissitudes of life in Thatcherite Britain. The ink was barely dry on the signatures to a generous sponsorship deal when the
sponsoring business, a very gentlemanly British firm, was gobbled up by an American computer corporation that had no compunction in declaring that they were in business to make money, not to
support the arts, music or any other charitable organization. They promptly pulled out of the sponsorship deal. This left Jonathan, whose schedule of contracted concerts for two years hence was
based on the calculations of the sponsorship deal, potentially with a huge debt when he himself at the best of times earned little more than a subsistence income from music. At that most
inauspicious moment for Jonathan and the Camerata, Stephen’s fame and success offered the hope of salvation. A concert in Stephen’s honour could be counted on to attract a large
audience of people who would come to applaud Stephen as well as to listen to the music. It might also attract new sponsors for whom the high scientific profile would be attractive. Stephen would be
fêted with his favourite pieces of baroque music and a retiring collection could be divided among the charities we all supported. This piece of planning augured well for everybody, and
Stephen gave it his approval – along with his approval of the Prime Minister’s letter, before he left for America in May.

The challenge of concert planning, forever flying in the face of sound economic sense, had previously added a certain spice and bravura to my other various dilettante occupations. That concert
would have been no exception, had it not been for the perpetual incursions of the media. The journalists who came to interview me were a mixed bunch: some were reasonably pleasant, some were
clinical, others were demanding. It was impossible to tell what sort of gloss they would put on an interview in advance. French journalists, Spanish journalists, representatives of all nations,
came in an endless stream, all wanting a different slant on the science and on the background. They brought their superficial interviewing techniques to the situation; in turn, I developed my own
techniques for dealing with them by deciding in advance how much information I was prepared to part with. I saw no reason why I should confide all the intimate complexities of my life to a
journalist, a stranger whose interest in me was governed by the imperative to sell more newspapers. If I wanted to confess, I would turn to a priest, if I needed psychiatric treatment I would turn
to a doctor, and if I had a story to tell I might one day write it myself, though regard for privacy – my own and other people’s – might well outweigh the desire to tell that
story. If, therefore, the questions posed by journalists overstepped my boundaries, I would turn the interview into a conversation, asking for their opinions and reactions rather than telling them
my own. Inevitably I became the target of disparaging remarks. For example, one journalist reported that I had “cared for Stephen for just a couple of years after our marriage”. My old
Headmistress and stalwart supporter, Miss Gent, wrote to the editor of that newspaper, the
Times
, to rectify the mistake. She was shocked at his arrogant reply: far from offering any
redress or apology, he asserted that he knew better than she did and he was confident that the facts in the article were correct. Our loyal friend George Hill, the husband of my school friend
Caroline, ever anxious to protect us from the prying eyes of the gutter press, said that he knew about the misrepresentations in the
Times
, because he had peered over the
journalist’s shoulder when he was writing the piece. However, George had been so relieved to find no mention of Jonathan’s part in our household that he had thought it better to let the
article stand as it was rather than reveal Jonathan’s close association with us.

If however, as once I did when being interviewed for the
Guardian
, I allowed myself to show any dissatisfaction with the trite old clichés about the rewards of living with a
genius – those oft-repeated truisms which dwelt on fame and fortune as if illness and disability were not fundamental factors in our lives – I would be accused of disloyalty to Stephen.
But as I saw it, if I continued to perpetuate the myth of cheerful self-sufficiency without even mentioning the hardships, I would be cheating the many disabled people and their families, who were
probably suffering all the heartache, the anxieties, the privations, the stresses and strains that we ourselves had undergone in earlier years. It would be all too easy for an uncaring society to
point accusingly at other disabled people and declare, “If Professor Hawking can do it, why can’t you?” The hard-pressed carers might be pressurized into performing even more
impossible tasks because of the unrealistic image of our way of life presented through the media. I could no longer truthfully offer the carefree, smiling façade, giving the erroneous
impression that our lives were contented and easy, marred only by a little local inconvenience. For that
Guardian
interview my assessment was candid and truthful: I noted the triumphs but
did not gloss over the difficulties. I voiced our criticisms of the National Health Service and emphasized the fact that Stephen’s success, even in procuring funds to pay for his nursing, had
been due entirely to our own efforts. I described how we fluctuated between the glittering peaks of brilliant success and the black sloughs of critical illness and despair, with very little level
ground in between.

