Travelling to Infinity (35 page)

Well-settled in the new surroundings and secure in his employment in the university, Stephen was changing direction in physics, turning his back on the macrocosmic laws of
general relativity and immersing himself more and more in quantum mechanics – the laws which operate at the microcosmic level of the elementary particle, the physics of the quanta, the
building blocks of matter. This change, which was a consequence both of his black-hole research and of his contacts with particle physicists in California, was beckoning him to a further quest, the
search for a theory of quantum gravity which, he hoped, would reconcile Einstein’s laws of general relativity with the physics of quantum mechanics. Einstein had been deeply suspicious of the
theory of quantum mechanics, developed by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in the 1920s. He mistrusted the elements of uncertainty and randomness implied in that scientific breakthrough because
they undermined his belief in the beautifully well-ordered nature of the universe. He voiced this dislike forcibly to Niels Bohr, telling him that “God does not play dice with the
universe”.

The origins of the universe had held my imagination for the whole extent of my married life and before. My mother used to point out the constellations, sparkling against the bright, unpolluted
clarity of the Norfolk night sky when Chris and I were children. Still in the Seventies, terrestrial lighting was dim enough for Robert and Lucy and me to be able to look up at the night sky and
marvel at the remote, spangled beauty of the glittering stars in the darkness. We could speculate about immeasurable distances and incomprehensible time spans and wonder at the genius, their father
and my husband, who could transform that infinite space and time into mathematical equations and then carry those equations in his head – as if, according to Werner Israel, he was composing a
whole Mozart symphony in his head. Those equations held the key to many questions about our origins and our position in the universe, not least the all-important question of the nature of our role
as the minuscule inhabitants of an insignificant planet revolving round an ordinary star on the outer reaches of an unremarkable galaxy. These questions appealed to my imagination, even if my
knowledge of the physics and the maths was only rudimentary. In contrast, the collisions of invisible particles, especially when those particles were not only invisible but imaginary as well, did
not fire my interest with the same passion as the extraordinary mental journey through billions of light years to the beginning of space and time. Nor, I have to confess, did the set of scientists
with whom Stephen was now associating attract me in the least. On the whole, particle physicists were a dry, obsessive bunch of boffins, little concerned with personal contact but very concerned
with their own scientific reputations. They were much more aggressively competitive than the relaxed, friendly relativists with whom we had associated in the past. They attended conferences and
came to the social functions arranged on their behalf, but, apart from a handful of ebulliently jovial Russians, their personalities made very little lasting impression. In among that grey morass
it was an occasional pleasure to see the faces of those cultured, articulate, charming old friends from the relativity days – the Israels, the Hartles, Kip Thorne, George Ellis, the Carters
and the Bardeens.

At least the most famous quantum physicist of them all left a long lasting impression, though he was certainly taciturn. Paul Dirac, a Cambridge physicist who in the 1920s had reconciled quantum
mechanics with Einstein’s theory of special relativity and in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize, was regarded as a legendary figure in physics. Stephen and Brandon considered themselves as
Dirac’s scientific grandchildren, since their supervisor, Dennis Sciama, had himself been supervised by Dirac. I had been introduced to Dirac and his wife, Margit Wigner, the sister of a
distinguished Hungarian physicist, in Trieste in 1971. It was said of Dirac that when he introduced Margit to a colleague soon after their marriage, he did not say “This is my wife” but
“This is Wigner’s sister”. After Paul’s retirement in 1968 from the Lucasian chair – Newton’s chair – the Diracs had moved from Cambridge to Florida, where
he became an emeritus professor. The story was told that Dirac had once watched his wife knitting a garment. When she reached the end of the “knit” row, her husband, having worked out
the mathematical theory of the craft of knitting, immediately instructed her how to turn the needles and “purl” the next row.

