Euan took out his diary, which had become his means of deciphering the world. He asked me, ‘In April, when Mum’s better, can we go to Hamleys?’ We had scheduled a trip to the famous toy shop in October to buy a present for Marlies’s baby, Tim, who had been born in July, but Magteld’s hospital appointments had forced us to postpone it. Euan’s question signalled a shift in his perspective: he could still look forward to the visit, even though six months must look to a nine-year-old like a Saturnine orbit. He opened his diary at 1 April and wrote: ‘Mummy get better’. And then on 6 April: ‘Go to Hamleys, find something for baby Tim’.
He grabbed his pen and spread the book open on the table. There was something else. Euan looked down at the blank page and said, ‘In April, when Mum’s better, will everybody be happy?’
I had no answer to that. Later I wondered: an earthquake can devastate a landscape and leave a beautiful ravine. Does that make it a happier place?
4
We thought we were being clever, having children early. Our generation tended to start families after securing a career and a home, believing health was a better measure than wealth of our fitness to raise children. Magteld’s parents had settled down in their early twenties and were now enjoying walking holidays and meals in restaurants and afternoons when nobody cried, yelled, scrapped, wailed for lost toys or had to be taken to the playground. Still fit, still in their fifties and able to enjoy the company of their grown-up children. That would be us one day, we thought.
A year after we got married, Magteld was abruptly made redundant. Feeling worthless and marooned, she consoled herself by spending a week with her family in Holland. The morning after she returned she scuttled into the bathroom while I was still shrouded in the fog of half-sleep. Then the door flew open and she bounded onto the bed, and in that instant I connected the excitement on her face to the opened pregnancy testing kit on the bedside cabinet.
‘You’re going to be a dad,’ she said, her eyes gleaming.
It was an uncertain time. For the first time since arriving on British shores five years earlier Magteld needed to find work, and pregnancy had just raised the stakes. But in that moment none of it mattered. We clutched each other fiercely and thought of nothing but the baby, this nameless bundle of cells drifting about her womb, and how it would swell and gain substance in the months to come.
Midway through her chemotherapy she spent a wet Sunday afternoon looking at pictures of breasts on the internet. Or, to be more exact, pictures of spaces where breasts had been. Though Magteld was distressed to lose her hair, she had the consolation it would grow back. Losing a breast would be permanent and more devastating. This act of life-saving mutilation was also a direct attack on her femininity. The right side of her chest would be a scarred stump of dead tissue. ‘I’ve had some great times with my breasts; I’ll be sad to lose one,’ she said. I hadn’t expected Magteld to mourn the loss of her erotic self in such stark terms. We never talked a great deal about sex. I made a clumsy stab at a joke: ‘I love your breasts, but if I had to choose, I’d rather lose them than you.’ The conversation flatlined.
She discounted silicone implants from the start: ‘It won’t feel part of me,’ she said. Her treatment coincided with the off-putting revelation that some French cosmetic clinics had been using building-grade silicone in breast implants. Another procedure involved fashioning a false breast from fat tissue elsewhere in the body, but Magteld knew a woman who had been left in permanent discomfort by just such an operation. Cutting out a lump of fat, to her mind, would only compound the sense of mutilation.
The advantage of having small breasts was that Magteld had the option of wearing a ‘softie’, or silicone bag, tucked inside her bra. Perhaps she could have an implant later, once she had accepted her new shape, but she sounded unconvinced. Then she found a picture online of a woman with a double mastectomy sunbathing on a beach, two fine lines running across her chest. She looked elegant, not hideous or pitiable.
By her next visit to the breast surgeon, Magteld’s mind was made up.
‘What are we going to do about reconstructing you, missus?’ asked Miss Winter.
‘I don’t want a reconstruction.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
Miss Winter checked Magteld’s face for traces of doubt, saw that look of quiet resolve I knew so well, and nodded.