Such simple and fairly obvious truths proved most unpalatable to those people who had come to believe in Stephen’s immortality and infallibility, and had conveniently detached themselves
from the reality of his condition, namely his family and certain of his nurses. My comments were interpreted as treason where no hint of criticism could ever be countenanced. Such reactions only
served to increase my sense of isolation. Were the people around me blind or mad, or was I losing my mind? Were those people living in a parallel universe where the roles were reversed and where,
as they seemed to suggest, it was I who was infirm? Further accusations of disloyalty were flung thick and fast on the showing of a BBC film made that summer. In it I repeated the misgivings voiced
in the two newspaper interviews, in a vain attempt to restore a sensible balance both to the depiction of our way of life and to the representation of Stephen’s scientific theories as the
basis for a new religion. My performance before the cameras, which rolled throughout the period of the honours and celebrations and afterwards, was not enhanced by a streaming cold and a raging
sore throat – just a couple of the recurring infections and ailments which followed each other in quick succession from beginning to end of that decade. The heavy cold lent my interview and
voice-overs a jaundiced tinge, deadening any humour and betraying an unintentional touch of bitterness.

Sadness there certainly was in my voice: it was the unfortunate outward manifestation of a profound inner sense of desolation and foreboding. Cassandra herself could not have forecast more
accurately, or with greater dread, the catastrophe that I knew was looming over us all. Even Nikki Stockley, the young television producer, remarked how Elaine Mason had disrupted the filming
process when she had tried to film in the Department. In public and at home, she was busily usurping my place at every opportunity, sometimes aping me, sometimes undermining me, always flaunting
her influence over Stephen. She had engineered an unassailable stranglehold over the nursing rota, and had so successfully ingratiated herself that all remonstrance was useless: any comments would
be reported back to Stephen, and I would be castigated for my interference. My appeals to the secretary of the Royal College of Nursing for help in enforcing the code of nursing conduct met with a
flat refusal to become involved unless I could produce photographic evidence of malpractice. Such was the background of physical chaos and emotional torment against which the tapestry of the
traditional honorary-degree ceremony unfolded, briefly transporting us into a fantasy realm of theatrical grandeur and champagne celebrations where all the froth of new clothes, archaic ritual,
fixed smiles, polite chatter and endless handshakes spread like an insubstantial white layer over the smouldering reality beneath.

In a modest bid to ensure some privacy, Lucy had optimistically marked the calendar from 8th June as follows:
Lucy starts A levels and becomes a complete recluse(!)
. The day of
Stephen’s Honorary Doctorate, 15th June, she noted as,
L does 2 A levels.
Although she missed the accompanying festivities on account of the exams, there was little hope of
fulfilling her reclusive intentions, so it was hardly surprising that on 22nd June an impassioned appeal appeared in brackets:
(Give me the sympathy I deserve!)
. In the circumstances, it
was a credit to her that she managed to do her exams at all, let alone succeed in them.

15th June, the day of the two most intensive A-level papers was bright, hot and sunny – which was not of much help to Lucy. For Stephen’s Honorary Degree ceremony, however, the
weather was ideal. Never had the discrepancy between the best interests of different members of the family been more marked. Lucy left early for school in an advanced state of nerves, while the
rest of us looked forward to a day of pomp and rejoicing, a true holiday from stress and dissenting voices. We left the house at 10 a.m. and strolled down the road to the Backs. The lawns and
meadows by the river could not have looked more pastoral and peaceful: every blade of emerald grass and every leaf – green, gold or bronze – rippled in the bright morning sun, while the
river gleamed like a silvery mirror, reflecting the infinite brilliance of the sky in mid-stream and the shady overhanging fronds of willow at the water’s edge.

We arrived in Caius to find a buzz of unaccustomed excitement: the whole College had assembled to applaud Stephen in Caius Court, the Renaissance court near the Senate House. It took a few
minutes to robe the honorary graduand in the ante-Chapel and a little while to get him comfortable in the chair in the heavy red gown, which would have been fine for midwinter, but was unbearably
hot in midsummer. He refused to wear the gold-rimmed black-velvet bonnet, so Tim wore it instead. As we emerged from the Chapel, the Fellows, all begowned, preceded us taking up positions along the
path to the Gate of Honour. From another gate, the Gate of Virtue, came a brass fanfare, and then the choir struck up the anthem ‘Laudate Domino’. Another fanfare resounded round the
court, chasing Stephen as he raced at full speed through the Gate of Honour, up Senate House Passage and into the Yard of the Senate House.