Travelling to Infinity (12 page)

Our return to England from Texas on Christmas Eve heralded yet another change in our lives. After Christmas in St Albans, we went back to Cambridge to resume residence, not at
number 11 Little St Mary’s Lane but at number 6. Our tireless supporter, Thelma Thatcher, had rung the absentee owner of the empty house at number 6, a Mrs Teulon-Porter (“such a
strange lady, my dears”) impressing upon her that it was an absolute disgrace that her house should be vacant at a time of “desperate housing shortage for the young”. Mrs
Teulon-Porter responded to the urgent call by catching the first bus to Cambridge from her home in Shaftesbury. Despite the misgivings about her strange personality, she was offered generous
hospitality at the Thatchers’ while she attended to her empty property.

Mrs Teulon-Porter was a small, wispy, grey woman, already advanced in years. As Fräulein Teulon, she had come to England in the 1920s, had bought number 6 Little St Mary’s Lane and
then had married her next-door neighbour, the late Mr Porter. Both she and he were passionate historians of folklore and were closely connected with the Cambridge Folk Museum, which might have
accounted for Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that they dabbled in the occult. Various items in the house testified to their shared interest: an Anglo-Saxon rune-stone, probably from the
churchyard, was incorporated into the fireplace; the door screen was a slice hewn from the trunk of an elm; the offcut wood from a cartwheel had been converted to form a heavy, curved stool; and an
eighteenth-century postillion’s box, made of oak, had been upended and attached to a wall to form a small cupboard.

Mrs Teulon-Porter seemed harmless enough to us – perhaps because she had been so well tutored by her hostess at number 9, but her house, despite all its quaint additions and its ideal
location, struck us as very pokey and gloomy, musty-smelling and sticky with Dickensian grime. The façade in red brick and stuccoed pargeting suggested Edwardian renovations, while the front
rooms on all three floors dated from the eighteenth century, charmingly so if one could overlook the dirt. The two flights of stairs were narrow and steep, but did not at that stage present any
unsurmountable difficulties. The back of the house – looking out onto a dingy yard enclosed by other houses and a high back wall – appeared to be on the point of collapse, because the
foundations had subsided so badly that the floor of the kitchen and, correspondingly, the kitchen ceiling and the floor of the bathroom above, sloped at an alarming angle. Mrs Teulon-Porter did not
appear to consider this eccentricity at all hazardous. According to a plaque in the outside wall, John Clarke had masterminded this exemplary piece of engineering in 1770.

It required imagination and Mrs Thatcher’s no-nonsense approach to convince us that this really was our dream house. Certainly its situation was perfect. The front rooms, right opposite
the old gas lamp, enjoyed a full view of the churchyard, wistfully poetic even in winter, and although the proportions of the ground floor were rather spoilt by the staircase of the house at number
5 butting into the party wall, the two bedrooms were quite sufficient for our requirements. “My dears, all it needs is a coat of paint, you’ll be surprised what a coat of paint can
do,” Thelma Thatcher declared authoritatively, determined not to let her masterly scheme be upset by trivialities.

Thus persuaded, we entered into negotiations with the owner. Stephen boldly made her an offer of £2,000 for her property. Not surprisingly she turned it down, timidly averring with one eye
on Mrs Thatcher that she would expect it to fetch at least £4,000 on the open market. She would however agree to let it to us for £4 a week until such time as we could raise the
£4,000 needed to buy it. In the meantime we were virtually free to treat the house as our own and redecorate it at will. The arrangement was to everyone’s satisfaction. Mrs Thatcher
shepherded her guest back to number 9 and there plied her with such liberal quantities of sherry, or possibly gin, that the next we heard was that Mrs Teulon-Porter, before departing for
Shaftesbury, had agreed to have the dusty old coal shed and lean-to removed from the back yard and the outside of the house repainted.

