Travelling to Infinity (28 page)

In 1970, shortly after Lucy’s birth, Stephen’s lonely Aunt Muriel had died. Instead of enjoying her new-found freedom after her mother’s death, she had simply wasted away. The
money she might have spent on herself, by going off on a round-the-world trip for instance, she saved cautiously to provide for the uncertainties of the future. The future never came and the money
was left to some of her great-nephews and nieces, among them Robert on whom she particularly doted. Of itself, the inheritance was not sufficient to finance long years of education, but when set to
work with an equal share from Stephen’s father, it amounted to enough to buy a small house which could be let out quite profitably. Half the rent went to Stephen’s parents while the
other half contributed substantially to Robert’s school fees. Cambridge was a good place for such a venture, because properties were still fairly cheap and the floating population of visiting
scholars meant that there was a constant demand for rented properties. With my experience of renovating our own house, I was put in charge of the project. Buying and renovating another house and
then letting it became an additional burden when my hands and my time were already full. The insight it gave me into the squalor of other people’s lives was disheartening, but since I was all
too conscious of the need to save money for the ever-mounting school fees, I had no option but to take up the paintbrush for an intensive week of solo decorating once or twice a year. Sometimes
this exercise had to be carried out even more frequently to satisfy summer visitors.

Such taxing activity and wearing preoccupations left less and less time and energy for the thesis. I had succeeded in assembling material for the first chapter and had come up with a few
original ideas of my own. I traced some close verbal reminiscences between the
kharjas
and the
Song of Solomon
, and I detected striking similarities between the
kharjas
and the Mozarabic hymns, the hymns of the native Christian populace under Moorish domination. With luck, all other things being equal, I might be able to snatch an hour for the thesis in the
morning, while Lucy was at nursery school after I had taken Stephen to the Department. Keeping up with my own research stretched me to the limit. There was no longer any chance of broadening my
grasp of other areas of medieval research, let alone investigating the other fields and topics which came up for discussion at the Lucy Cavendish dinners. I was out of touch with the political and
international scene and had scant time for reading. I had little to offer and little to gain, other than a depressing awareness of my own inadequacy, from either Lucy Cavendish or the
Dronkes’ medieval seminars. When I did attend one or the other, I had to bluff my way through discussions and conversations or else maintain a dull silence. It was an uncomfortable situation
in which I felt a fraud, and my attendance at both lapsed.

In Lucy Cavendish, I had just one friend, Hanna Scolnicov, with whom I felt at ease. Hanna, an Elizabethan scholar from Jerusalem, was enjoying the respite which she found in Cambridge from the
tensions of her war-torn homeland. Hanna and I discovered that we had much in common. Although our circumstances were inevitably disparate, we were both trying to live normal lives and bring up our
three-year-olds, Robert and Anat, against a background of tension and uncertainty. When we met, I had just given birth to Lucy and Hanna was expecting her second child. By the time Ariel was born
the following summer, we had become friends for life. Moreover, in Hanna’s husband, Shmuel, a classical philosopher, Stephen had found an intellectual sparring partner. Both Hanna and Shmuel
were so much more intuitive and perceptive than many people who had known us longer and supposedly better. When Shmuel’s sabbatical year came to an end and they nervously returned to Israel
with their young family, there was even less incentive for me to attend Lucy Cavendish, and I became even more isolated and out of touch.

It did not matter much. Stephen’s career was so obviously more important than mine. He was bound to make a big splash in the pond of physics, whereas I would be lucky to make the smallest
ripple on the surface of language studies. And, as I reminded myself often, I did have the consolation of the children, both of them lively and funny, loving and adorable. Many people who might
well have stared cruelly at Stephen, absorbed by the freakishness of disability – the same people who would have called him a cripple – were visibly nonplussed by the sight of a
seriously handicapped father with such strikingly beautiful children, each one a miracle of lucid perfection. Stephen gained confidence through his pride in them. He could confound those doubting
onlookers by announcing, “These are my children.” The acute joy that we shared in their purity and innocence, their quaint sayings and their sense of wonder, gave us in turn moments of
profound tenderness. In those moments, the bond between us strengthened till it embraced not just ourselves but our home and our family, reaching out to include all those people we valued most. The
family, our family, had become my
raison d’être
.

