by Jane Hawking
As a result of that chance meeting, Jonathan came to teach Lucy the piano on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, depending on his availability. She quickly warmed to him and his serious-minded hesitancy was soon dispelled by her liveliness. At first he came strictly for the length of the lesson, then he stayed a little longer to accompany me in the Schubert songs I was learning – while Stephen alternately directed the railway operations in Robert’s bedroom and provided us with an audience of one for our own private Schubertiades, as we called them. After a few weeks of this routine, Jonathan began to stay for lunch before or supper afterwards, and to help with Stephen’s needs, relieving Robert of all the chores which had oppressed him for so long. Then when we had got to know Jonathan a little better, Robert would lie in wait by the front door and pounce on him on his arrival, throwing him to the floor and wrestling with him. Jonathan took this unconventional form of greeting in good part and responded in kind to a growing boy’s need for a good rough-and-tumble to release his excess energies.
Often during the course of each week we would come across each other quite by accident and wonder at the extraordinary coincidences which seemed to be bringing us together. We would stand by the roadside, talking, oblivious to what it was we were supposed to be doing or where we were going. We had so much to discuss, his bereavement, his loneliness, his musical ambitions on the one hand, and my fears for Stephen and the children and my despair at the difficulty of doing everything that was required of me with tolerance and patience on the other. Although younger than me, he had so much wisdom, so broad a perspective on life with which to enlarge my restricted view, so strong a faith and so luminous a spirituality with which to light my black horizon, that we truly trod the holy ground which, in Oscar Wilde’s words, is present where there is sorrow. I had met someone who knew the tensions and the intensity of life in the face of death.
Other circumstances conspired to bring us together in the strangest of ways. I still attended dinners once a term or so in Lucy Cavendish – simply to maintain the contact rather than because I derived any pleasure from them. On one such occasion, having exhausted my own limited fund of conversation, I was listening to the talk across the table when I heard a distinguished elderly Fellow of the college, Alice Heim, singing the praises of a young man who visited her house regularly to play piano duets with her. The warmth with which she described him, his kindnesses to her and his musical talent startled me. He was unique, a veritable Apollo. Her ageing companions were more than a little perplexed by the effusions of their colleague. “What was his name?” they asked. When she replied, “Jonathan, Jonathan Hellyer Jones,” my ears burned and I felt myself colouring with pleasure, as though I was the only person present who could share her appreciation of this champion who had entered our lives. Nor could anyone have been more surprised than I was, as much at my own blushing reactions as at Alice Heim’s enthusiasm. I was uncomfortably aware that the warm glow resulted as much from embarrassment as from pleasure, as if I stood accused of a guilty secret. Yet there was no apparent reason for this friendship either to be a secret or to be tinged with guilt. It was based on our shared interests, on our concern for each other’s situation, on the support we could bring to each other, and above all, on music. Nevertheless, though we had never touched and would not do so for a very long time, we were both aware that the guilty secret was an admission of the potentially physical nature of the relationship. The attraction between us was strong, but adultery is an ugly word, contrary to the ethical basis on which our lives were built. Was this the price I should have to pay to rekindle the flame of my passionate spirit? Was it a price that, in all honesty, I could allow Jonathan to pay? If I were to find myself in the company of the adulterous heroines of the nineteenth century, the price might be even higher. The end result might be only the jarring sound of Flaubert’s cracked kettle rather than music to move the stars to pity.
8
A Helping Hand
During the following term Jonathan suggested that I might like to join the church choir, which was rehearsing excerpts from Messiah for an orchestral performance at Easter. As Robert and Lucy were old enough to be left for an hour in front of the television in the early evening, I joined the handful of choral parishioners for the Thursday rehearsals in the church. To me, a comparative beginner, the graphic complexity of Handel’s choruses – in which sheep ran astray with alarming rapidity “turning everyone to his own way” – represented a challenge which I countered with an obsessive enthusiasm. In joining the choir, I also joined the church, where services fell loosely within the bounds of the Church of England formats that I had known since childhood. But this was Anglicanism devoid of sanctimonious dogma and stifling pedantry, thanks to the visionary dynamism of the vicar, Bill Loveless, whose surname could not have been more ill suited to his personality. Once a journalist on the Picture Post, actor, soldier and businessman, Bill had come to ordination in middle age. Happily still blessed with phenomenal vitality, he brought all his experience from other walks of life – and all his contacts too – to assist him in his pastoral work and in his unending search for relevant themes for his sermons, while for his monthly forum on topical matters he invited a succession of guest speakers – doctors, policemen, social workers, political activists and so on.