Since the house was already vacant, Mrs Teulon-Porter was content to allow us to start redecorating inside before moving in. As Stephen’s thesis was now at the bookbinder’s, the time
which I had previously spent typing it at weekends could now be devoted to my next occupation, that of house-painting. It was rewarding, but bore worryingly little relation to the Spanish studies
which I was supposed to be revising for Finals. However, as the house was in a truly depressing state and as we could not afford to have it professionally redecorated, I had no choice but to do it
myself. Armed with a collection of brushes and a plentiful supply of white emulsion, I attacked the grimy walls of the living room. My intention was to paint the two most important rooms, the
living room and the main bedroom, before moving in, and then tackle the rest – the attic, the two flights of stairs, the kitchen and bathroom – more gradually over the ensuing
months.

As I disliked the smell of paint, I usually worked with the front door wide open. The Thatchers were frequent and admiring visitors, plying me with cups of tea and encouraging comments. One day,
Mr Thatcher paused as he was passing, bending his military frame slightly to peer in at the open door. “I say,” he exclaimed, “you look such a fragile little thing, but, by Jove,
you must be tough!” From the top of the stepladder I smiled, flattered by this commendation from a veteran of the First World War who still bore the disfiguring marks of that conflict on his
gaunt face. A few days later we were told that the Thatchers had decided to pay their odd-job man to paint the living-room ceiling for us: “Dear Billy’s housewarming present to our new
neighbours,” was Thelma Thatcher’s way of describing her husband’s extraordinary generosity. The Thatcher’s odd-job man, a somewhat portly version of John Gielgud, was a
retired artist who filled in his time with larger-scale painting while his wife ran a print shop on King’s Parade. He was an amiable man who, I suspected, derived much quiet amusement from my
initial attempts at wielding a paintbrush. Indeed, under his benevolent tuition, I soon acquired many of the tricks of his trade, like starting a wall from the top, or applying the brush in a
circular motion over an uneven surface, or using a hard edge to paint a window frame.

Stephen’s reputation in relativistic circles may have been rapidly ascending the ladder of fame on account of his pursuit of singularities, but my advance in learning was exhibiting an
equally dizzying if more erratic series of highs and lows: propelled upwards by intensive doses of medieval and modern languages, philology and literature during the week, and brought to earth by a
crash course in the skills of interior decorating on Saturdays. Finally, when I began to find the area of wall and ceiling still to be covered rather more daunting than I had anticipated, we
calculated that we could just afford to ask the decorator to paint the kitchen for us, a particularly unpleasant task since the grime and grease were probably as old as the house.

Although my parents had only just moved to their new house, they and my brother Chris came to Cambridge one weekend early in 1966 to redecorate the top-floor bedroom and, in token of his
willingness to help, Stephen’s father spared a day from his globetrotting to paint the bathroom while I applied a coat of enamel to the old chipped bath. Then, magically, fully justifying
Thelma Thatcher’s convictions, our tumbledown eighteenth-century cottage acquired the air of a des res, and in the transformation the angles of its floors and ceilings had become simply
eccentric curiosities. Our few pieces of furniture, which various colleagues of Stephen’s carried the five doors along the lane, fitted in perfectly – although, of course, when we
bought them we had not given a moment’s thought to the possible proportions of their eventual resting place.

Proud of our restoration of the little house, Stephen and I decided that the new Bursar of Caius was due for another visit, especially as Stephen was by now beginning to feel more sure of his
place in the College hierarchy. Early in the New Year, we had braved the annual Ladies’ Night, Bishop Shaxton’s Solace, when wives were officially welcomed to the College precincts and
treated to a banquet, as if in compensation for the contempt in which they were held for the rest of the year. Bishop Shaxton had, in the sixteenth century, bequeathed the munificent sum of twelve
shillings and sixpence for the solace of every Fellow who had to spend Christmas at home rather than in the College. The equivalent in modern terms of twelve shillings and sixpence per head was
sufficient to provide a lavish fiveor six-course dinner with unlimited quantities of the best wines for the Fellowship and their spouses. Typically the meal would consist of soup, a whole lobster,
an undefined small game bird each – usually served complete with head and limbs – a substantial creamy pudding, a cheese savoury and then, of course, at dessert, the famous port –
or claret – which tradition demanded should only ever be passed clockwise round the table. In theory it was a magnificent spread, but in practice college halls tend to be draughty places, and
usually the food was cold before it reached the table. Our first experience of Bishop Shaxton’s Solace was a chill one, not only on account of the temperature of the food, the wine and the
hall. We were seated on the same table as the former Bursar – the one who had so scathingly dismissed Stephen’s perfectly reasonable request for a job description before our marriage.
That was bad enough, but our discomfort was compounded by finding ourselves placed out on a limb at the end of the table. After the meal, eaten in a frosty silence, an elderly band appeared from
the shadows and struck up antediluvian foxtrots. I had never learnt the foxtrot, as the advent of the Beatles had cut short my brief flirtation with ballroom dancing, and now I could only watch in
pensive, glum frustration as our tight-lipped dinner companions deserted us for the dance floor
–
looking like close-furled black umbrellas, they authoritatively steered their
submissive, upholstery-clad wives round the hall, deftly exhibiting a precise, manicured display of ornamental footwork. I was twenty-one: all around me our dining companions were in their forties
and fifties, if not their sixties and seventies. It was as if we had been propelled into a geriatric culture where our generation was deliberately snubbed as irrelevant.

