By Christmas of that second year Magteld was talking seriously about moving to Edinburgh. She had two years left at college; I had three more to go until I graduated. After qualifying she could come over for the summer and look for jobs in flower shops. She was determined in her quiet way, and although I worried she was acting on impulse, I knew we were at the point where our relationship had to take root or perish. We had probably spent no more than three months together, stretched out across three years. At some stage her family must have asked her if she was ready to take such a drastic step. But Magteld’s will was as strong as a tethering rope.
In the summer of 1995 we went to Italy again, boarding a train in northern Germany and emerging sixteen hours later in Bolzano, where a mountain thunderstorm battered our tent for the first night. For the next nine days we backpacked round Bologna, Venice, Lake Como and Florence, bleeding every last drop from a ticket that allowed 3,000 kilometres’ travel for a flat fare.
We saw much of the country through the windows of trains and hot, crowded buses, squeezing our rucksacks apologetically between the scowling passengers. These cities, and the Italian trains with their old-fashioned compartment coaches, were so familiar to me from family holidays that they felt more like home than most parts of England. To Magteld they were a novelty, and I relished playing the role of tour guide. I have a picture of her taken on the outskirts of Florence, at the midway point of our holiday and, as it transpired, her life, squinting and smiling into the sun with the Duomo rising up behind her. She wears a pair of loose linen trousers with an elephant motif she’d bought from a local market. I was entranced by the way they wrapped around her legs as she walked.
In Venice we stayed on the Lido, where we mocked the German campers’ habit of bringing their alarm clocks with them, as if time always had to be marshalled, even on holiday. We found a tiny canalside bar, two streets and a bridge away from the main arteries pumping tourists through Piazza San Marco, and sat drinking Coke as the passing Venetians greeted the owner, a burly sallow-jawed man named Aldo. Later, as the light faded over the lagoon, we stopped in a secluded archway and kissed each other fiercely, the tang of seawater filling our nostrils.
In the years that lay ahead Italy would be a recurring reference point, the place where the tributaries of our lives had flowed into each other. One day, we vowed, we would return to Lake Garda, or spend a weekend in Rome, or go away to a hotel carved into a mountainside that we had seen in a colour supplement – perhaps when we had children, or for a special anniversary. It never occurred to us, as the night sleeper trundled between the black mountains and over the border into Austria, that we might never make it.
On 15 August 1996 Magteld’s family stood in a semicircle in the living room of the house where she had been born, and which was still the only home she had ever known. Almost all her possessions were crammed into the back of my Renault Clio, which was parked outside, waiting to take us to the port at Hook of Holland and across the sea. On the other side awaited a job she had secured in an Edinburgh flower shop, a shared room in a student house and the great uncharted future.
Her mother, her two sisters and her father stepped forward one by one and took her in their arms. I stood a few paces back, giving them the space to cherish the last moments that Magteld belonged unambiguously to them. There were promises to visit, and to write letters and cards. When it came to her father’s turn he spoke a single word, meid – girl – which succinctly captured the magnitude of the moment. She was leaving the family home, as an independent woman, to take on life with all its uncertainties. She had told me once she didn’t believe in happiness. Now we had to make our own.
We got into the car, reversed down the driveway, gave a little toot and pulled away. A few seconds later she had left Sleen, within an hour she was out of Drenthe, and by nightfall she was on a boat, beyond the Netherlands and headed for a country she barely knew. I felt the burden of responsibility and the weight of hope, because I had persuaded her to cross a sea for me, but it would take me years to understand how or why.
3
Two days after receiving the biopsy results, Magteld met her oncologist for the first time.
Hospitals were still foreign territory; she had not yet accepted her place in the domain of the sick. We sat in a whitewashed corridor watching the patients shuffle by. An elderly woman bent at ninety degrees kept dipping her head up like a butterfly swimmer to check she was on course. Another woman, lost in the fog of dementia, was guided by a scowling nurse who said nothing apart from ‘Come on’, as if calling a petulant dog to heel. In the next corridor a man sat waiting, wearing only a hospital gown, his white legs glaring even through two layers of glass.