For Bill, true Christianity did not deal in absolutes, bargains with God or divine punishments. Its one guiding principle was a passionate love of humanity, affirming God’s unequivocal love for all people, whoever they were, whatever their imperfections. The only command of this loving doctrine was to love one’s neighbour. In this realm there was rest for all the weary and heavy-laden, and there I found solace. At last the crumpled rag of my spiritual being began to revive, but, although I derived comfort from my return to the Church, it also set me imponderable questions. What was being asked of me? How great a sacrifice was required of me? The circumstances in which I had met Jonathan, when I was at breaking point, were so extraordinary – and yet so ordinary – that I could not avoid the bizarre, perhaps naive impression that that meeting had been deliberately engineered by a benevolent power, acting through our good and caring mutual friends. We were both lonely, deeply unhappy people, in desperate need of help. Could that meeting really have been part of a highly unorthodox divine plan? Or was I just being absurd, even heretical and hypocritical? I knew my Moliere too well to want to find either myself or Jonathan being cast in the role of Tartuffe, the arch hypocrite.
Some people might regard the support that had appeared at my side, lifting the burden from my shoulders, as a happy chance, for others it might seem just a coincidence. For me, tense and overwrought to breaking point, it had the hallmark of divine intervention – although at that stage, in the spring of 1978, Jonathan and I had scarcely begun to confront our feelings, let alone give them any expression. The fundamental question was how to handle this heaven-sent gift. It could be used hurtfully, destructively, with the potential to break up the family in which I had invested so much of myself, if Jonathan and I even momentarily contemplated going off and setting up a home together. It would not be enough to claim that I had fulfilled my promise to Stephen in outrageously difficult circumstances over a very long period, because this was not a viable rationale in terms of the teachings of our church, which both I and Jonathan believed were the only true basis for human living. The alternative course was the only one we could follow. Then, that special gift could be used well, for the benefit of the family as a whole – for the children and for Stephen, if he were prepared to accept it as such. The latter course would not be easy since it would require a rigorous amount of self-discipline. In caring for Stephen we would have to try to maintain a distance from each other, living apart and not allowing ourselves to show any outward signs of affection for each other in public. In principle, our social lives would always focus on at least three, if not five people, never an exclusive twosome. The well-being of Stephen and the children would be the justification for our relationship w
ith no thoughts for the future. In effect there was no obvious future for anyone who became involved with me. If it was selfish of me to monopolize the life of a young man who had already suffered so much tragedy, the answer was always the same: with his help we could survive as a family, without it we were doomed.
As, hesitantly, we began to admit to the attraction that was drawing us to each other, Jonathan would dispel these doubts by reassuring me that through us – all of us – he had found a purpose which was helping him to alleviate the hollow pain of his own loss. It was during the course of a rare visit to London, sitting in a quiet side chapel of Westminster Abbey, that he announced that he was prepared to commit himself to me and to my family, come what may. That most selfless and most moving of pledges lifted me out of the dark void that my life had become. The relationship was ennobling and liberating. It was still platonic and would long remain so. The mutual attraction, and the unruly emotions it threatened to provoke, were sublimated in the music we practised and performed together, usually in Stephen’s presence at the weekends and sometimes on weekday evenings as well. It was enough that someone had come into my life on whom I could depend implicitly.