I comforted myself that no amount of academic recognition could have equalled the creative fulfilment I derived from my family. If sometimes the long hours of childcare and baby talk seemed
unremitting, I was well compensated by the privilege of rediscovering the world, its wonders and inconsistencies, through the eyes of small children. Happily my parents also delighted in this
pleasure. Never were grandparents so keen to enjoy their grandchildren, and never were grandchildren so indulged by their grandparents. The children brought my parents some light relief from their
own anxieties, which were focused on my grandmother, whose health and memory were failing fast. When eventually she moved to St Albans from her home in Norwich, it was too late for her to settle
with confidence anywhere else, and all too soon, in her disorientation, she fell and broke an arm. I already knew when I waved goodbye to her one Sunday afternoon in early December 1973, that I
should never see her again. I wept all week for that brave, gentle spirit whom I loved so much. It came as a great sorrow but no surprise when my mother rang the following Friday, 7th December, to
tell me that she had died in her sleep.

The gradual disappearance of close friends from our social scene did nothing to alleviate my flagging spirits. My school friends and college friends I saw rarely; either they
had gone abroad or were raising families in other cities. The friends of the past few years were branching out, leaving Cambridge to climb the career ladder wherever the jobs happened to be. Rob
Donovan, who had been Stephen’s best man at our wedding, had with his wife Marian and their little daughter Jane left Cambridge for Edinburgh. Thereafter our contact with them was sporadic,
though when we were able to meet, the strength of our friendship resumed in as lively and stimulating a manner as ever. We stayed with them outside Edinburgh in the summer of 1973, just before the
planned trip to Moscow. As always in the company of old friends, our conversations ranged far and wide, recalling those Sunday afternoon visits soon after our marriage. We would gossip about the
Cambridge scene, the latest convulsions in Gonville and Caius, developments in science, the complexity of grant applications and friends dispersed across the globe.

When we spoke of the Moscow trip, Rob insisted that we should not be lulled by lack of media coverage into supposing that in the post-Cuban Missile Crisis era the arms race had disappeared into
the attic of history. Surreptitiously, both superpowers were developing a huge array of ever more sophisticated weaponry. Although the threat of nuclear warfare still hung over us all each time the
superpowers, like snarling dragons, caught a whiff of each other’s presence in some contested corner of the world, the fact that they were actually enlarging and refining their already
enormous nuclear arsenals was not widely publicized. Rob’s remarks worried and angered me. Now that we had children it was not enough to say that there would be consolation in all being blown
up together. I was not prepared to stand back and let that monstrous apocalypse destroy the lives of my precious offspring. But what could I – or we – do? There was little use in
appealing to the scientists who had developed these weapons in the Forties and Fifties – many of whom were known to us on both sides of the Iron Curtain – because the decisions were now
in the hands of untrustworthy politicians, the devious Nixon in the United States and the inscrutable Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. It was almost harder to digest these unpalatable truths against
the pristine background of Scotland’s purple-headed mountains, where the honey-laden air sang of biblical simplicity, than in any man-made urban setting.

The Carters, Brandon and Lucette, with whom we also used to spend so many weekend afternoons, had moved to France with their baby daughter, Catherine. Brandon had taken up a research post at the
Observatoire de Paris at Meudon. The Observatoire was set in the grounds of a château, rather like its Cambridge counterpart, and commanded magnificent views over Paris. I missed Lucette
greatly for many reasons, quite apart from the fact that she was the only person I knew in Cambridge with whom I could speak French. A respected mathematician, she was clever and articulate without
ever being pretentious. Her sincere interest in people and her enthusiastic sense of family were not typical of the Cambridge academics with whom she had mixed. She was musical, imaginative and
blessed with a delicate sense of poetry. It was Lucette who through her rhapsodic delight in the trees and flowers, colours and perfumes of the churchyard, introduced me to Proust.

