Travelling to Infinity

by Jane Hawking

  The primary function of this film was supposed to be a portrait of Stephen for an American television news channel; subsequently it was to serve the dual purpose of providing a snippet of biographical background for the other scientific documentary based on A Brief History of Time. Only the thought that this spate of filming would be serving both purposes made that horrible weekend bearable. By the time that an urbane interviewer-journalist and his wife arrived for drinks that Saturday evening, I was in no mood to welcome any more film or television personalities or technicians into the house. Scarcely had I introduced myself to them than the journalist’s wife casually asked, just as I was handing her a drink, “Do you have a religion?” Her enquiry was delivered with an unabashed coolness which froze my frayed nerves. I turned on my vapid interrogator, more or less telling her to mind her own business, but then, instantly overcome with remorse, I heard myself foolishly inviting the entire team to dinner in compensation for my rudeness.

  Alone, late at night, I lay in bed aware that a trap was closing over me. The stress of publicity was forcing me to behave in ways that were uncharacteristic and untrue to myself, yet there was no clear way out. It was obvious that, in the eyes of the media, I had become an appendage, a peep show – relevant to Stephen’s survival and his success only because in the distant past I had married him, made a home for him and produced his three children. Nowadays I was there to appease the media’s desire for comforting personal detail while inwardly my spirit rebelled both at the indignity and at my own helplessness.

  Ten days after that bout of filming had come to an end, Stephen gave the Schrödinger lecture in a hot, stuffy lecture theatre, packed to capacity, at Imperial College, London. Schrödinger’s equation, the fundamental equation for the science of quantum mechanics which he developed in 1926, bears the same relation to the mechanics of the atom as Newton’s laws of motion bear to the movement of the planets. Stephen’s lecture about imaginary time was as lucid as it could be, and afterwards he was fêted and pursued by representatives from IBM, the firm that had sponsored the lecture, who hankered for a photograph with him, presumably as one of the perks of their job. I stood diffidently to one side, thinking that I was the only non-scientist present, until I was introduced to Schrödinger’s daughter, whom I had encountered once before at a similar occasion in Dublin in 1983. She was quiet and unassuming, informing me for the second time that she was Schrödinger’s daughter by someone other than his wife, but had later been adopted by Mrs Schrödinger. I was sorry for her; she was uncomfortably pursued by her father’s legacy – as much embarrassed perhaps by his reputation as a womanizer as she was haunted by his scientific fame – and walked in his shadow. I feared for my children – hers was not a fate that I wanted for them.

  The following Saturday, before setting off into town to sell flags for the National Schizophrenia Foundation, I opened Stephen’s mail for him as usual. It contained a letter from the Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher in which she proposed recommending his name to the Queen as a Companion of Honour in the forthcoming Birthday Honours’ List. The proposal sent us running for the encyclopedia. It revealed that this singular honour was one of the highest in the land, ranking above a knighthood and discreetly conveyed, without title, simply by the letters placed after the name. As Stephen was on the point of leaving for America, it fell to me to accept on his behalf.

  Since Stephen had already been nominated for an Honorary Doctorate of Science at the University of Cambridge, the summer promised to mark the apogee of his career – though how that, with its inevitable flood of media interest, was to be reconciled with Lucy’s A-levels and Robert’s Finals, let alone stability and harmony, was not at all obvious. Our priorities were diverging drastically. Mine was the preservation of the sanctity of the home and the privacy of our family life – or such tatters of it as remained after the nurses had done their worst to tear it apart and after the media had plundered every corner of it. Stephen was, for all his fame, but one member of a family where no one person had the right to be more important than any other. Although his medical condition demanded more attention for him than for anyone else, the home had still to cater fairly for the needs of all its occupants, adults and children alike. The children must never have cause to resent the circumstances into which they had been born.

