by Jane Hawking
8
The Red Queen
The trip to the Middle East was a prelude to the demands of that summer, which proved to be even more intense than usual. Although there was no escape anywhere from the endless bickerings of the nurses, the epicentre of the rumbling discontent had moved to the Department, as that was where Stephen spent most of his day. The young assistant, Nick Phillips, wrote to me to apologize for handing in his resignation, a move forced on him because he was so often the target of the ill-humour and criticism of one of the nurses. “Bad-mouthing” was the term he used in his note. I sympathized with him, but there was little that I could do to help. The nurses were a law unto themselves, and neither Judy Fella nor I had any influence. Whatever went on in the Department was completely beyond my reach: my concern had to be focused on maintaining a civilized atmosphere in the home.
With the start of the A-level exams and the end of those particular teaching commitments for the year, I turned my attention to the plans for Robert’s twenty-first birthday party. We celebrated the actual day with a large family dinner at home, and planned another evening party a week later, on the lawn with a band, a repeat of his eighteenth birthday party – though this time it was to be a jazz band, and Robert sent out invitations to a “Mad Hatter’s Fancy Dress Party”. Just as preparations for the party were in full swing, three weeks after returning from Jerusalem, I awoke one morning with a splitting headache and itchy spots around my waist. The only comparable headache that I could remember was the one that had preceded the chickenpox in Spain when I was a student. Lucy took her younger brother to school and I fell back into bed. I saw no one until Eve came in, as usual, at ten o’clock. Her comforting Brummie accents were clearly audible outside my bedroom door. “Where’s Jane?” she asked. Elaine Mason’s languid tones rang out in prompt reply, “Oh, she’s lying in bed... shamming.” Eve took no notice, but came directly into my room. One look at me sufficed: “You need a doctor!” she pronounced firmly and loudly enough for all to hear.
The doctor diagnosed shingles, the reactivation of the chickenpox virus, exacerbated by stress. He prescribed bed rest and a new drug to relieve the itching. Ruefully I remembered the spotty child in the rooftop swimming pool in Jerusalem and wondered how I was to fit bed rest into the long list of all those things to be done.
Thanks to Eve – who herself was suffering having broken her arm – and Lucy and Jonathan, I managed to rest a little. Jonathan shopped and ferried Tim to and from school and cub camp, in between organizing and rehearsing his next run of concerts, while Lucy interrupted her usual whirl of social activity to bring me cups of tea, cook and ward off unwelcome intrusions. Luckily Jonathan was no longer dependent on my administrative skills in the running of his baroque orchestra, since that enterprise was now established on a firm enough financial basis for him to be able to employ an administrator who attended to every minute detail of every concert. Since the Camerata was now a going concern and was giving concerts regularly, even in the remotest parts of the land, Jonathan was frequently away from Cambridge. He worked hard, rehearsing and performing, and often drove back from distant concerts in the small hours of the morning. His irregular schedule, typical of the life of an itinerant musician, was incomprehensible to the nurses. Not having witnessed or appreciated his talent in practice, the less imaginative of them supposed that his presence in the house during the day suggested that he was a ne’er-do-well, a lounger, sponging off Stephen’s munificence. His presence gave rise to much whispering.
Lucy, meanwhile, was juggling her social life and rehearsals for the Edinburgh Festival with her summer exams. As my shingles improved only slowly, she found herself obliged to squeeze yet another unforeseen commitment into her already hectic routine. I had been intending to accompany Stephen to Leningrad for a conference in the third week in June, but it was obvious to everyone, except to Stephen and his subversive minions, that I would not be well enough to travel. As he made such a superhuman effort to overcome all obstacles, it was difficult for him to see why others, above all his wife, should not be capable of similar exertion and will power, especially since all other illnesses were insignificant by comparison with motor-neuron disease. It was clear that I could no longer live up to his expectations. I found myself having to open every sentence with awkward apologies, and each attempt to apologize for being me made me even more aware of my inadequacy. The more my sense of deficiency grew, the more intense the shingles became. The neuralgia and dizziness intensified to blinding proportions, while my nerves tingled like a thousand bee stings to the very tips of my fingers whenever I tried to communicate my feelings or my ideas over any family matter, however trivial.
There was one function which I could not miss, however ill I felt: that was the launch of A Brief History of Time, scheduled to take place at a lunch party for family and friends at the Royal Society on 16th June, a week after the shingles struck. A Brief History of Time was the tangible expression of Stephen’s triumph over the forces of nature, the forces of illness, paralysis and death itself. It was a triumph and an achievement which involved us both in a way that was reminiscent of those passionate struggles and heady victories in the early years of our marriage. This triumph however was not a private affair but a very public event, attended by intense publicity. The figure I cut at that feast was little more than spectral: I lacked the stamina even to maintain a coherent conversation, let alone confront the onslaught of ensuing media interest with any display of confidence.
