When Magteld dropped Adam off at school on the morning she was diagnosed, he refused to leave her side. He clung to her like ivy to a tree and only let go when the deputy head came out to lead him away. The startling thing was that she hadn’t told him about the appointment. ‘I’m clearly not a very good actress,’ she observed.
After her biopsy she told the boys they would have to cuddle her on the left side from now on, because the other side was too sore. That night they moved into her bed, displacing me to the spare room.
Two hurdles stood in our way: what to tell them, and how to be certain they had understood it. Euan was nine, Adam on the threshold of seven. We couldn’t be absolutely sure they knew what death meant. We started by talking about sickness, since they knew about that. I told Adam his mummy was going to be very sick for a long time, but that it was all to help her get better. He nodded silently.
Then I spoiled it by telling him he needed to be a good boy and not kick up a fuss. Which to an autistic child means: forget yourself. Be someone else. Climb on your own head. Do not exist.
Adam spent the next few days in a temper that wouldn’t have disgraced a rhinoceros. One day I bought a wall clock for his bedroom. When I came home at the end of the day it was lying in pieces on the kitchen worktop, its hands frozen and a great crack splayed across its face. The clock face only showed the hours of 3, 6, 9 and 12, and the missing numbers had driven him to distraction, Magteld explained.
Gathering a small army of cuddly toys, he occupied my half of the double bed. Because Adam struggled to speak he gave away few clues about what impact his mother’s illness had on him, but as her treatment went on, and her hair vanished, he became increasingly reluctant to go to school in the morning.
One day he managed to distil his anxieties into an explanation. ‘I don’t want you to take me to school because you’re sore,’ he said.
Magteld sat down with Adam and his toy reindeer, Finlay, so called because his grandparents had bought him in Finland.
‘Why doesn’t Adam want to go to school, Finlay?’ asked Magteld.
‘He thinks you’re a different mum,’ replied Adam, in Finlay’s voice.
Adam’s visual sense dominated his reasoning. He had watched from the bath as Magteld ripped her hair out in clumps, chortling at the spectacle, but when he realised it was gone permanently, he decided it must have been painful.
‘But I’m still the same mum as before,’ Magteld told Finlay. ‘I just don’t have my hair. And when I get better, it will grow back.’
That eased Adam’s fears about the school run, but there were other tears in the fabric. I had fallen into the habit of using Magteld’s illness to reproach him. Cancer had become a kind of third parent, a sullen and demanding stepmother. If he made too much noise in his bedroom while Magteld was sleeping next door, I told him to stop disturbing her. One morning I pulled the trick once too often and Adam yelled at me in anguish. For the first time I saw her illness from his point of view. A seven-year-old boy was seeing his strong, dependable mother transformed into a frail and hairless woman. He was grieving the loss of the mum he had known. And my response was to wrap his grief in my own anxiety and throw it back at him.
I stopped chastising him. I said his mum was trying to get better and he could help her by doing more for himself. His rage abated. But as Magteld’s illness progressed, it became clear that Euan and Adam were terribly, terrifyingly aware of how grave her situation was. As Maurice Sendak argued, adults who try to protect children from bad news succeed only in deceiving themselves. We had no choice. We had to take them with us on the journey. We had to tell them the truth.
On the weekend after Magteld’s diagnosis we went to Paisley for a picnic with a carers’ group. It was a capricious September day, grey and sharp, with heavy clouds trudging across the sky, but for a few hours they rolled aside and the children played in the sunshine. There was a boating lake with a miniature railway that looped around it, and Euan and Adam spent most of the afternoon going round the loop, enthralled by the shriek of the train’s whistle and the trundle of the carriages. Every so often Magteld ducked away to talk to a friend and returned, her eyes moist and a quiet smile of relief on her face. At this stage her diagnosis was still restricted to close friends, like pregnancy but without the joy.
As the weeks went by, the news rippled outwards to neighbours, distant relatives, acquaintances, colleagues and employers. Cancer, cancer, cancer: every repetition of the word stung like those stones on the gravel path in Gérardmer.