Dr Sophie Barrett’s brisk manner was offset by a bright smile, which she deployed frequently to blunt the force of the messages she had to convey. She sketched out the plan in quick, clear strokes: chemotherapy every three weeks, for six sessions. Then a month’s rest before the mastectomy. Then a month of radiotherapy. Then five years of medication.
Before that, though, Magteld’s body would undergo a full audit: a bone scan to check cancer hadn’t set up outposts in her organs, a CT scan and a heart scan to make sure she could endure the strain of the next four months. She would lose her hair, temporarily, and her breast, permanently, unless chemotherapy succeeded in obliterating the tumour. For the rest of her life she would be a cancer survivor. Her existence depended on the cancer remaining in remission and the compliance of her cells.
She complained she could hardly trust her own body any longer, and the suspicion was infectious. In bed at night I checked for lumps, asymmetric blotches, unexpected protrusions. I wondered about the pattern of moles on my back and scanned my nervous system for niggles of pain. The treachery of Magteld’s cancer encouraged me to sense conspiracies everywhere.
Her rage boiled over in the sanctuary of the underground car park, after we had left Dr Barrett. ‘This shouldn’t be happening to me,’ she spluttered, ‘I’m not some old lady.’ Disease and infirmity are callous intruders at any age, but to be ambushed by them at the age of thirty-six is brutal and appalling.
Magteld started writing a blog a week after she was diagnosed. She would not let cancer define or diminish her, nor flinch from describing the pain, weariness or trepidation. She posted a picture of herself on the chemo ward, bareheaded, lashed to a drip and smiling defiantly. She wanted to confront the myths that proliferate and choke any discussion of the disease. Like bravery: she didn’t feel brave, just desperately unlucky. ‘Brave’ is a nod to the modern superstition that force of character can improve your survival chances. The terror of the disease is magnified by the tyranny of the fighting spirit. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, goes the old lie. Nobody wants their friends to think that they died from not trying hard enough. We praise the cancer battlers for the same reason we once told stories of knights who slayed fire-breathing dragons: the need for heroes to banish our primal fears. But in doing so we deny them the need to be anxious, frightened, tired, resentful, angry and aggrieved.
She rejected the notion that cancer is the product of poor lifestyle choices, a modern echo of the belief that leprosy was a punishment visited on sinners by God. Cancer strikes mostly at random: living well does no more than tweak the odds in your favour. ‘I live healthily,’ Magteld wrote. ‘Don’t smoke, drink with moderation, keep fit by running regularly and eat a healthy diet. All I know is that it is not a lifestyle disease. If it was at least I could kick myself for having bad habits. And I’m allowed to feel angry that this is happening to me.’
In her first blog entry she asserted the right to be unhappy, and to be anxious: ‘I can’t stuff my anxiety away and make way for positive thinking at all times.’ She dismissed the talk of bravery and fighting, and focused on the hard grind of treatment. Fighting confers a worthiness on the opponent, a misplaced sense of respect. But I didn’t respect cancer. I hated this insidious, stealthy, unconscious killer that had subverted
the mechanics of my wife’s body. There was no question of a fair fight. Cancer needed to be flushed out by any means possible. Don’t fight cancer, we said: fuck cancer. Fuck it to hell. Fuck it with a full-on chemical assault. Fuck it with weapons-grade radiation. Fuck it till your hair falls out and your nails turn yellow. Fuck it before it gets to fuck you.
Fighting is not a matter of choice; the will to live is irresistible, and the hard thing is to invest your hope in a gruelling and unpredictable course of treatment. We decided it was wiser to live in fear than delusion, because fear can be instructive. The most positive thought we held on to was that if she survived, we could start living again.