The Diracs visited us one afternoon in Cambridge. Margit was not dissimilar to Thelma Thatcher in her aristocratic bearing. If anything, though, with her flowing auburn hair, hers was an even
more irrepressible personality, unselfconscious and gifted with a natural ease of conversation which contrasted strikingly with her husband’s silence. As we sat having tea on the lawn, she
talked about their travels, their family and their home in Florida, and she admired the children, chatting with them freely and openly, while her husband listened and watched. Margit more than
compensated for his periods of taciturnity, attributed to the pressure put upon him by his Swiss schoolteacher father, who would only allow him to speak in impeccable French as a child at home in
Bristol. She often spoke for her husband, just as I often found myself acting as Stephen’s mouthpiece, especially when the talk did not concern physics. Stephen and Paul Dirac were not
unalike in that they were both men of few words and preferred to put their well-considered utterances either to the service of physics or to trumping an otherwise meandering discussion. But in one
particular respect they differed drastically.

In the week of their stay in Cambridge, Margit Dirac rang with an invitation to the ballet at the Arts Theatre. I hesitated, knowing only too well that Stephen would not be best pleased to spend
an evening watching
Coppélia
even in the company of one of the world’s most famous scientists. “No, no, my dear, it’s not him we are inviting!” Margit
exclaimed emphatically in response to my excuses on Stephen’s behalf. “Paul wants you to come with us!” Paul’s wishes brooked no further hesitation. A couple of evenings
later I joined them at the theatre, slightly surprised to find that Paul really was there too, for I suspected that he would share Stephen’s contempt for the dance that I loved so much. I was
wrong: he seemed to enjoy the performance as much as anyone else. Despite his taciturnity, he and Margit exuded a comforting reassurance, making me very welcome, and for one evening I was not
obliged to do anything at all, least of all worry about whether my companions were enjoying themselves.

At home, the routine was eased when a new postgraduate student of Stephen’s, Alan Lapedes from Princeton, agreed to come and live in our spare room and, like Bernard in California, help
with the more onerous tasks, especially the lifting. Reserved and self-contained, Alan was an uncomplaining helper, but I was wary of exploiting his willingness, since with other colleagues he
often contributed to Stephen’s daily care in the Department too.

Indeed problems with Stephen’s bodily comfort were now considerable, because, true to form, he refused to resort to any palliative measures and often kept us tied to the house at weekends.
During the week it was a perpetual source of anxiety and frustration, despite the efforts of Constance Willis’s latest assistant, Sue Smith; she tried to make him take more regular exercise,
by straightening his body and helping him to walk the length of the hall, supported by one helper on each side. However much Sue, with her engaging northern sense of humour, amused Stephen by
telling him all the latest gossip in her own entertaining fashion, she could never persuade him to devote any more than those two hours of her visits to his exercises each week. “Now, you
will do them, won’t you, just for me?” she would plead, but he would simply regale her with one of his most beguiling, sphinxlike smiles.

The fact was that since Stephen was sedentary for all his waking hours, his limbs were much wasted through illness and lack of exercise. To outsiders, the mechanical advantages of the electric
wheelchair, and the independence it conferred, hid the true extent of the ravages of motor-neuron disease because he was able to get about quite freely, flitting back and forth across the river, to
and from the department. Any obstacle in the way of this revolutionary vehicle, however, required the assistance, not just of one able-bodied man but two or three to lift its 120 kilograms over a
steep step or up a flight of stairs. If, on the way to an evening out together, we encountered a single step, we were in trouble.

Unlike me, Stephen, surprisingly, was not usually prey to the numerous minor ailments which the children brought home from school. He maintained a healthy appetite and a robust constitution,
priding himself on never missing a day’s work. Outsiders could have no concept, though, of how painfully emaciated his body had become, nor did they generally witness those horrendous choking
fits which would come on at supper time and last well into the night, when I would cradle him in my arms like a frightened child, till the wheezings subsided and his breathing slipped into the easy
rhythm of sleep. We tried to avoid these fits by experimenting with different diets, at first eliminating sugar, and then dairy products and finally gluten, the sticky protein in flour which binds
bread and cakes. They were all suspected of irritating the hypersensitive lining of the throat. Although the children and I continued to eat bread and cakes, and cooking without sugar was not
difficult, the challenge of gluten-free cookery in the 1970s – long before the advent of “free from” products on supermarket shelves – required some major adjustments in the
kitchen since gluten-free flour in those days was a culinary nightmare. Even so, that challenge was infinitely preferable to those terrible life-threatening attacks of choking.