The greatest shock came with the loss of the Ellises. Their departure was especially distressing because they were not leaving Cambridge simply to go to another job, but because their marriage
had ended. We identified so closely with them that when George and Sue separated, our own family seemed to be under threat. Our two families, each with two small children, had shared so much that
we had become part of each other’s support system. Sue was Lucy’s godmother. We had bought and renovated our houses, had our babies, gone on holiday and attended conferences, almost in
tandem. On the one hand, George and Stephen had written a book together,
The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time
, and on the other, Sue and I had conferred and confided in each other over
many of the crises of motherhood and the struggle to compete with the goddess Physics. George and Stephen were alike in that they could cut themselves off from the basic realities of the outside
world, plunging out of the reach of their families deep into the realms of the theoretical universe. The many shared and parallel experiences had built an interdependence into our marriages, and
when theirs failed, the solidity of ours was shaken.

All those friendships with couples who had now left Cambridge had been formed in special circumstances. They were the product of Stephen’s contacts in the Department or in one or other of
the colleges. He had shared interests, usually scientific, with the husbands while I discovered common interests with their wives. On the departure of the Ellises, our very close, foursome
friendships petered out. Although we were on good terms with many of the younger Fellows of Caius and their wives and had made new friends among the more recent postgraduates in the Department, a
subtle change occurred. I made many female friends through the children, but the husbands and fathers of those families did not necessarily have much in common with Stephen, and they were
understandably deterred by the difficulties of communication. Moreover I tended to make friends among people with whom there was a perceptible bond of sympathy. They either had cause for sorrow in
their own lives or they had some special knowledge of the needs of the disabled. Of all those several valuable friendships, two in particular, the most loyal and the most lasting, had very relevant
points of contact with Stephen.

Among Constance Willis’s team of assistants – “Daddy’s exercisers” as Robert called them – there was a slim, fair-haired girl of about my own age, Caroline
Chamberlain. In the summer of 1970 Caroline ceased to practise as a physiotherapist because she was expecting a baby at the same time as I was expecting Lucy. As she lived nearby in the Leys School
– the local boys’ public school where her husband taught geography – we kept in touch and were brought into closer friendship after our daughters were born. My mind was focused
ever more intensely on the problems of disability, for it sometimes seemed that a trap was closing over all of us, over the children and me as well as over Stephen. Information was pretty well
non-existent and I began to depend on Caroline’s fund of professional knowledge for guidance. At once practical and cheerful yet very sensitive, she was well aware of the array of
difficulties we faced at every turn and, despite all the pressures of being a housemaster’s wife, would do her best to come up with an answer, be it a more comfortable posture, an item of
equipment – such as a wheelchair cushion or a caliper – or the address of some useful pioneering organization.

At the school gate, that traditional meeting place for mothers, I found another stalwart friend in Joy Cadbury, whose children, Thomas and Lucy, were the same age as Robert and our Lucy.
Joy’s retiring gentleness confounded my perceived image of an Oxford graduate. Far from vaunting her intellectual prowess at the expense of others, she played it down as if it were of
absolutely no relevance to her present lifestyle. The daughter of a Devon doctor, she had fulfilled her real ambition – to become a pediatric nurse – after graduating from Oxford. Joy
took our situation deeply to heart, always ready to take the children off my hands in times of crisis, always ready to give an unobtrusive hand when the strain was overwhelming. She was not
unfamiliar with motor-neuron disease, the incurable degenerative illness about which so little was known, because two hundred and fifty miles away her own elderly father was suffering its terminal
stages.