  Stephen, for his part, delighted in the publicity. He revelled in his relationship with the media, who had made his name a household word all over the world. His fame, in the face of a sceptical and sometimes hostile society, represented the triumph not only of his mind over the secrets of the universe, but also of his body over death and disability. For him any publicity was good publicity and could always be justified by claiming that it would increase the sales of the book. A case of champagne arrived from Bantam Press later that summer in celebration of A Brief History of Time’s fifty-second week on the best-seller list. In the fifty-third week, it shot back to its commanding position at number one. It seemed that he had succeeded in reconciling two extremes in the task he had set himself: in his description of his branch of science, the most fundamental and the most elusive of all the sciences, he had managed to placate the scientific intelligentsia and attract the popular reader.

  Although there was no denying that the book was a phenomenal success, I tried to keep the correspondence relating to the handsome royalties confidential. If our sudden flush of wealth were to become generally advertised, I knew that I risked losing many of my real friends with whom in the past I had scraped and saved to make ends meet, and I was also well aware that any publicity given to our enhanced financial status would attract exactly the sort of people with whom I did not want to associate. In the past, while Stephen’s mind was focused on weightier matters, I had handled our financial affairs, always with an anxious eye on that uncertain future when Stephen might be too ill to work and the money might run out. I had run the family budget prudently and had accumulated sufficient savings to pay Lucy’s school fees and to provide a buffer against the rainy day, which for us could run to months and years. Since the signing of the contract for A Brief History in 1985, I had also dealt with the correspondence on that subject with the agent in New York. Unaccountably, the arrangement whereby I handled the royalties was suddenly overturned behind my back. It was from the agent in New York that I learnt of this change: he told me that he had been instructed to send all correspondence relating to the book to Stephen in the Department and no longer to me at home. I had no idea what had provoked this change, and Stephen gave no explanation. It was as if, after many years of mutual trust, my ability to handle financial affairs efficiently and with discretion was being called into question. In the resulting confusion, even the most casual helpers were allowed to open and read private correspondence; it was spread out on desks and tables, left strewn around for all to see, as if in black-and-white confirmation of the undisputed supremacy of genius.

  Stephen’s second trip to America that spring allowed us all a breathing space from impossible tensions in which to return to those other elements of a more regular lifestyle, the teaching, the studying, the literature and the music, and to settle into simpler, more relaxed habits without the vain and wearisome distractions of fame, publicity and contentious nurses. Tim fulfilled one of his passions when we took off for a promised weekend to Legoland in Denmark, and later in May we returned to France for half-term.

  The Moulin, welcoming us in its summer garb for the first time, opened its box of delights in a new guise. Further renovations had been completed, a bathroom had been added for Stephen’s sole use, work on the barn had been started, and the garden was beginning to take shape. My dream of an English country garden was being realized in France so satisfactorily that even Claude, my valiant workman, confessed that he had begun to plant flowers in his own garden where previously he had grown only vegetables. Even more significantly, the Moulin opened the door to another world, the world of a past era, where the impossible whirlwind of our Cambridge lives slowed to a leisurel
y pace under the influence of the land and the sky, and where the only sound was the song of the lark, soaring high into the blue above the green cornfield in the morning sun. The place had already engraved itself on my heart. Its clean air and broad patchwork of fields fading to a distant grey horizon, its sleepy shutters and its aroma of newly chopped logs and old wood, its backdrop of tall conifers and shrubs shimmering in the sun, all sang of unaccustomed peace, solitude and salvation. There I could be alone, undisturbed by nurses, by the press, by cameras, by the clamour of incessant demands. I could dig my garden. I could immerse myself in books without fear of interruption and I could learn and listen to music without fear of criticism at such wasteful self-indulgence. There I could find my true centre, in close touch with nature, old-fashioned, perhaps, contemplative certainly, a daydreamer whose favourite occupation was gazing out at the wide expanse of the western sky each evening, standing spellbound at the everchanging magnificence of the setting sun as it dropped behind the silhouetted line of trees across the fields.