Our first home together was a room in a tenement flat on Edinburgh’s Morningside Road, in the suburb that has become synonymous with Miss Jean Brodie, mothballed petticoats and ‘you’ll have had your tea’ jibes. We, meanwhile, were living in sin, sharing a single bed in a student flat with no central heating and a kitchen window that jammed an inch from the top, so that when winter came we huddled together on the communal sofa in the kitchen, warming ourselves by switching on the oven and throwing the door open.
In December we moved into a one-bedroom flat on Nicolson Street which estate agents would call ‘bijou’. The double bed almost completely filled one room while a three-piece suite took up about half the other, leaving just enough space to open the doors to the minuscule kitchen. Even the door at the foot of the cotton-reel turret staircase was too small to walk through upright. A few hundred yards up the road, though we were unaware of it at the time, J.K. Rowling was drafting the first chapters of Harry Potter in Nicolson’s Cafe. We spent Christmas Day in that cramped space, carving the turkey on the coffee table before taking a walk along a deserted Princes Street, wrapping our coats together in a cocoon against the jabbing Edinburgh wind.
In Edinburgh she learned to dance. After graduating I spent a year in Preston, taking a postgraduate diploma in journalism, while Magteld chose to stay in Scotland. She took a room in a student flat and juggled working full-time in a flower shop with an undergraduate nightlife. Our relationship became long-distance once more, but she was more independent than she had ever been. Life was more austere when we moved together to Peterborough, where I worked long hours as a junior reporter on the local newspaper while she cycled ten miles a day to work for a florist in Market Deeping. After a year we moved again, to Northampton, renting the upper half of an airy Edwardian house that backed on to the county cricket ground. In summer you could open the window and hear the crack of bat against ball, punctuated by the crackle of polite applause and the occasional strangled cry of ‘Howzat!’ My father, who was a fan of Northamptonshire, considered it idyllic, but we knew nobody in the town and loneliness began to cast its shadow. Our arguments became more frequent and bitter, and Magteld increasingly finished them by threatening to go back to Holland. I started to fear she meant it.
Gradually things settled. She signed up for driving lessons and started an Arts degree with the Open University. Her love of literature, art and music blossomed like a spring flower. For the first time in her life she felt valued for her mind and had an outlet for her natural curiosity. As a girl she had been diagnosed with deafness and had a series of operations to improve her hearing. She tuned out of lessons, cast adrift by her incapacity and the rigidity of the Dutch system, which took its revenge by sifting her into the lowest tier of secondary education. It equipped her with the skills she needed to run and administer a small flower shop, and this offered her a respectable living making neatly arranged bouquets for respectable people to place in their neatly arranged homes. Since leaving Holland she had had glimpses of a life that was less constrained, more unpredictable, more challenging, but more rewarding. As she focused on her studies, and passed her driving test, the threats to take the next boat home faded.
Cancer treatment is a black hole of exhaustion. It takes you to a level of fatigue that not even small children or all-night double shifts can match. The physical tiredness was exacerbated by extreme stress, mortal dread and, for Magteld, the Sisyphean exertion of chemotherapy. The drugs wiped out her white blood cells and weakened her immune system at the peak of flu season. The fear of succumbing to a virus gnawed at her, especially as a nurse at Adam’s nurs
ery had died of pneumonia while being treated for lung cancer. After her second chemotherapy session her doctor compounded the situation when he told her she was ‘in no state right now to fight an infection’.
I was working two days a week and one weekend a month so we could make ends meet, and to give me a little respite from our cancer-infested house. That was until one damp, dismal Saturday in November, when Magteld called me up in the middle of the afternoon and begged me to come home. The merciless Glasgow rain was holding her hostage; she was terrified of catching a chill if she went out to the shops. I went straight home and cancelled my weekend shifts. We were withdrawing, having to slow down, which, as she reflected on her blog, is like cold turkey for the plugged-in generation:
It is hard to get used to resting when my mind is so active. I have had to learn to take time out and lie down with a book. Recently I started knitting as a way of relaxing. I learned how to knit when I was a child and I felt like taking it up again. It is another way to rest my active mind and concentrate on just one thing.