The day after the launch I rose from my sickbed again, donned my red dressing gown and a red paper crown, applied patches of violent rouge to my cheeks and appeared at Robert’s party as the Red Queen: I made a rueful joke of the fact that, like the Red Queen, I was always running to stay in the same place. Perpetually tired and listless, I battled on to the end of term through a long string of engagements and the last classes of the academic year. I had neither the energy nor the inclination to intervene again in the feverishly explosive rivalries among the nurses, which grew ever more venomous with the meteoric rise of A Brief History of Time to the top of the bestseller list. So long as the nurses’ squabbles did not further threaten the balance of life in the home, I tried to treat them with the contempt they deserved. The minimum amount of time I was – in theory – prepared to grant them, stretched to eternity as they aired their mounting grievances at length over the telephone, oblivious to the fact that I might have better things to do, but all too ready to be mortally offended if I replaced the receiver without hearing them out. Finally I found myself obliged to ask one of the nurses, Elaine Mason, whose behaviour seemed to be at the root of the troubles, to come for a discussion, in which I intended to tell her that I could not stand aside and see the nursing rota, my home and my family torn apart. I might as well have saved my breath. With a smug complacency, she condescendingly denied all such malicious intent, calling upon her husband to vouch for her immaculate character before sailing out of the house, head held high, while I sank into a hollow of all-enveloping despair.
By comparison the crank intruders who would ring – usually from America – in the middle of the night with no consideration for the time difference, seemed like light relief. At all hours, they would demand to speak instantly to “The Professor”. Like a certain Mr Justin Case, they had all, to a man, solved the riddle of the universe, and were impatient to tell the Professor where his calculations had gone wrong. Mr Justin Case had to vie for the phone line at 3 a.m. with a Mr Isaac Newton, who was a regular caller from Japan. Lucy answered one call from a man who asked her to marry him. “Fair Lucy,” he pleaded, “will you marry me? But read my thesis to your father first!” Another desperate caller from Florida insisted on speaking to Stephen because he was sure that the world was going to blow up in half an hour. “Sorry,” we said, “he’s away.” “Well, then,” came the forlorn reply, “It’s the end of the world, and there’s nothing I can do to save it!” Some actually turned up at the front door and lay in wait for St
ephen there, not always to their own best advantage however. One, his upper half clad only in a string vest, was unprepared for the front door opening outwards. As the door was flung wide for Stephen to emerge at full pelt in his chariot, the poor man was thrown into a rose bush. His string vest caught on the thorns, and Stephen was well away by the time he extricated himself. There was also the Hollywood film star, who wanted to test out her own half-baked mystic theory of the universe; the fraudulent journalists, who promised to make donations to charity in payment for the interviews we granted them but never paid up; and the would-be unauthorized biographers, who were obviously out to make a quick buck at our expense. It was with impatience that I looked forward to the summer holiday, when we were to lay the ghost of the Geneva episode with a return to that city. Anywhere had to be better than Cambridge.
Hollywood stars and domestic difficulties notwithstanding, when we managed to communicate, Stephen and I gave some thought to the mundane matter of how to spend the Wolf Prize money. That and the anticipated proceeds from A Brief History, together with the modest savings that I had made over the years, amounted to enough to allow us to think of buying a second home. Stephen was interested in buying a flat in Cambridge as an investment, but I cherished the dream of a country cottage, somewhere away from all the razzmatazz, tensions and persistent invasions of our privacy. A cottage on the north Norfolk coast would have been my ideal, but that was beyond our means. A place in the country could give us longed-for peace and anonymity, the time and the quietude for Stephen to think and for the children to revise for exams, while I would be mistress of my own establishment, both house and garden.
It was not until we came across an eccentric Englishman – as Jonathan, Tim and I ambled through northern France on the way south to meet Stephen in Geneva that August – that the thought of buying a property in France began to cross my mind as a viable proposition. This gentleman, who had a minimal command of Franglais, was cheerfully setting himself up in business, buying and renovating French country properties and selling them to the British at prices which were extraordinarily cheap by comparison with those at home. As he unfolded his plans to a rapt audience of mystified French and fascinated English bystanders in a wayside restaurant, the exciting truth began to dawn that this was a possible outlet for our resources. We would enjoy all the advantages of a country cottage, abroad but less distant than Wales, and we and our children would be true Europeans, with a foothold in Europe, and hopefully bilingual into the bargain.