  In those periods of reflection while I dug the garden, sowed seeds and planted rose bushes, I identified with the hero of one of the set texts that I had been teaching for the French syllabus in the past year. Candide, Voltaire’s young hero, whose optimism in the “best of all worlds” – as taught by the philosopher Dr Pangloss – is sadly betrayed by experience, finally turns his back on the world and takes refuge in his garden. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin...” is his ultimate, pessimistic, personal solution to the malfunction of society. The clash of inexorable but often zany logic with searing, unresolved emotional problems lay like a corrosive material at the root of our existence in Cambridge, and that root was succumbing to the insidious effect of the invasive poison of fame and fortune. In France the soil was fresh and fertile, and there the garden was full of the promise of a future, a cyclical foreseeable future, decreed by the immutable laws of nature.

  12

  Honoris Causa

  In the summer of 1989 all attention was concentrated on Stephen’s multiple triumphs and the avalanche of media interest in them. The date for the conferral of the Honorary Doctorate by the Chancellor, the Duke of Edinburgh, was set for Thursday 15th June while, known only to ourselves, the royal honour from Buckingham Palace was to be confirmed the next day and published in the media on Saturday 17th. By a fortunate coincidence, this was also the date of a concert to be performed in Stephen’s honour by Jonathan and the Camerata, two days after the honorary degree ceremony, also in the Senate House. Although in 1987 the Newton celebrations and concert had provided an attractive lure for commercial sponsors to support the Camerata, the sponsors themselves had become extremely vulnerable to the harsh vicissitudes of life in Thatcherite Britain. The ink was barely dry on the signatures to a generous sponsorship deal when the sponsoring business, a very gentlemanly British firm, was gobbled up by an American computer corporation that had no compunction in declaring that they were in business to make money, not to support the arts, music or any other charitable organization. They promptly pulled out of the sponsorship deal. This left Jonathan, whose schedule of contracted concerts for two years hence was based on the calculations of the sponsorship deal, potentially with a huge debt when he himself at the best of times earned little more than a subsistence income from music. At that most inauspicious moment for Jonathan and the Camerata, Stephen’s fame and success offered the hope of salvation. A concert in Stephen’s honour could be counted on to attract a large audience of people who would come to applaud Stephen as well as to listen to the music. It might also attract new sponsors for whom the high scientific profile would be attractive. Stephen would be fêted with his favourite pieces of baroque music and a retiring collection could be divided among the charities we all supported. This piece of planning augured well for everybody, and Stephen gave it his approval – along with his approval of the Prime Minister’s letter, before he left for America in May.

  The challenge of concert planning, forever flying in the face of sound economic sense, had previously added a certain spice and bravura to my other various dilettante occupations. That concert would have been no exception, had it not been for the perpetual incursions of the media. The journalists who came to interview me were a mixed bunch: some were reasonably pleasant, some were clinical, others were demanding. It was impossible to tell what sort of gloss they would put on an interview in advance. French journalists, Spanish journalists, representatives of all nations, came in an endless stream, all wanting a different slant on the science and on the background. They brought their superficial interviewing techniques to the situation; in turn, I developed my own techniques for dealing with them by deciding in advance how much information I was prepared to part with. I saw no reason why I should confide all the intimate complexities of my life to a journalist, a stranger whose interest in me was governed by the imperative to sell more newspapers. If I wanted to confess, I would turn to a priest, if I needed psychiatric treatment I would turn to a doctor, and if I had a story to tell I might one day write it myself, though regard for privacy – my own and other people’s – might well outweigh the desire to tell that story. If, therefore, the questions posed by journalists overstepped my boundaries, I would turn the interview into a conversation, asking for their opinions and reactions rather than telling them my own. Inevitably I became the target of disparaging remarks. For example, one journalist reported that I had “cared for Stephen for just a couple of years after our marriage”. My old Headmistress and stalwart supporter, Miss Gent, wrote to the editor of that newspaper, the Times, to rectify the mistake. She was shocked at his arrogant reply: far from offering any redress or apology, he asserted that he knew better than she did and he was confident that the facts in the article were correct. Our loyal friend George Hill, the husband of my school friend Caroline, ever anxious to protect us from the prying eyes of the gutter press, said that he knew about the misrepresentations in the Times, because he had peered over the journalist’s shoulder when he was writing the piece. However, George had been so relieved to find no mention of Jonathan’s part in our household that he had thought it better to let the article stand as it was rather than reveal Jonathan’s close association with us.