The reactions varied widely. Some elected to dispense cheap advice – ‘stay positive’ was a recurring platitude, as if we could somehow think the cancer into going away. Friends in medical professions had the unfortunate habit of saying things that were meant to ease our worries but instead contrived to add to them: one doctor asked, ‘Is it positive?’ Not only did I have no idea, but I was only just learning that there were as many different cancers as there are trees in the jungle, and the chances of us emerging from the thicket alive seemed infinitesimal. Most of all we came to dread that declaration of uncommitted support: ‘If there’s anything I can do,’ usually combined with a flap of the hands as the speaker began retreating at a canter. We were glad of all offers of help, but we simply had no energy to do people’s thinking for them.
There were the constant enquiries about Magteld’s health. ‘How are you feeling?’ becomes a loaded question when it is asked dozens of times a day, in all circumstances, often paired with an expression of dramatic concern. Magteld would find it tagged to Facebook posts about the children’s achievements at school, or her holiday photographs, or the weather. Every time she tried to forget that she was living through the nightmare of cancer, those four words would drag her back in.
But many people gave freely, even if it was just twenty minutes of their time for coffee and a chat. One friend appeared unbidden on the doorstep one evening with two Tupperware boxes full of frozen leftovers. Another offered to pray for me. In other circumstances I might, as a devout atheist, have dismissed or scorned such a gesture, but I welcomed it, because it acknowledged and valued our sense of vulnerability. The straight answer was no, there was nothing anyone could do to banish the pain, but every act of kindness made us feel a little less alone.
Now that we had entered the realm of cancer treatment the programme lurched forwards at harrowing speed. Magteld was diagnosed on a Thursday; on Monday she returned to the hospital for a second biopsy. The surgeons needed to carve a larger chunk from her tumour so they could probe the growth for clues about how to quell it. They would inject a radioactive dye to track the progress of the cancer cells. The operation would be done under general anaesthetic, Magteld’s first since childhood, and the implication – of being slashed and stitched while she lay unconscious, and the faint chance she might not wake up again – pestered her.
‘You’re worried because you’re healthy,’ I said. ‘People who spend their lives in hospital don’t think twice about being poked and prodded.’
We had been warned that the rhythm of our lives would have to submit to the chemotherapy cycle. Our well-being, our social lives and our capacity to care for ourselves all depended on how Magteld’s body responded. The hospital appointments were inked in the diary, every three weeks until New Year, like breakwater posts stretching out to sea.
The advice was to use the good days and weather the bad ones. ‘It’s like I’m living my life in snippets,’ said Magteld, and once again I marvelled at her dexterity with her second language.
When we arrived at the hospital on Monday we discovered the operation had been put back to the afternoon. Magteld sat and chatted with a fellow patient in the waiting room. I went home and had lunch in the garden, joined by a wasp that stung me between the fingers as I swatted it away. I yelped with pain, then instantly thought of Magteld lying, prone, on the operating table as surgeons grappled with the dumb assassin inside her. What was a wasp sting compared to that?
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sp; It was early evening by the time she was ready to be picked up. She was sitting up in bed, relieved and weary and in some discomfort from the operation. I helped her out of the flimsy dressing-gown she had bought from Marks & Spencer the day before, and pulled her cotton top carefully over her bruised arm. Over the next two years I would become adept at this kind of nursing work, but right now I was clumsy and hesitant, and she winced as I pulled down the sleeve.
‘Just before I woke up I had a lovely dream,’ she said. ‘I was walking in the sunshine with the boys.’
‘Was I there?’ I asked selfishly.
‘Of course you were,’ she said with a soft smile.
At home we lay in bed, side by side, unable to clinch because she was too fragile, like a porcelain vase.
2
We met in Italy, two decades earlier. It was probably the only moment our lives could have crossed. I was eighteen and had a summer job with a company that hired campsite couriers to work all over Europe. Chance dumped me in the hills above Lake Garda, where every morning I rolled up the awning of my tent and drank in the view of the dazzling sheet of water cradled by vine-clad mountains. As I remarked in Magteld’s eulogy two decades later, who could have failed to fall in love in such seductive surroundings?