With all the hurly-burly of the start of the new academic year just after returning to England, I let the idea drop, and it passed into the category of a pipe dream. Our holiday with Stephen in Geneva had been a heartening success from the moment we met him at the airport, and after that harmoniously restorative spell, Jonathan, Tim and I had spent ten days camping in the south of France. We came back to Cambridge, refreshed and ready to take up the reins, altogether unaware of the new chaos that awaited us. First of all, Lucy’s application to the University of Oxford – to her father’s and paternal grandfather’s old college, University College – had to be withdrawn and hastily resubmitted. The unexpected success of the Cambridge Youth Theatre’s visit to the Edinburgh Festival had made it impossible for her to sit the entrance exams, so she would have to rely on an interview and her A-level results instead. Secondly, the tenant in the letting house belonging to Robert and his grandmother was threatening legal action, because in my absence in France Stephen had thought to resolve a problem that had arisen by ordering her to leave. Thirdly, the administrator of the Cambridge Baroque Camerata was finding the workload too great and wanted to resign. Fourthly, and most untypically for the discreetly private world of a scientific institution, the Department had turned into such a cauldron of intrigue that Judy, incapable of doing her job properly because of the indiscipline among the nurses, was brought to the point of tendering her resignation. This was a sad turn of events for those of us who had witnessed and appreciated her devotion to Stephen over a span of almost fifteen years.
I was afraid that the volcanic eruptions in the Department might overflow and engulf the house at the worst possible time – when Lucy was under greatest pressure. She was now studying for her A-levels and for Oxford entrance at the same time as rehearsing for yet another run of The Heart of a Dog, because the Youth Theatre’s performance at the Edinburgh Fringe had been awarded one of the top prizes in the Festival, the Independent award for the best Fringe performance, which entitled them to a two-week run on a London stage. Unfortunately the London performances were scheduled to take place just before the crucial Oxford entrance interviews, so Lucy would have to go down to London to perform every day after school and then return to school as usual the next morning. As her resilience would be tested to the limits, it was essential for her to be able to count on a quiet, stable background at home. This simple piece of common sense did not impinge at all on the majority of the people who regularly came in and out of the house.
A rearguard action to keep the nurses’ battles at bay was simply not enough to maintain calm at home. From being a well-known scientific figure in Britain and America, Stephen had suddenly achieved worldwide fame: he had become a cult figure with the success of the book. We had the first taste of this in October 1988, when Tim and I accompanied him to Barcelona for the publication of the Spanish edition of A Brief History of Time. He was recognized everywhere, attracting crowds who stopped to applaud him in the street. I was called upon to translate for journalists in press conferences and television interviews and, in my own right, was asked to give interviews for women’s magazines. There was a satisfaction in working in tandem with Stephen again as his intellectual partner. However, the demand for interviews was reaching fever pitch, not only in Spain but everywhere, at home and abroad. It was easier to cope with the publicity abroad, because we were there expressly to sell the book, and that Mephistophelean pact required us to make ourselves available to the media. At home, where we had our daily routine to accomplish in quiet anonymity, the intrusions of the press became an irksome dislocation of family life. That television equipment had become a regular feature of Stephen’s office, where nurses vied with each other to pose for the cameras, was not a problem. The problem arose when the journalists asked for an interview or pictures at home as well. This I was extremely loath to grant, and the children objected vociferously. It was bad enough having nurses in the house all the time: with television cameras and reporters as well there would be no privacy for anyone anywhere. My arguments cut no ice. They were represented as yet further evidence of my disloyalty to the man of genius. It was obvious that with my dependence on Jonathan and my refusal to train to be a nurse, I was already condemned. My reluctance to regale the press with stories of life with that genius within the walls of my home was just one more admission of my perfidy.
On 7th November, Lucy’s two-week run in London began at the Half Moon Theatre on the Mile End road. She came out of school at 4 p.m., with just half an hour to spare before catching the coach. The play demanded huge reserves of energy and concentration of its young cast, who changed roles with every scene, sometimes appearing in individual parts, sometimes in the chorus. She would arrive home after midnight, and the next morning, by nine o’clock, would have to be back in school for a full day’s work. Her schedule was punishing, but the general stress was eased somewhat by Stephen’s decision to go off to California with his retinue for a whole month the day after the first night. Thereafter the quality of life improved dramatically at home, and we all heaved a long sigh of relief as we withdrew into comparative peace and seclusion.
With unaccustomed self-indulgence, I was sitting idly thumbing through the Sunday paper the next weekend when an article on the availability of property in France caught my eye. Beneath it there was a modest advertisement for an English agency, offering to search for suitable houses in the French countryside for its customers. I followed the telephone number up, and within a few days photocopies st
arted arriving in the post from northern France. The photographs looked as if they had been taken in thick fog or a snowstorm, and the terminology used often sent me searching for the dictionary, but the prices were remarkably low. None of them were more than about half the price of a two-bedroom Victorian terraced house in southern England, and, although it was impossible to tell what state the properties were in, they were patently much more substantial in terms of ground area. Clearly further investigation was called for, which was how Tim, Jonathan and I came to be sailing to France one Saturday in mid-November.
