Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  9

  Prospecting for Paradise

  France in November was bleak and dreary indeed, and bitingly cold and dark. But at seven o’clock in the evening, Arras, our destination, was still brimming with life and activity as the shops disgorged their last customers out into the brightly lit streets. They were full of enticing displays of Christmas delicacies and toys, which promptly made a hole in our pockets. Moreover, much to our surprise, signs everywhere announced that Beaujolais Nouveau had arrived! The weekend began to assume a different perspective, especially after an excellent meal in the bar of our pension, where the ruby-red new arrival met with general critical acclaim. If all else failed, the weekend held the promise of dealing with most of the Christmas shopping and a certain amount of pleasure in liquid form as well.

  The next day, the heavy sleet was hard and unrelenting, and although I could summon no interest whatsoever in quaint little houses dotted about the landscape, a pleasant, helpful agent and his assistant were waiting, prepared to give up the best part of their Sunday to escorting us round what they considered to be the most suitable properties on their books. What a Sunday that was, and what sights we saw as we huddled in the back of the agent’s car! The rain beat down, now and then giving way to driving snow. When finally the sleet and snow had exhausted themselves, a dark, penetrating mist set in while we looked at tumbledown houses with leaking roofs, cardboard bungalows, and a house where the passage between the kitchen and the dining room was in fact the bathroom. We were looking for an old house with character, but basically in good condition, possibly with some opportunities for renovation, and with plenty of ground floor accommodation for the elderly and infirm members of the family, especially for Stephen. Nice views were desirable, and the distance from the main road was a prime consideration. Nothing we had seen that first day even approached our requirements.

  As it happened, the next day dawned bright and clear and the countryside sparkled under a fine layer of crisp, fresh snow. On our way back to Boulogne we stopped at a small market town to call on just one more agent, Mme Maillet. She led the way out of town in the direction of the coast. The road climbed out of the hollow in which the town nestled, up onto the windswept reaches of an extensive plateau – in fact, a broad ridge between two river valleys. We passed a small race track on the right and sped through a tiny village. There was little sign of habitation, only the occasional church spire, water tower or ruined windmill. Then, suddenly, Mme Maillet turned right – we followed, and there it was, a kilometre or so away from the main road, long and low, whitewashed and red-tiled. “That’s our house, Mum,” said Tim, then aged nine. And so it was, unmistakably beckoning us across the fields, an old friend from a past existence, instantly recognizable, immediately appealing. “Un vrai coup de foudre”, the French would say – love at first sight. Nor were we disappointed when we turned into the driveway of the Moulin – for that was what it was, an old mill house, its windmill long since destroyed. The low, smiling façade we had seen from the road proved to be but one of the three sides of the house, which embraced a courtyard, rather in the style of a Roman villa, the sort of house that Stephen and I had dreamt of in the golden days of our engagement. The aspect inside the courtyard was as delightful and welcoming as the exterior had been from the road. The living rooms, including the kitchen, all looked onto the yard or out to the garden and pasture at the back; they were wild and unkempt, at the mercy of a flock of hostile geese, except for a corner of traditional vegetable garden.

  The sleeping quarters in the long side of the building which had first caught our eye and our imagination from the road were ideally suited to Stephen’s needs, being on the ground floor, and the accommodation could be considerably expanded by completing the conversion of the vast, light, airy attic, which ran the whole length of that wing of the house. It was almost too good to be true. As far as we could tell, the house fulfilled every requirement; it was within an hour’s drive of the coast, no further away from Cambridge than parts of the West country, and certainly closer than Wales. It enjoyed lovely views sweeping across fields to woods and it was well away from the main road although the access was easy. It was old and bursting with character but, apparently, in reasonably good condition. There was obvious potential for further improvements and, most significantly, the price left a sufficient margin for any renovations.

  All the way home my mind was fixed on the Moulin, programming in the impressions, the excitement, the ideas. Once back in England, I hastened to write it all down and, with pen, paper and ruler, to make rough sketches of the property and plans for its adaptation to our needs, and fax them all to Stephen in southern California. Stephen replied positively. It was much less complicated to communicate with him by fax across the Atlantic than face to face, and I interpreted his terse comment “sounds good” as approval. Then the wheels for the purchase of the Moulin were set in motion at remarkable speed. Equally quickly I had to learn the language and the procedures for house purchase in France which, from the outset, proved to be very different at every stage from the English equivalents. I had to get to grips with French law and legal terminology, the French banking system, French building terms, insurance French-style, local taxation and the eccentricities of the public utilities. Sterling was buoyant against the franc at the time, so I had the consolation of benefiting from a favourable exchange rate. The comforting thought was that the same amount of money could not have bought us anything worth having in England. Deep down inside me I felt an assurance and a certainty that I had not known in years. This project, based on my input, my knowledge of French, would be my contribution to family life – although, of course, it would be jointly financed. So many of our excursions in the past had had a single objective, the pursuit of science. This project would combine all our interests and talents – languages, love of France and the French way of life, relaxation, gardening and music as well – with that scientific pursuit. The more I looked at my plans and drawings, the more I realized that the Moulin had an even greater potential than I had at first deemed possible. There was an old barn attached to the house which was ripe for conversion into accommodation upstairs, with potential for a conference room downstairs, permitting Stephen to have his own summer school, to which he could invite his scientific colleagues and their families. I had visions of establishing our own version of the Les Houches summer school in the undulating countryside of northern France, and it was my hope that there we would once again find the unity and the harmony which we had achieved before the events of 1985, and which since then had eluded us in England.