Just as we thought that we had escaped the worst of the winter’s ills, the spring of 1976 lay in wait with a series of cruel tricks which made of it an obstacle course akin to a
snakes-and-ladders board, though with many more snakes than ladders and with the dice weighted to land on the snakes. On 20th March the first small snake on the board snapped us up when Lucy fell
ill with chickenpox. This unremarkable though uncomfortable ailment was certainly better disposed of in early childhood than at the age of twenty, as I knew from my own experience as a student in
Valencia. By the following Monday, 22nd March, poor little Lucy was miserably red with spots, crying for all the attention I could give her by day and by night. As far as the chickenpox was
concerned, we were no different from any other family with young children, but there the similarity ended. It was fortunate that Lucy made a speedy recovery during the course of that week, since
the next throw of the dice was to send us hurtling down a much more precipitous snake.

On the Saturday morning at the end of that week, we all awoke with sore throats, and the next day both Alan and Stephen were distinctly unwell. The inflamed throats were accompanied by a high
fever. Inherently mistrustful of the medical profession, still resentful of their shabby treatment of him in 1963 at the time of diagnosis, and as phobic about hospitals as I was about flying,
Stephen forbade me to call a doctor even though he was neither able to eat nor drink and was coughing on every breath. Later the next day, in desperation, I called the duty doctor, but Stephen
shook his head in furious rejection of all her suggestions for palliative measures, such as cough syrup or any sort of cough suppressant, because he had formulated a theory that such measures, in
suppressing his natural reflexes, could be more dangerous than the cough itself. Effectively he had become his own doctor and was convinced that he knew more about his condition than any member of
the medical profession. Stephen’s mother, who had come over for tea on the Sunday afternoon, stayed on, and between us we nursed Stephen through a very disturbed night. The next day –
my birthday – though very ill, pale, gaunt and racked by the choking, Stephen still refused to allow me to fetch help until late in the day when – as a major concession to me on my
birthday – he let me call the doctor. When finally Dr Swan was permitted to set foot in the house at 7.30 p.m., his reaction was pragmatically straightforward: he called an ambulance at once,
reassuring Stephen that he would be home again in a couple of days.

It was surely providential that at that blackest of moments when we arrived at the admissions unit – with Stephen thinking that he was about to be confined to a condemned cell and I, in an
anguish of uncertainty, helplessly stroking his arm – the sound of a familiar voice, confident and authoritative, emerged from the doctors’ office. It belonged to John Stark, the chest
consultant who drove Robert to school every day. Stephen could not fail to respect John as a friend, whatever his opinion of doctors in general, and I was overjoyed to encounter someone in
authority who could take charge of the situation without demanding lengthy explanations, someone with the medical expertise to relieve me of the impossible responsibility of caring for a very sick
patient unaided. Nevertheless, because Stephen was so helpless in his inability to communicate with more than a handful of people, and because of his terror of being fed either a medicine or a food
which could have harmful effects, I stayed in the hospital at his bedside all night. The next day showed a slight improvement in his condition – which had been diagnosed as an acute chest
infection – as he gradually began to climb the first rungs on the ladder towards recovery, and two days later he was so much more cheerful that he seemed well enough to come home.

In the meantime, life at home had resumed a semblance of its usual pace. My parents had come to look after the children, Lucy had gone back to school and Robert went on a school day trip to
York. When Alan and I collected Stephen from the hospital on 1st April, we entertained the foolishly optimistic hope that we were going to be able to get back to normal straight away. No sooner had
we arrived home, so full of eager anticipation, than Stephen began to choke violently and incessantly and almost immediately slipped back into a desperate state. There was nothing that could be
done to help him in his suffering, despite all the advice of the medical experts. He choked whatever position he adopted, whether sitting up or lying down. He could neither eat nor drink and was
too weak to endure physiotherapy. My mother, Bernard Carr, Alan and I operated a rota system. One or two of us sat with Stephen all day and all night while the others slept. There was little doubt
that the situation was extremely critical. I hardly needed the doctors to tell me that I should prepare myself for the worst.