Leisure time no longer existed; concentration gave way to emotional numbness. I had been a keen 10k runner, but now I couldn’t manage more than one training run a week. Magteld kept up the cooking and fetched Adam from school, but spent most of her remaining hours on the sofa, asleep.
Around the time I gave up the weekend shifts I had a dream about a race. I set off gently, aiming to conserve energy, but as the race went on I noticed myself losing speed. The more I tried to speed up, the stiffer and more sluggish my legs became. The sensation was like stirring a pan of thickening porridge. A much older runner shuffled past, grey hairs dangling from his legs. I tucked in behind and tried to keep pace with him up a hill, expecting to pass him on the downward slope, but my legs cramped up and he pulled away easily, his back shrinking as he melted into the distance. I felt angry and helpless, but the rage only constricted my movement more, until my knees could barely bring up my feet. I woke up, scared and sweating and bewildered. The seed of it was the dread of ageing, losing one’s faculties and strength, the slow unravelling of the body’s apparatus, all the things that were happening to Magteld at an accelerated rate, like a nuclear reaction.
Exhaustion crashed over us relentlessly. She was once reduced to tears because she was unable to squeeze an orange with a juicer. Another time our washing machine expired with a grinding, rattling sigh. I told her I’d mislaid a house key and wondered if it might be in the pocket of a pair of jeans which was now in the stricken drum. Marlies was visiting the following week with Tim, and the prospect of looking after a four-month-old baby without a working washing machine shredded the last scrap of Magteld’s nerves. The row that followed swept away what little energy we still had. Two days later a repairman came out and diagnosed a worn-out mechanism. The door key turned up a few weeks later: one of the children had posted it behind a radiator.
We moved to Glasgow in the summer of 2000, having bought a flat on the top floor of a red sandstone tenement at the far end of the Great Western Road. The hallway had the kind of resplendent stone steps that chimed as you walked up them and a brass-studded banister kept scrupulously polished by the elderly widow across the hallway. Beyond Anniesland Cross the road ran out through Drumchapel, past the Clyde estuary and on to Loch Lomond, Glencoe and Inverness. The a82 was an umbilical cord that connected Scotland’s natural heritage directly to our front door.
I went up to Scotland three weeks ahead of Magteld, commuting from Edinburgh until we were able to move into the flat. Sometimes I didn’t get home until nearly midnight, which made me grateful it was midsummer. On a clear June night there is still a smudge of blue in the northern sky to guide you along the m8. On one of those nights, as the silhouettes of the Ochil Hills slid past the window, I made up my mind to ask Magteld to be my wife.
We had talked a lot about not marrying. It was old-fashioned and pointless. We were still in our mid-twenties. Our children would not suffer for being born out of wedlock. Marriage seemed principally designed to make separation more difficult. But there was no denying that we looked and behaved increasingly like a married couple. We had moved in step from Edinburgh to Peterborough to Northampton, and now to Glasgow. If we were to separate we couldn’t simply vanish from each other’s existences. Our lives were too entwined, the weight of shared memory too great.
I didn’t go down on bended knee. I didn’t buy her a ring. I still needed to pretend it was no big deal. When I went down to Northampton to rejoin her I simply stood in the living room and said, ‘Hey, Mag, shall we get married?’ She grinned and locked me in a deep embrace, and said yes, and I had the feeling that she had anticipated the question long before the thought had taken form in my mind.
She made a point of walking the mile and a half to the New Victoria Hospital for her cancer treatment when she could. It helped her combat the weariness and worry, and escape the sense of living in a cocoon. On a sharp November morning we walked up together for her fourth chemotherapy cycle. Once it was done she would be past the halfway point, and we planned to stop at a café on the way home to celebrate and fortify ourselves with tea and chocolate cake. Chemotherapy had degraded Magteld’s taste buds and left a harsh, metallic taste and a parched sensation in her mouth. Favourite recipes, such as spicy lentil soup, were unpalatable; dry foods, such as bread, acquired the texture of sawdust. Eating had become a discipline instead of a pleasure, driven not by appetite but the need to keep her weight up. But she could always manage chocolate and cake, and appeased her tarnished palate with new flavours such as ginger beer. She consumed yoghurt, milk and cheese to stave off the danger of osteoporosis. And she looked forward to the treats of Christmas: a succulent turkey, mince pies and mulled wine.
