Travelling to Infinity (10 page)

On the last evening, at the end of the summer school, as we sat on the steps of the hall of residence gazing out at a full moon suspended in a translucent sky, I was introduced to Professor Abe
Taub, the avuncular mastermind of the summer school, who with his wife Cice was also taking the air and admiring the night sky. We listened in fascination as they talked of their life in
California, of the views their house commanded of the Golden Gate bridge, of San Francisco and of the campus and science department at Berkeley where Abe was the leader of the Relativity Group. I
detected a tentative invitation from Abe to Stephen and a corresponding eagerness on Stephen’s part, though no formal propositions were made.

We wandered back indoors and were about to resume our conversation when, without any warning, Stephen, perhaps affected by a chill in the night air, was seized with a devastating choking fit,
the first I had witnessed. The illness, seemingly long-suppressed, suddenly revealed itself in its true terrifying fury. The lurking spectre stepped out of the shadows and grabbed him by the
throat, tossed him about, shook him like a doll, trampled him underfoot and hurled his rasping cough round the room till the very air resonated with loud, panic-stricken wheezing. Helpless in the
grip of the enemy, Stephen was beyond my reach. I stood by unprepared for this sudden encounter with the dreadful power of motor-neuron disease, the hitherto unseen partner in our marriage.
Eventually Stephen managed to gesture to me to thump him on the back. I did so vigorously, determined to expel the invisible monster. At last it receded, as quickly as it had come, leaving us
drained and exhausted and the onlookers politely dumbfounded. This onslaught came as a great shock to us both, an ill-omen warning of a hazardous future. Dreams of California disappeared into the
mists of the fantasy from which they had begun to emerge.

By the time we returned to New York, the Cornell experience had rapidly turned me – at the age of twenty-one – into a rather confused follower of sober, if not of godly, matrons. The
demonic nature of the illness had announced its presence much more dramatically than in lameness, difficulty of movement and lack of coordination. As if that were not enough, I sensed that there
was yet another partner lurking in our already overcrowded marriage. The fourth partner first appeared in the form of a trusted and quiescent friend, signalling the way to success and fulfilment
for those who followed her. In fact she proved to be a relentless rival, as exacting as any mistress, an inexorable Siren, luring her devotees into deep pools of obsession. She was none other than
Physics, cited by Einstein’s first wife as the correspondent in divorce proceedings.

New York City provided both a necessary respite from such sombre considerations and the opportunity to restore the balance of our relationship, away from the inveigling companionship of other
physicists. A medical colleague of Frank Hawking generously offered us a room in his Manhattan apartment for the weekend. It was ideally situated for our sightseeing excursions to the Metropolitan
Museum, the Empire State Building, Time Square and Broadway. Unfortunately Broadway had little to offer in August, so, bizarrely, we spent the Saturday evening in a cinema watching
My Fair
Lady
. I had few regrets when we said goodbye to New York. As the bus drove into Kennedy Airport, I looked back over my shoulder to the solid line of clearly etched skyscrapers standing to
attention in a grey mass on the horizon, and thought that I had never seen an apparition of such monstrous brutality. I was impatient to return to the manageable, if cramped, proportions and
genuinely old-fashioned but less frenzied ways of the Lilliputian world where I belonged. My place was on a continent mellowed by history and a sense of poetic values, where I fondly thought there
was greater stability and where people had more time for each other.

My sentimental illusions about the stability of life on the European side of the Atlantic were quickly dispelled on our return to England, where I found that my parents were
about to move to a house only thirty doors up the road from the home where I had lived since the age of six. The break with the past was now irreparably set in bricks and mortar. Although, when
last heard of, the flat Stephen and I had reserved over the market place in Cambridge was not yet finished, we had to find a home of our own urgently if only to house all our wedding presents.
Loading our luggage and presents into the red Mini, we set off for Cambridge and went straight to the estate agent’s. The flats were indeed finished, we were told, but, as the agent had no
record of our names or of our booking, they were all already let to other tenants. The Old World was beginning to look distinctly unreliable after all.