The only consolation was that Caius, as one of the richest, most solidly based colleges, could probably afford to lend us a couple of thousand pounds without the loan creating a blip in the
college accounts. We were well aware that no building society would even begin to consider the house for a mortgage, but Stephen, undeterred by his previous encounters in the Bursar’s office,
thought it perfectly reasonable to apply to the College for a loan so that we could improve our offer to Mrs Teulon-Porter. While he was with the Bursar, I sat waiting in the outer office and
broached a matter of some delicacy to Mr Clarke, the white-haired bursarial assistant, much more amenable than the Bursar himself. My discussion began in the nature of a complaint. Why, I asked Mr
Clarke, had he sent Stephen the application forms for a university pension a few weeks back when it was common knowledge that Stephen’s life was going to be so drastically foreshortened that,
in all probability, he would not qualify? Was it not a bit heartless of him to have sent the forms? Stephen had taken one look at them and with a weary gesture had pushed them aside, not wanting to
contemplate arrangements for a future that others might look forward to, but that was to be denied him.

Mr Clarke did not apologize for any insensitivity; quite the contrary, he shook his head as if unable to comprehend my problem. “Well, young lady, I just follow my instructions,” he
said, turning his bright blue eyes on me from beneath busy white brows. “My instructions are to send out the forms to all new Fellows, as all new Fellows are by rights entitled to a
university pension. Your husband is a new Fellow, so he is entitled to a university pension, just like the rest of them. All he has to do is sign the forms to establish his rights.” His words
were still ringing in my ears when he added casually as an afterthought, “No need for any medical tests or anything of that sort, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I could hardly believe what he was saying. This was an area which, in our ignorance, we had tacitly dismissed as inapplicable to us. Now I was being told that it could be resolved with a mere
signature and, moreover, that it would assure us of a commodity which neither of us had ever thought about before – that is to say, security. For one afternoon’s business we had both
been remarkably successful, and through our success had discovered this new goal in life, security, which suddenly assumed a comforting importance. Stephen had persuaded the Bursar to send the
College land agent to inspect the house with a view to securing a loan, and I had secured Stephen’s rights to a pension. With a loan to buy the house and a pension, our well-being would gain
two firm anchors in an otherwise uncertain world.

The College land agent came to survey the house one sunny spring morning, when the churchyard was bursting into a profusion of yellow blossom. Our optimism soon quailed before his dry, unsmiling
exterior, and when he issued his verbal summary of his projected report, our hopes were dashed beyond recall. The agent gave us the strong impression that we were wasting his time, calling him out
on such a nonsensical errand. Could we not see that the back of the house was falling down? And, as if that were not enough, the third-floor attic was a definite fire hazard. He would not risk
sleeping up there, or even using it as a study himself, nor would he advise letting anyone else do so. A two-hundred-year-old house was not, in his opinion, a sensible purchase. In any case, there
were so many road-building schemes in the offing that he would not be surprised if the whole lane were demolished to make way for a new access road to the city centre from the west. He could not
possibly recommend the property as an investment to the College.