  10

  A Homecoming

  My plans for the Moulin were put on hold at the beginning of 1989 because I was busy proofreading the French edition of A Brief History of Time. It proved not simply to be a question of checking the language, but of delving much deeper. The English edition opened with an introduction by the American scientist Carl Sagan; I was perplexed to find that this had not been translated into French and that, unknown to Stephen, Flammarion, the French publisher, had commissioned an introduction from a French physicist to replace it. I found the disparaging tone of certain remarks in the French introduction extraordinary, and I took it upon myself to delete them. The launch of Une Brève Histoire du Temps was scheduled for the beginning of March in Paris and would coincide neatly with the completion of the house purchase. The weeks before the launch brought a procession of French journalists and television cameras to Cambridge, while the completion of the conveyancing process focused my attention more and more on the other side of the Channel. My horizons were expanding, no longer constricted by the four walls of the home in England.

  The intricacies of the French legal system, the mechanisms for setting up a bank account, the details of the insurance contract – all these I attacked with enthusiasm, helped by the delightfully idiosyncratic characters with whom I was coming into contact in the quietly rural Ternois region of northern France. The plans for renovation were already in the
pipeline when, en route for Paris, I signed the house purchase agreement at a formal ceremony on 1st March, itself a considerable achievement, since all parties to the agreement had to be present and Stephen had decided that he could not spare the time to attend. He had after all only just returned from a trip to New York on Concorde. When news of the house in France began to percolate through to friends and relations in England, I was baffled by some of the reactions. “Stephen doesn’t like the country,” his mother announced adamantly in his hearing, as if intent on predisposing him against the Moulin. Had she forgotten Llandogo? Certainly Stephen’s mistrust of the country might be justified after that experience. But to condemn the Moulin, which had been chosen so carefully and was being prepared so meticulously for his enjoyment, seemed very unfair. The image of Stephen that was being cultivated by his relations, and some of his nurses, was that of a playboy who lived for the bright lights of the city and who found the rural life boring. This image of him conflicted with my own perceptions of his character, and the aspersions cast on my venture were already undermining his interest in it.

  The few days in Paris after the purchase of the house certainly intensified Stephen’s love of the bright lights. He was fêted and pursued wherever he went, the darling of the media and the prized possession of the publisher. As I loved Paris too, it was no hardship for me to enjoy the bright lights as well. We dined at La Coupole; we ate in the restaurant on the Eiffel Tower, where Stephen was invited to add his name to the signatures of the rich and famous in the visitors’ book; we visited the newly opened Musée d’Orsay and we entertained friends and Stephen’s French relations, including his cousin Mimi, to a dinner in celebration of the launch. Photographers followed us everywhere, and journalists clamoured for interviews, for which either I or a French colleague of Stephen’s did the interpreting. I was flattered to be asked for an interview by a leading radio journalist, Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, at the radio station Europe 1. When I arrived, my interviewer was involved in a long and heated discussion with Jean Le Pen, the nationalist leader. Jean-Pierre Elkabbach quickly recovered his composure and treated me with Gallic charm and deference. The interview was broadcast all over France, and as a result we and our circumstances were introduced to our new neighbours in our village in the north before we had taken up residence.

  Within three weeks I was setting out for France again: this time with Tim and Lucy in a car laden to the roof with packaged cupboard and bookshelf kits, linen, crockery, cutlery, utensils and food. As if in our honour, we found that a new motorway had just been opened, cutting twenty minutes or so from the journey from Calais, so when we arrived, earlier than expected, at the Moulin, we found the house full of workmen, putting the finishing touches to the Herculean effort of making suitable arrangements for Stephen – and of converting the attic to bedrooms, which they had completed in seventeen days. Their beaming pleasure in our delight was obvious as we toured the house that they had so swiftly transformed.

  Stephen had recently bought a Volkswagen van which had been fitted with a ramp and fixtures to hold the wheelchair steadily in place. It also proved invaluable in transporting large items of furniture. Late that evening, Jonathan arrived at the wheel of the van, which was packed with yet more furniture and luggage. The next day he drove to the airport at Le Touquet – so fashionable with the British in its heyday – to meet Stephen, Robert and the entourage of two reliable and trusted nurses. The advances and royalties coming in from the several editions of A Brief History of Time permitted Stephen the rare luxury of chartering a small aeroplane from Cambridge airport to bring him to France by the simplest and most comfortable means possible. The genial Australian pilot had opened up spaces in the wing to store suitcases and bits of the wheelchair, and he invited one of the passengers, on this occasion Robert, to sit beside him in the cockpit of his tiny six-seater aircraft.