  If however, as once I did when being interviewed for the Guardian, I allowed myself to show any dissatisfaction with the trite old clichés about the rewards of living with a genius – those oft-repeated truisms which dwelt on fame and fortune as if illness and disability were not fundamental factors in our lives – I would be accused of disloyalty to Stephen. But as I saw it, if I continued to perpetuate the myth of cheerful self-sufficiency without even mentioning the hardships, I would be cheating the many disabled people and their families, who were probably suffering all the heartache, the anxieties, the privations, the stresses and strains that we ourselves had undergone in earlier years. It would be all too easy for an uncaring society to point accusingly at other disabled people and declare, “If Professor Hawking can do it, why can’t you?” The hard-pressed carers might be pressurized into performing even more impossible tasks because of the unrealistic image of our way of life presented through the media. I could no longer truthfully offer the carefree, smiling façade, giving the erroneous impression that our lives were contented and easy, marred only by a little local inconvenience. For that Guardian interview my assessment was candid and truthful: I noted the triumphs but did not gloss over the difficulties. I voiced our criticisms of the National Health Service and emphasized the fact that Stephen’s success, even in procuring funds to pay for his nursing, had been due entirely to our own efforts. I described how we fluctuated between the glittering peaks of brilliant success and the black sloughs of critical illness and despair, with very little level ground in between.

  Such simple and fairly obvious truths proved most unpalatable to those people who had come to believe in Stephen’s immortality and infallibility, and had conveniently detached themselves from the reality of his condition, namely his family
and certain of his nurses. My comments were interpreted as treason where no hint of criticism could ever be countenanced. Such reactions only served to increase my sense of isolation. Were the people around me blind or mad, or was I losing my mind? Were those people living in a parallel universe where the roles were reversed and where, as they seemed to suggest, it was I who was infirm? Further accusations of disloyalty were flung thick and fast on the showing of a BBC film made that summer. In it I repeated the misgivings voiced in the two newspaper interviews, in a vain attempt to restore a sensible balance both to the depiction of our way of life and to the representation of Stephen’s scientific theories as the basis for a new religion. My performance before the cameras, which rolled throughout the period of the honours and celebrations and afterwards, was not enhanced by a streaming cold and a raging sore throat – just a couple of the recurring infections and ailments which followed each other in quick succession from beginning to end of that decade. The heavy cold lent my interview and voice-overs a jaundiced tinge, deadening any humour and betraying an unintentional touch of bitterness.

  Sadness there certainly was in my voice: it was the unfortunate outward manifestation of a profound inner sense of desolation and foreboding. Cassandra herself could not have forecast more accurately, or with greater dread, the catastrophe that I knew was looming over us all. Even Nikki Stockley, the young television producer, remarked how Elaine Mason had disrupted the filming process when she had tried to film in the Department. In public and at home, she was busily usurping my place at every opportunity, sometimes aping me, sometimes undermining me, always flaunting her influence over Stephen. She had engineered an unassailable stranglehold over the nursing rota, and had so successfully ingratiated herself that all remonstrance was useless: any comments would be reported back to Stephen, and I would be castigated for my interference. My appeals to the secretary of the Royal College of Nursing for help in enforcing the code of nursing conduct met with a flat refusal to become involved unless I could produce photographic evidence of malpractice. Such was the background of physical chaos and emotional torment against which the tapestry of the traditional honorary-degree ceremony unfolded, briefly transporting us into a fantasy realm of theatrical grandeur and champagne celebrations where all the froth of new clothes, archaic ritual, fixed smiles, polite chatter and endless handshakes spread like an insubstantial white layer over the smouldering reality beneath.