We discussed our next move over a despondent lunch. Stephen decided to brave the Bursar of Caius once again in the vain hope that he might be persuaded to help, even temporarily. Together we
bearded the ogre in his den. To our surprise, he had changed identity in the previous six months, and the new Bursar was also the lecturer in Tibetan. However that post was a sinecure, since there
were never any students in Tibetan, so he had time on his hands in which to oversee the financial affairs of the College. Unlike his predecessor, he did not snap Stephen’s head off in
indignation but listened gravely, even sympathetically, to his request, and then came up with a brilliant solution, which coaxed a glimmer of a smile from his dour face. “Yes,” he
mused, “I think we might be able to help – only in the very short term of course, because you know that the College has a policy of not providing housing for Research Fellows,
don’t you?” We nodded with bated breath. He consulted a list. “There’s a room vacant in the Harvey Road hostel: it’s twelve shillings and sixpence a night for one man
so we will put another bed in and it will be twenty-five shillings a night for the two of you.” We had to suppress our outrage at such sharp practice because we had nowhere else to go, hotels
being beyond our means, but vowed that we would minimize the amount of time we spent at Harvey Road.

Although the College authorities were harsh and ungenerous, the staff, particularly the housekeeper of the hostel, could not have been kinder. This proved to be characteristic of the college
servants, whether cleaning staff, workmen, gardeners, porters or waiters. Unfailingly they revealed qualities of warmth and friendliness often conspicuously absent in the rarified atmosphere of the
higher echelons. The housekeeper warmed our room, aired our beds, brought us tea and biscuits that first evening and breakfast in the morning. She even offered to do our washing for us, although
that was not necessary as our stay was to be mercifully brief.

In the intervening day, Stephen’s supervisor, Dennis Sciama, had come speedily to the rescue by putting us in touch with a Fellow of Peterhouse, who wanted to sublet the house he had been
renting from that College. The house was unfurnished, but it was available immediately and moreover it was ideally placed for us, in one of the oldest, most picturesque streets of Cambridge, Little
St Mary’s Lane, within a hundred yards of Stephen’s department, which had recently moved to the building of the old Pitt Press printing works in Mill Lane.

Since number 11 Little St Mary’s Lane contained not a stick of furniture, we had to grit our teeth, dip deep into our funds, savings and wedding-present money, and go on a rapid spending
spree to buy basic furniture, a bed and an electric ring. While we were waiting for the bed to be delivered, I went out to buy provisions, leaving Stephen propped up against the bare wall of the
living room for want of a seat. To my astonishment, when I returned he was comfortably seated on a blue kitchen chair. He explained that a lady from down the road had come to introduce herself and,
finding him leaning against the wall, had kindly brought him the chair, which we could borrow until we had more furniture. The lady in question was Thelma Thatcher, the wife of the former Censor,
or Master, of Fitzwilliam House, who lived at number 9. Thelma Thatcher was to become one of the most benevolent and most entertaining influences in our lives over the next ten years. That evening
we cooked our supper in the Cornell saucepan on the single electric ring, drank sherry from our crystal glasses and, using a box for a table, ate from our bone china, using our gleaming
stainless-steel cutlery set. Stephen sat on the Thatchers’ kitchen chair while I kneeled on the bare white-tiled floor. No matter that it was somewhat improvised, we celebrated our good luck
in having a roof over our heads for the next three months.

Guarded at its entrance by two churches standing sentinel – the Victorian United Reform Church on the right and the medieval Church of Little St Mary on the left – the lane is hidden
from the public gaze. Tourists discover it only by chance. These days the lane is closed to through-traffic thanks to a campaign by the residents, including Stephen and me, so visitors to the two
big complexes on the river front, the Garden House Hotel and the University Centre, have to gain access via Mill Lane, which is not residential. Number 11 is the last of the main terrace of
three-storeyed cottages on the right-hand side of the street, some of which probably date back to the sixteenth century. When we took up residence in 1965, the house had been recently renovated by
Peterhouse, a college which, unlike Caius, did provide its Research Fellows with accommodation.

Iron railings on the south side of the lane enclose Little St Mary’s churchyard, a wild overgrown garden which, that September, was ablaze with reddening hips and haws and heavy with the
scent of autumn roses. The few gravestones which were still standing were so weather-beaten that their inscriptions had become illegible, despite the spreading branches of the towering sycamore
trees and the gnarled stems of the wisteria which sheltered them from the worst ravages of the elements. Here Nature had gently absorbed the dead of previous centuries back into her bosom,
resurrecting them in a profusion of blossoms which trailed over the railings and reached out to caress the crooked old gas lamp which lit the street at night with its sulphurous glow.