Stephen at first reacted to Jonathan with a certain male hostility, trying in true Hawking fashion to assert his intellectual superiority, just as he might when faced with a new research student. He was soon disarmed on discovering that this technique was unavailing, since Jonathan was not competitive by nature. Highly sensitive to the needs of others, he responded much more readily to Stephen’s helplessness and to the charm of his smile than he did to the sonority of his reputation. Stephen became gentler, calmer, more appreciative, more relaxed. It even became possible, in the dead of night, for me to confide in him in an unprecedented manner. Generously and gently he acknowledged that we all needed help, no one more than himself, and if there was someone who was prepared to help me, he would not object as long as I continued to love him. I could not fail to love him when he willingly showed such understanding and, most importantly, communicated it to me. On the occasional days when Jonathan was attacked by the black dog of depression, it was Stephen who would reassure me that Jonathan would never let me down. Otherwise, once accepted, the situation was rarely mentioned. It was however greatly reassuring to me that I could trust Stephen with my confidence.
All pulling together, the three of us embarked upon an exceptionally creative period. There were still those times when the combination of my tiredness and Stephen’s innate cussedness would bring me to the verge of collapse, but generally we operated on a much more even keel. For Stephen, it seemed as if the respectability conferred on him by his Fellowship of the Royal Society and by the Papal medal constituted an automatic passport to a cornucopia of other honours. While he continued to advance his understanding of the universe, all sorts of august bodies continued to trip over each other in their eagerness to cover him with medals, prizes and honorary degrees. These had already included the honorary doctorate from his Alma Mater, the University of Oxford, and to his special gratification, an honorary fellowship at University College. The atmosphere at the six-monthly feasts in the College was warm and friendly, and Stephen’s undergraduate excesses were a recurring topic of jovial reminiscence. As if to lend substance to the recollections, we were regularly accommodated in undergraduate rooms at some distance from the nearest bathroom across cold, damp flagstones.
In March 1978, Caius College, not to be outdone, commissioned a line-drawing portrait of Stephen from David Hockney. While Hockney sketched and drew, Lucy sat curled up, reading and drawing, in an armchair in a corner of the living room. Doubtless to the surprise of the Fellows of Caius, Hockney included her in the final version, a gentle acknowledgement of Stephen’s family background to offset the official formality of the portrait. On the second day of the sitting, Lucy paid her own tribute to Hockney. We were sitting on the lawn, drinking coffee and taking advantage of a brief spell of spring sunshine, when she burst out of the house, bouncing across the lawn on her hopper, a big balloon made of tough rubber. Her dungarees were pulled up to the knee, deliberately revealing that like Hockney she was wearing odd socks, one white and one brown.
One cold wintry evening that February, Stephen and I had joined the distinguished gathering of Fellows on the coach going down to the Royal Society for the admission of Prince Charles as an honorary Fellow. (Before coaches were fitted with wheelchair lifts, Stephen had to be hauled aboard bodily – by the coach driver and me. This however was easier than driving and parking in London.) The occasion gave Stephen cause for much mirth, a welcome reminder of the old irreverent student, scarcely discernible under the present, weighty trappings of Establishment recognition. At the ceremony, the new President of the Royal Society complimented the Prince on the dedicated royal patronage of the Society, founded as he said by Prince Charles’s namesake, Charles II, and “continued by his son James II”. Stephen guffawed and, in the loudest stage whisper of which he was capable, gleefully announced, “He’s got it wrong! James II was Charles II’s brother!” At the reception after the ceremony, Stephen enjoyed himself even more by demonstrating the turning circle of the wheelchair to Prince Charles and in so doing, ran close to – or over – the highly polished royal footwear, an exercise which he was to inflict at a later date on the Archbishop of Canterbury at a dinner in St John’s College, Cambridge.