The campsite was owned by a Dutchman, and many of the guests were from his homeland. The Dutch seemed to be the ideal folk to hang out with on holiday: relaxed, self-assured, accomplished drinkers and footballers, with a high proportion of lissom blonde girls, even if their language sounded more gargled than spoken. On the pitch across from me was Jacco, a Dutchman in his late twenties with a deep tan, a javelin-thrower’s physique and a tentative resemblance to Sting. He worked campsites in summer and ski resorts in the winter, in a seamless hedonistic cycle. He seemed to me to be dazzlingly mature and wise, especially around women. That impression was cemented when he seduced his area manager within a few weeks and indulged in a raucous all-night coupling in one of the tents.
One day Jacco was standing by my tent when he pointed at two girls walking along the path below us. ‘See those two Dutch girls over there?’ I remember him saying. ‘You should go and talk to them. I think the taller one likes you.’
The taller one was Magteld. She was seventeen and on holiday with a schoolfriend. I have a picture of her at that time, as slender as a reed, with blonde hair like silk draped over her shoulders, and legs of unblemished marble. She wears knee-length Lycra leggings, a tight-necked T-shirt adorned with a silver chain, and an air of impishness. She craned her long neck forwards as she walked and had a slight bounce in her step, and my first memory is of her twisting her head back over her right shoulder, fixing her pale blue eyes on mine and breaking into a shy smile. It’s almost certainly a composite image, but that’s how I remember the first time my eyes met my wife’s, in the first week of June 1993.
Our first date was in the campsite bar, down the hill from my tent, overlooking the lake. It was early June, and the lights of boats flickered beneath us in the lingering twilight. I don’t remember what we drank, or what we talked about. Probably Jacco and Magteld’s schoolfriend were with us, and Marco, the campsite watchman, and his girlfriend Roberta, who spoke better German than English.
On the walk back up the hillside Magteld’s fingers interlaced with mine. We swung our arms together forcefully, keeping step as we climbed up the steep, dimly lit path. I had never kissed a girl before and wondered what the inside of her mouth would feel like. I had an inkling I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.
But that first night she simply said goodnight, lingering for a second on the edge of my tent pitch before retreating to her caravan. I was too good at waiting, it seemed. The next night the routine was much the same: the drink, the lake, the warmth of her slender hand as we walked up the hill. But this time, when we stopped at my tent, she took another four steps to the doorway and launched into a full-on kiss. I was so stunned I forgot to breathe for a second, like a novice swimmer, until her tongue enticed mine to dance. Her eyes were closed; mine were open and focused on the tiny frown on her forehead.
She went home after three more nights of those hastily snatched kisses. They seem rather coy in retrospect, sweet weightless souvenirs of a holiday romance. Magteld, her schoolfriend and her friend’s parents drove back through the night to north-east Holland; to me it could just as well have been the moon. As they left I focused on the back of her blonde head through the window of the vanishing car, believing it was the last I would ever see of her.
Not once in all those sultry nights above Lake Garda had I dared to speak her name out loud. Magteld – a soft Dutch ‘g’ rolling into a solid ‘t’ like a wave crashing against a breakwater – proved too much for my reserved English tongue.
By the next evening I was already consigning her to memory when the phone rang. The campsite staff shouted up to my tent from the cabin that served as their office, and I scrambled down the grass bank to listen to her voice, as sweet and fresh as honeyed tea. The night after that she called again. Letters followed in the next few weeks, since phone calls were expensive and had to be rationed. It’s hard to believe now that at the end of the last century there was no cheap and easy way of making contact across an international boundary. Letters took a week or more to filter through the Italian postal system. Ours was perhaps one of the last truly epistolary relationships, when the anticipation of the weekly missive could make the most banal sentence seem to simmer with suppressed passion.