There was time for one last party before the chemotherapy began. My father was celebrating his retirement as a Crown Court judge with a marquee on the lawn. I was determined to persuade Magteld to fly down to Norwich, partly because it would be our last chance to travel for several months, and partly because the idea of spending a September weekend alone in Glasgow while the rest of the family availed themselves of some excellent champagne was too torturous to bear.
My parents’ home offered us asylum from the regime of cancer. The boys could run loose in the garden while we dispelled the seeping fear by preparing for the party. Only close relatives would be told about her diagnosis, we agreed, to stop it gatecrashing the feast. It felt like the end of the belle époque, a last dance before the ballroom doors were padlocked.
My mother took Magteld into Norwich in the morning to buy flowers. Engaging Magteld’s professional skills was a way of keeping anxiety at bay. During the biopsy ten lymph nodes had been removed from her arm, which had put an end to her career, since she no longer had any resistance to infections from plant scratches. She spent the afternoon gathering up rhubarb leaves and other greenery in the garden to fill the giant vases. I hauled the vases across the lawn and marvelled at her ability to conjure a magnificent display from such plain materials. Magteld, however, scowled and reproached herself as she worked to achieve the desired blend, like a musician who hears every wrong note in a recording.
The party began in the amber glow of a September evening. Magteld, fresh from an afternoon rest, was resplendent in a zebra-patterned dress. She was effortlessly beautiful and yet barely aware of it, sometimes to an aggravating degree. I could never understand why she got so apprehensive about social gatherings when she could make the room spin around her. When we excused ourselves to cook the boys’ supper one of the guests chastised me: ‘You can’t take her away; she’s the prettiest girl in the room.’ In my memory she never looks so perfectly composed as she did then. As we walked across the lawn I wished time would stop long enough to let me indulge in the flash of her legs in the twilight, the softness of her voice, the warmth of her hand clutching mine.
The newly retired guests looked back over successful careers and ahead to years of cruises, fine wines and indulgent lunches. They suddenly looked younger and more vital, like university graduates. Over supper my father regaled us with the tale of how his best man turned up at his wedding with a black eye: the two of them had gone camping in Germany and got into a fight over a girl. It was hard to know what was more incongruous: that these two punctilious lawyers had ever been in a fight, or in a tent, or that the versions of themselves in the anecdote were far younger than Magteld and I now.
The chemotherapy room was on the top floor of the New Victoria Hospital, with a large picture window that framed the tree-lined hillside of Queen’s Park. In mid-September the trees were heavy with yellowing leaves and swayed gently in the breeze; as the treatment progressed through the autumn months their luxuriant crowns would become bare and scrawny.
Before the treatment could begin, Magteld had to sign some disclaimer forms in Dr Barrett’s office, acknowledging, among other things, that she understood the risks of falling pregnant while her bloodstream was teeming with vivid poison. Then we went upstairs for the first of six episodes. Magteld settled into the soft blue chair, supported by two pillows, while a nurse eased the point of a needle into the back of her hand. Other patients sat quietly chewing sandwiches and reading magazines, or snoozed as the medication trickled into their veins from plastic bags. They had the demeanour of people dropping in to a church to pray.
Magteld and the nurse chatted contentedly as the syringe stealthily did its work. I headed for the café for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, away from the jungle of blood bags, drips and needles. By the time I came back up it was all over. Magteld greeted me with a faint smile of relief and apprehension. It was time to go home.
At first nothing happened.
Magteld fetched Adam from school at three o’clock, as normal. She made a cup of tea, read a magazine and watched the boys play in the garden. I cooked dinner. We sat and talked. Everything was eerily familiar.
At six o’clock she took her first anti-sickness drugs. The nausea came on like a sudden storm. The pain swept across her face, dulled her eyes and flushed her cheeks a hot shade of crimson. She threw up violently and took to her bed as a creaking fatigue seized her. Through the night her stomach rejected everything, right down to the slightest sip of water. She vomited, retched, dry-heaved, gasped, sipped at her water, vomited again. As she gasped for breath I ran shuttle relays to the bathroom to empty the bucket.
