Free Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking Page B

Dunham’s kitchen in raptures. Stephen’s hundred pounds
– added to the two hundred and fifty pounds which my father had been accumulating for me in National Savings and which he had promised to give me on my twenty-first birthday – would
enable us to pay off Stephen’s overdraft and buy a car. Later that summer, just before the wedding, Stephen’s close friend in Trinity Hall, Rob Donovan, negotiated a very favourable
deal for us with his father, a car dealer in Cheshire. We had the choice of two vehicles: one, a gleaming, red-painted, open-topped 1924 Rolls Royce, was tantalizing but quite impractical and
rather beyond our means; at the other end of the scale, there was a red Mini on offer. Reluctantly Stephen had to concede that the Mini was better suited to our purse and to our requirements,
especially since one of those small clouds looming on my horizon was ominously marked “driving test”.
    As all my previous attempts had ended in failure, I did not suppose that turning up for the next test in a 1924 Rolls would endear me to the crusty, humourless examiner who, when last I
encountered him, had failed me yet again. Drily he had commented, as he clutched his heart, that my driving was not that of a beginner but of a hardened driver; it was alarmingly carefree and much
too close to the speed limit. He should have been grateful that, given my recent experiences, I did not exceed the speed limit, overtake on bends or hills and attack dual carriageways from the
wrong direction. Ironically, considering his known driving techniques, Stephen still held a valid driving licence, although he was no longer able to drive, so it was within the bounds of the law
for me to drive on a provisional licence while he sat beside me. When finally in the autumn of 1965 I passed the dreaded test, it may have been because my bête noire, the chief examiner, was
reported to be in hospital.
    All those successes and celebrations in the early months of 1965 clearly marked our way forwards, with the result that my concerns became more intensely focused on Cambridge and the wedding.
Inevitably a distance was developing between me and my friends and contemporaries, both my student friends in Westfield and my old dancing and tennis friends in St Albans. The last time that I saw
many of those early friends was either when we worked together in the sorting office at the Post Office before the Christmas of 1964, or at my twenty-first birthday party: this Stephen’s
parents kindly agreed to host in their large, rambling house, which was much more spacious than my parents’ semidetached.
    It was a glorious day, hot and sunny with bright, clear spring skies, and my happiness was complete. Stephen’s present to me, recordings of the late Beethoven Quartets, could only be
interpreted as the ultimate expression of our depth of feeling for each other. That birthday was happily very different from the previous year, when Stephen had given me a record of the complete
works of Webern and later taken me to a drama about the use of the electric chair in the United States. That afternoon my whole family, including Grandma, had sat in a silent circle in our living
room listening to Webern’s entire opus. Stephen sat solemnly in an armchair while Dad buried his head in a book, Mum immersed herself in her knitting and Grandma dozed off. With great aplomb
my family managed to appear totally unmoved by the assorted atonic clashes, lengthy inconsequential pauses and grating dissonances of the music, while I, sitting on the floor on the verge of
hysterics, had to hide my face in a cushion.
    In 1965, however, my twenty-first birthday party went with a swing in the warm spring air under the coloured lights on the terrace. It was as magical as a fairy tale, although as in all fairy
tales it masked a perceptibly hostile element. Again I sensed an ill-disguised frisson of resentment in Philippa’s attitude towards me which I was at a loss to