In those early months it was more like a pen-pal exchange than a traffic of billets-doux. A typical letter would begin with an observation about the weather, then summarise whatever had happened in the past week and close with a few plaintive sentences about how we yearned to be back in each other’s arms. Perhaps I was charmed by her faltering English, which threw a veil of mystery over her personality; perhaps my mannered prose fostered the illusion that she was living through a Jane Austen adaptation. Whatever the reason, the writing habit survived the summer and, somewhat to my surprise, my first term at Edinburgh University, and as the autumn wore on I made plans to visit Magteld in the week before Christmas.
I touched down at Schiphol airport on a Saturday afternoon. Magteld was waiting at the arrivals gate in a long black raincoat. Standing beside her was her father, Luc, a tall man in his early forties with sandy hair, a neat beard and an earring. With his crumpled leather jacket and jeans he might have been the manager of an up-and-coming rock band. We climbed into the back seat of the family Volvo, where a Tupperware box of cheese sandwiches and cartons of fruit juice had been packed for the journey across the Netherlands.
Even for a native of Norfolk, the Dutch landscape was astoundingly flat. Only the sky changed, fading from grey to a starless black, during the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Sleen, a one-windmill village near the German border in the province of Drenthe. ‘We have some catching up to do,’ I said, and clutched Magteld’s hand for the first time since six months earlier on an Italian hillside. I had no real idea what to expect.
It rained for most of the week. We played board games, including chess, though not for long: Magteld was a poor player and an even worse loser. In the evenings we retreated to her attic room, beneath the deep pitch of the roof and the flat grey sky, with a platter of cheese and crackers. We met all four of her grandparents, who had lived through the wartime occupation and recently retired as farmers. It was the tail end of that time when contempt for a country that was a few hours’ walk away ran through many people’s veins like the poison of an insect bite.
When we lay in bed together Magteld’s eyes glittered like stars, and her smile was a dazzling crescent moon. What this beautiful girl, with her porcelain skin and delicate breasts and irresistibly plump cheeks, saw in me, I wasn’t sure. Our first attempt at sex was awkward and clumsy, and we sat on a bus the next day doubled up with leg cramp. That night we tried again, in the hope of expunging the memory, and thankfully with more success.
‘I will n
ever break our relation,’ she said one evening, looking up at me with soft tears and a searching look in her eyes. I nodded, dumbly, and pulled her head against my chest. At the end of the week, as we parted at the airport, she removed the silver necklace from around her neck and draped it around mine. I boarded the plane feeling as if the textures of the world had changed: the damp air was keener, the soil thicker, the sea below restless and churning with life.
Easter, 1994. Clumps of daffodils and a canopy of thick white cherry blossom festooned the garden as Magteld visited my parents’ home outside Norwich for the first time.
Our relationship had become a serious affair. I wore the silver necklace she gave me most days, and we were still writing each other polite, restrained letters once a week. She was working weekends, washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen, to save up for plane tickets to England.
In Norwich we strolled by the river, in the shadow of the giant cathedral. On a bend by an archway I stood still and waited for her to turn around. ‘Why are we stopping here?’ she asked, her eyes dancing, and I replied by clutching her waist and kissing her deeply. It was the type of impulsive act I had shied away from at Lake Garda, almost to my cost.
That summer her family went on holiday to England, Wales and Ireland. I picked her up from Shropshire, where her parents had booked a whitewashed cottage that could have been transplanted from a James Herriot novel. We took the train from Kidderminster, changing at Birmingham and windswept Ely, pottering through the black fields of the Fens, which must have seemed to her like an apocalyptic parody of her homeland. We went on days out to Cambridge, to the coast and all the landmarks of my childhood, but mostly we explored each other, in the garden or the seclusion of the attic, and by the time she went home, five weeks after arriving, we were inseparable.
From then on we saw each other at least every three months. Our romance required a lot of patience: a lot of my memories are of going for walks or reading in the garden. Once we were walking in the pine forest near her home among the hunebedden, Neolithic tombs of delicately stacked menhirs where early man had buried his loved ones, when a sudden downpour enveloped us. With nowhere to shelter we clutched each other and danced among the puddles, laughing and brushing wet clumps of hair from our faces as we kissed, and I tasted the cold rain on her apricot cheeks.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 2