Jonathan’s career was much less meteoric than Stephen’s; in fact it had scarcely begun. Quite apart from the devastating tragedy he had suffered, the frustrations of being a struggling musician contributed to the gloom of the bleak, black days he sometimes endured. A former chorister and prize-winning scholar of St John’s College, he was sufficiently ambitious to find the prospect of a life spent teaching the piano disheartening, yet his natural reticence and modesty tended to conceal his very real talent as an organist and harpsichordist. His intense love and knowledge of baroque music, particularly Bach, especially when performed on authentic instruments, found scant outlet in the humdrum routine of piano teaching in schools. Convinced that he had a mission to wean the ears of the public away from resonant modern instruments and Romantic interpretations to the subtleties of baroque performance technique, he hardly knew where to begin. Authenticity in performance became one of the subjects under discussion at mealtimes, when the children’s chatter allowed the adults to get a word in edgeways. Stephen would tease Jonathan about the difficulties of managing a harpsichord, insisting that a steel frame would solve all the delicate time-consuming problems of tuning and retuning. Jonathan would point out that the instrument would then not only be unsuitable for authentic baroque performance, it would no longer be portable either. In fact it might as well be a piano.
Good-humoured banter notwithstanding, Stephen and I inevitably became more and more involved in music and encouraged Jonathan to take the plunge, to move away from teaching into performing. This proposition presented him with a dilemma of which he was already only too well aware. To become a performer he would have to give up most of his teaching and devote the time to practising and rehearsing, yet he depended on teaching for his income. It would be a long time before he could make enough money from performing alone. He did have one great advantage however: he possessed his own instrument. Not only did he have a fine upright piano in his tiny house – so reminiscent of 6 Little St Mary’s Lane – on the other side of Cambridge, but most of the rest of the living space was taken up with a harpsichord which he himself had built. He was therefore well equipped to begin performing; he simply lacked the right opportunity.
The more the three of us discussed the dilemma, the more we realized that the only way for Jonathan to build up a repertoire and to become recognized as a performer, in a highly competitive environment, while still earning an income from teaching, was for him to create his own opportunities. This he could do gradually by self-promotion and by offering his services to charities. A symbiotic relationship developed between him and the various charities to which he subsc
ribed, particularly the societies concerned with leukaemia and other cancers. He gave recitals free of charge and in so doing trained himself in the techniques of performance, not simply in playing the notes but in overcoming nerves and in planning and presenting the programmes, while the charities benefited from one hundred per cent of the takings, minus the costs of publicity.
Meanwhile I was at last catching tantalizing glimpses on the horizon of the end of my own intellectual pilgrimage. I scarcely liked to confess how long it had taken me to reach that point, for it was all of twelve years and two children. Alan Deyermond, my supervisor, had been right to insist on registering me as a student at London University, as any other university would have thrown me out long ago. The way had been hard and tortuous and just when I was despondently thinking that there was no end to it, Jonathan had appeared to cheer me along the final stretch. He showed a sufficient interest in the subject to spur me on; he would ask me at the end of each day what I had achieved, listen to just a few lines of the poetry and lend a hand in sorting out the card index and the masses of notes, scribbled on odd bits of paper. That interest and a little practical help was all I needed to bolster my resolve for the final hurdle, the last chapter of the thesis which was to be an analysis of the language of the popular poetry of Castile in the later Middle Ages.
The Castilian lyrics were lively and colourful, full of the medieval iconography of gardens, plants, fruits, birds and animals, symbolizing the multiplicity of the aspects of love. Many of them were also of religious significance and were common to the rest of Europe. The garden epitomizes the attractions of the beloved as well as the virtues of the Virgin Mary. The fountain at the centre is both the spring of life and the symbol of fertility. The apple is the fruit of the Fall and the pear the fruit of divine redemption, but, in the secular context, both are potent metaphors for sexuality. The rose is the emblem of the martyrs and of the Virgin, yet it is also the most appealing image of the sensual beauty of the beloved. Spain introduces its own set of vivid images, drawn from its flamboyant landscape. The fruit which the unhappy nun tastes is the bitter lemon, while happy lovers walk in the shade of the sweet orange grove. The olive grove, similarly, becomes the scene of lovers’ meetings. The fact that many of these images have reappeared in the poetry of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492, and in the poetry of the New World, is indicative of their early folkloric composition. Thematically these poems present an unbroken tradition with their Galician and Mozarabic forebears, the cantigas and the kharjas. The songs are usually sung by girls, the motif of the lover’s absence recurs, the lovers meet at dawn and the mother is a constant figure.