  The weather was so kind during the Easter holiday that northern France acquired a deceptively Mediterranean aspect. The long white walls and low red roofs of the house and outbuildings glowed in the bright sun against an azure sky, while clouds of white blossom fluttered to earth like silken snowflakes in the meadow and the shrubbery. Even Stephen was impressed, though he complained that the countryside was as flat as Cambridgeshire. This was not actually true, as Robert was to discover when he set off on a bicycle ride. The house stood on top of a plateau, which was divided by many a meandering river valley with villages, water mills, ruined châteaux, abbayes, poplar trees and trout streams. Stephen appeared to like it – though, of course, he would never allow himself to admit it. Whatever his opinions about country life and quaint old houses, he certainly enjoyed the social scene. He and the children went out to buy pink champagne for the house-warming party, which we gave for all our neighbours and for all the people who had helped me with the purchase or worked on the house. Stephen was the willing centre of attraction: he demonstrated his computer and its ability to speak a garbled, Americanized version of the French language to everyone’s amusement, and graciously acknowledged the abundant congratulations showered on him on the success of his book. The children had quickly made new friends, and even Tim was communicating effectively in French with a few well-chosen words and gestures, like “football?” or “jouer?”. He did however object to being kissed on both cheeks at every encounter, until Robert remarked to his mystification that in a few years’ time he would be only too pleased to be kissed on both cheeks by the girls. As for me, in France I could be French, spontaneous and natural and true to myself, neither having to justify my actions nor apologize for my existence.

  11

  The Price of Fame

  The shoots of my budding self-esteem, cultivated in the soil of French society, were to be quickly crushed back in England. Optimistic as ever, I did not anticipate that the arrival in late April of a Hollywood film producer would signal the opening shots in the next onslaught on our home life. He seemed friendly enough, inspiring my confidence with stories of his young family, and conveying a genuine sense of purpose in his plan to make a film of A Brief History of Time. His would be a serious, informative film of the book, and he liked my idea that it should take the form of a journey in time and the universe through the eyes of a child. The idea was appealing. So long as the film remained strictly scientific and could be imaginatively done, using the innovative technology of graphics, his plans augured well.

  Hot on his heels came an American film crew, directed by a lively woman who also won my confidence with her sympathetic approach. It had become the accepted routine that film crews would first wreak havoc in the Department before turning their attention to our home for a reassuring touch of cosiness in the otherwise enigmatic portrait of the disabled genius. On initial acquaintance the directors would all appear to be pleasant, considerate, ordinary people, effusively promising that any disturbance would be kept to an absolute minimum. Their fly-on-the-wall approach would take no time at all and would require only a few shots, causing no disruption to our normal activities. Cameras, cables, arc lights and microphones would all remain at a discreet distance; the furniture would not be moved; we could dress informally and go about our daily business as usual.

  The reality bore no relation to these promises. Without exception, in the short interim between pleasantries and filming, the procedures would – before our shocked eyes – become devastatingly intrusive. Disregarding the assurances they had given, all the producers and directors would plead shortage of time or scarcity of funds in mitigation of their sudden change of approach as soon as the cameras started rolling. Items of furniture would be shoved around, often damaged, never to be returned to their original positions; blinding arc lamps and glaring reflective screens on cold metal supports would supplant well-worn familiar clutter, obscuring the furniture and the books and newspapers; lengths of cable would snake hazardously across the floors in and out of every room; microphones would be hung from any available hook or shelf. We strangers in the harshly transformed landscape of
our unrecognizable tubular steel home would be typecast in our parts: the principle (though untrained) actors in the drama, expected to react with natural grace and aplomb for the eye of the camera, that twentieth-century sacred object of worship. As I watched helplessly and participated reluctantly, a despairing voice inside me protested. Surely, it complained, there had to be a middle way between this insatiable nosiness and the starkly impersonal approach of the BBC Horizon film some years before. But an imaginative middle way would demand both more time and more money than any of the directors had at their disposal as they rushed frenziedly from one project to the next.

  For want of any outlet, my silent rebellion at this extra burden rumbled beneath the surface. Despite the complaints of the children, especially of Lucy, for whom the glare of publicity and the intrusion of the cameras were most distracting as her exams approached, I was in no position to bar the cameras from the house for fear of further antagonizing Stephen, who positively relished the publicity. He had just returned from yet another trip to America, but the respite did not arm me with sufficient strength to combat the depredations of the film crew at what was always for me the worst season of the year, when tree pollens settled like pepper dust in my sinuses. The American director, who at first sight had appeared so friendly and likeable, rapidly became assertive, indeed embarrassingly so, when her cameras trailed us into town to film my usual routine of Saturday-morning shopping. It was unusual for me to be accompanied in this weekly chore by Stephen and his retinue, even more so that we should all have a fully fledged film crew trailing our steps. There was no possibility of taking evasive action. It might not have been so bad if they had actually lent a hand with the shopping instead of following us like shadows, poking their cameras and microphones into my face as I loaded the shopping trolley to the rim and dragged its heavy weight home behind me.