At about two o’clock in the morning I called out the emergency doctor. Magteld had been propelled so fast into the realm of the severely ill that her mind was still catching up. After the doctor’s injection had calmed her recalcitrant stomach she sat up in bed and declared, ‘I want to go for a run in the morning.’ The doctor jolted in his chair, flattened his shirt front and suggested laying off the exercise for a while.
But Magteld was not to be kept down for long. By midmorning, once the children were in school, she rose from her bed, though only for five minutes. She tried a banana, which her stomach immediately rejected. Later on she managed to keep down an apple. By the afternoon she could manage a whole sandwich. The next day she attempted a trip to the shops, ten minutes’ walk away, and came back half an hour later, a bag of groceries in her hand and a look of triumph on her face.
Within a couple of days Magteld might have passed for a healthy person again. The reddish stain bestowed by chemotherapy had faded from her skin, she resumed her daily walks and her hair seemed as sturdy as ever – so lush and firmly rooted that it was hard to imagine her deserted scalp. I lay in bed, inspecting her and looking for the first signs of it working loose. Her custom-made wig sat in a box on top of the chest of drawers, awaiting its debut.
The next Saturday night she stood in the bathroom pulling out clumps of dead hair as if it were candy floss. ‘I’m like an autumn tree,’ she said as she watched her disintegration in the mirror. ‘It’s oddly satisfying.’ The sides receded first, then the top and finally the fringe. She concealed the effect for another week by wearing a hat and consoled herself in the meantime by shopping for headscarves on the internet.
Eventually it was down to a few wispy pale scraps – ‘like a baby owl in spring,’ she said. Impatiently she took the hair clippers from the drawer and prepared to excise the last stubborn follicles.
‘Let me do it for you,’ I said.
I ran the razor over her head until only a soft coating of stubble remained. It sharpened the outline of her face and helped the headscarves fit better.
The wig, however, was a disaster. It was similar to her own blonde shade, but a little fuller, slightly more honey-toned and with a hint of curl, giving her the air of a prim 1950s secretary. The craftsmanship was meticulous, right down to the flesh-coloured lining to make the parting more convincing.
She called her wig Connie. I took photos in the back garden, in the sunshine, attempting to show Connie off at her radiant best. Later that day Magteld went for a walk in the park. When she came home she had the look of someone who’d just been dropped off by an over-opinionated taxi driver. She and Connie were a good match, but the chemistry was wrong. Connie made Magteld�
�s head sweat and itch, and at close quarters smelled faintly like a straw mat. A failed attempt to use her in the bedroom sealed her fate. Connie went back in her box, unlamented.
The real problem, Magteld told me later, was that Connie was too much like her own hair, and a constant reminder of what she had lost. Besides, the headscarves were a good deal more comfortable.
When Euan came home from school in the afternoon he would remove Magteld’s scarf and rub her head. Sometimes he tried on her hat or her headscarves, and they laughed together. This little ritual was the way he processed the dramatic change in his mother’s appearance. In the absence of language, the sense of touch, the feel of her scalp and the sensation of the soft turbans on his own head were his way of understanding the changes in her.
Euan was clinical in his approach, like a child who unscrews ballpoint pens to examine the spring mechanism. Hard facts were less intimidating than vague adult emotions. As Maurice Sendak observed, he knew everything, but lacked the words to tell us. After her biopsy he noticed the mark on her breast and asked what the doctors would do to her. It was rare for Euan to ask a spontaneous question, so clearly it had made a deep impression in his mind.
His school sought out some materials, and I found a comic book that used superheroes to explain cancer treatment. Euan barely looked at them. His attention was fixed on the retreat of her hair, the one change he could properly grasp and monitor. Once it was gone completely he asked me if it would come back when she was better. Yes, I said. But it would take until April.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 3