Thelma Thatcher was the self-appointed warden of the lane. She had planted many of the rose bushes in the churchyard, where she exercised Matty, her King Charles spaniel, wrapping each of her
paws in plastic bags in wet weather. As a matter of course, she took it upon herself to keep an eye on the well-being of all her neighbours, whatever their age or circumstances. Scarcely had a week
gone by than she had lent us more chairs, tables, pots and pans, found us a gas cooker to borrow – from Sister Chalmers, the Peterhouse nurse who was moving into a fully equipped college flat
– set about finding us somewhere else to live on the expiry of the present tenancy and served us innumerable glasses of sherry in the elegant, highly polished, antique-filled living room of
her fine, whitewashed old house.

In 1965 she must already have been in her seventies, though with her straight back, dark hair and stately figure she could easily have passed for ten years younger. She combined the sparkle of a
gifted raconteur with intense practicality: once, she told us, in a moment of inspiration at a Quaker wedding, she stood up and announced that the helpers had forgotten to light the gas under the
tea urn. In a manner which would have done justice to Joyce Grenfell, she delighted in playfully deflating the pompous egos of many Cambridge academics. Her style was aristocratic and assertive,
but always supported by deeply held and sincere Christian values. A self-professed pillar of the establishment, representing everything that Stephen despised, she found her natural target in
woolly-minded liberals. In her, however, Stephen met his match, and he had to respect her for her goodness and generosity even if, politically, she and he were poles apart.

In the next few months, Thelma Thatcher took us under her wing like a mother hen. She kept a kindly eye on Stephen when I was away in London, as well as attending to the needs both of her
elderly husband who – according to her, had snatched her out of her cradle – and of her lively, independent daughter Mary, who was assembling a film archive on the domestic lives of the
British in India.

All too soon, I had to return to my final year at Westfield. Parting from Stephen each Monday was desperately painful, and the regime was hard for both of us. Stephen was just sufficiently
capable of looking after himself to be able to live in the house, but every evening, unless invited out elsewhere, he had to make the long, hazardous trek down King’s Parade on his own to eat
in College. Our Australian friend, Anne Young, unfailingly kept an eye out for him as he passed her window on the other side of the road, and generally one or other of the younger Fellows would see
him home after the meal, when he would ring me to report on the day.

My routine was exhausting. I would leave for London on Monday mornings, spend the week in Westfield and then on Friday afternoons join the commuters once again. In my anxiety to get home to
Cambridge, to Stephen – and to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Friday evening course of lectures on Renaissance architecture, which we attended together – I would bite my nails as I watched
the minutes tick by on the Underground, wondering how long the train would sit in the tunnel, fearing that I was going to miss the connection from Liverpool Street. For years afterwards, my worst
nightmares were dreams of being stuck in a tunnel on the Underground.

During the week, the pressure was on: translations into and from Spanish, essays and seminar papers all had to be submitted within deadlines, and the only time I had for doing them was in the
evening. Weekends were taken up with shopping, washing, housework and typing Stephen’s thesis, parts of which he would have written out in a scrawly, all but illegible longhand during the
week, and parts of which he dictated to me as I sat typing at our shiny new dining table in the otherwise bare living room. The trials of that pre-university secretarial course were now bearing
fruit. The shorthand had been moderately useful for taking notes in lectures, but the dreaded typing was proving to be a godsend in tabling the laws of creation, since it saved us a mint of money
in professional fees. The thesis first glimpsed at Cornell – with its equations and signs, symbols and coefficients, Greek letterings, numbers above and below the line, and infinite and
non-infinite universes – drove me to distraction. However, since it was a scientific thesis, it was blessedly short. Furthermore I derived some small satisfaction from the knowledge that my
fingers were consigning the beginnings of the universe to paper. The thought that all these mysteriously coded numbers, letters and signs were penetrating the secrets of that deep, black infinity
was awe-inspiring. Dwelling on the poetic immensity of the topic for too long was counterproductive, though, as it distracted concentration from all the little dots and hieroglyphs above and below
the line, any of which if misplaced could have thrown the beginnings of the universe into dire disarray and upset the whole order of creation.