I noticed how she hunched forward as she walked, and pulled her coat around herself. Lifting her knees had become an effort. On the steepest section of the route, a hill that rose steeply from the White Cart Water towards Queen’s Park, she had to stop twice to regain her breath. Just a few weeks ago she had pranced up it on her weekly runs; now she had the gait and posture of a woman thirty years older. Time was warping.
The slower pace changed my perspective. On the way to the hospital I noticed how the south side of Glasgow was speckled with patches of thick greenery that could have been transplanted from the jungle. I thought I knew every inch of these streets from my weekly runs, but I had been moving too fast, and with too much purpose, to see the abundance of life on the verges.
On a damp September day in 2001, the kind when the fields shimmer with a veneer of rainwater, Magteld and I were married in the old municipal hall in Sleen. In the 1970s, when it was still a functioning government office, her father had been part of the living fabric of this building as a young Labour Party councillor; a century earlier Vincent van Gogh had tramped through this countryside on a dawn walk to the nearby village of Zweeloo, remarking on the church tower and admiring the ‘tones of golden green in the moss, of reddish or bluish or yellowish dark lilac greys in the soil, tones of inexpressible purity in the green of the little wheat-fields’. Amid this suppressed, understated beauty, easily missed at first sight amid the overwhelming flatness and the upright conformity of the trees in their regimental straight lines, we pledged ourselves to each other in a plain civil ceremony, shorn of the theatrical language of Anglican conventions: for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part.
My kilt clashed vibrantly with the horizontal fields, less so with the flat grey sky, and nicely complemented the redbrick castle in the border town of Coevorden where we held the reception. We travelled there on an old red Routemaster with an open back door, an inspired choice by Magteld’s parents, even if its rudimentary suspension was ill-equipped to deal with the Dutch fetish for speed bumps. Magteld wore a dress she had bought off the peg in a high-street store, in keeping with our insistence on downplaying the occasion, but she was too beautiful not to shimmer, even in the drizzle. Almost everybody we invited from Scotland an
d England had made the journey. It was an incongruous sight to see these people gathered in what I had come to think of as my Dutch country retreat, and together with our families they filled the Ridderzaal with the buzz of happy camaraderie.
The next morning I woke to find Magteld’s side of the bed empty. She had slipped out early, feeling invigorated, and gone out on her bike to tour the village. Perhaps she wanted to see if the world had changed in the night, when a short intense storm had crudely interrupted us by flinging open the balcony door.
Our wedding day seems now to belong to a different age. One of our guests made everybody laugh with a story in the news about a man who had been stopped at airport security for trying to take a Welsh sporran through customs. We chuckled and shook our heads at this absurd display of pernickety officialdom; these were the days when you could arrive at the airport twenty minutes before departure time and still expect to get on the plane. Four days later we went to check in to a hotel in the French city of Troyes. The receptionist breathlessly informed us that un avion touristique had developed a fault and crashed into the World Trade Center.
‘À Amsterdam?’ I asked, parochially.
No, she replied: New York.
I switched on the television in our room and watched, for the first time, the now familiar images of a plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. The other tower was on fire. Through the smoke I saw the decapitated remains of another plane sticking out of the side of the far tower.
That evening we sat in a cafe, watching the television and trying to decipher what had happened through the medium of my rusty French. In Paris the next day we saw armed guards at the railway station and met Americans who were scrabbling around trying to find hotel rooms because all the planes had been grounded. It gave the events of 9/11 a surreal, distorted quality. We learned the news in fragments, through the prism of a foreign language, as we floated on a plume of postnuptial bliss. Only when we drove back over the Dutch border four days later and reconnected with the known world did we really grasp how much had changed.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 4