The lowest point came on a Monday morning in early December. Rain had been teeming from a pewter sky for what seemed like months. The boys were in a slow frenzy, jumping up and down the stairs and erupting in geyser-like rage. The night beforehand, Magteld and I had watched an episode of The Killing in which one of the background characters was a young mother who died of cancer. I hadn’t even noticed it, but Magteld’s radar was more finely attuned. We slept intermittently, swathed in fear. As she stirred the porridge pot at breakfast, she boiled with anxiety. What if the treatment failed, what were the chances of the cancer returning, what if it surfaced in another part of her body?
I had no answers. I couldn’t soothe her pain. I wished I had a bouquet of hope, sweet and gleaming, that I could hold under her nose. I wanted to tell her it would work out, she would recover, we would conquer cancer together and emerge, swords aloft and smiling. But it was a brittle and worthless fantasy that crumbled in the hard light of fate.
Magteld was standing over the cooker, her back turned to me and shaking. She was sobbing noiselessly. I was by the table next to the door, in the opposite corner of the dining kitchen, itching to flee. On the corner of the table was a small glass. As I left the room I picked it up and weighed it for a second, feeling the smooth hard material in my trembling hand.
I launched the glass full-tilt into the wall. It seemed to shatter even before it left my hand. I heard the smash a fraction of a second later, like the blast of a gun, but didn’t look back.
Magteld wailed after me as I retreated up the stairs. At first she thought I had knocked something onto the floor. Only when she turned around did she see the blasted fragments spreading out from the wall, across the floor and over the table.
Sweeping up the glass later, I wondered how these memories would affect us as survivors. Once the treatment was over, once Magteld’s hair had grown back, exhaustion had been banished, fear had been neutered and the whole macabre opera had been played out – once, in short, we emerged from our year in hell – what would be left of us? I was becoming a caricature, an impotent manchild venting his frustration on the tableware. My sick wife needed comfort and I gave her glass splinters, across the floor, embedded in the picture rail, in the fruit bowl.
Would the cracks and blisters heal over, or would they linger beneath the surface, ready to burst open at the next onslaught?
How much of the debris of these days would cling to us?
I fetched the stepladder and switched two pictures on the wall to cover the damaged plasterwork. We slept a little better that night.
6
The mood had lightened, mercifully, by the time Magteld’s birthday came around, on 5 March. The first buds were pushing through on the trees and she felt her old energy returning as the days grew warmer and brighter, allowing her to take more frequent and longer walks. Sometimes she went on her own; sometimes we went together. Her hair was growing back, a darker colour than her former wheat-blonde and thicker in texture. Mainly we were relieved to have got past the winter and the operation. Those fraught days when she was flitting in and out of hospital were already fading from memory and for the first time since her chemotherapy began, our lives had a sense of rhythm.
In the summer we would go on holiday to Denmark with her sister’s family, take the children to Legoland and put the house up for sale. But before that there was radiotherapy. If chemotherapy was carpet bombing and the mastectomy a targeted strike, radiotherapy was the scorched-earth campaign to choke the cancer at the root. Magteld would have twenty ten-minute sessions, once a day, five days a week, lying prone on a bed while radiation beams were blasted into the crater that the tumour had left behind.
She insisted on travelling alone to the clinic, even though it involved a ten-minute walk to the railway station, a change of trains at Glasgow Central and another ten-minute walk up to the Beatson Cancer Centre. Glasgow’s weather can be mischievous in April, stirring up horizontal rain and face-whipping winds even on a bright day, but it was commendably restrained for the month of her treatment. On one of the first days she phoned me to say she had fainted at the station and been sick on the platform. She was still fragile and, having lost so much weight after the operation, prone to dizziness. Before I could think of riding to her rescue, she had boarded the next train and carried on. She refused to give up her solo journey, but from then on she packed a banana in her handbag.
After each session she dropped in at the Maggie’s Centre next to the hospital, to drink coffee and chat with the volunteers and fellow cancer patients. The building was on a hill overlooking the Beatson, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to capture as much light as possible. There were formal events, workshops and counselling sessions, but also the chance to sit and talk, or just sit. It was a place that ran on mutual respect and dignity, where cancer patients could shield themselves from the pressure to fight, or be brave, or inspire people healthier than themselves. Sometimes the only people she could relate to were those who were going through the same process, who didn’t judge or flinch from discussing the worst aspects. New visitors were often surprised to find that the atmosphere was convivial and optimistic. When Magteld went back to the Beatson the following year, this time as a patient who would not recover, she drew again on the deep resources of compassion and understanding at Maggie’s.
Magteld was afflicted with a terrible sense of direction. On an early visit to Edinburgh she went for a walk in the city centre and wandered out towards Haymarket, where she called me from a payphone. She laughed about it then, but it was an early indication of the fear of disorientation that haunted her through her life. For a long time I failed to realise how inhibiting it was to be unable to read the contours of a city or translate the lines of a map into an orderly route. It was a kind of blindness, more profound than being unable to tell left from right, which she also struggled with. Eventually salvation arrived in the form of satellite navigation technology.
Having failed three driving tests in the Netherlands, it took her five years to get behind the wheel again, but in Northampton she passed first time, in defiance of the town’s deranged traffic planning. Another five would go by before she overcame her phobia of going out in the car alone. It happened quite suddenly. I had the job of collecting Euan from nursery, which meant catching a train home from work, picking up the car and driving out to fetch him. I was full of resentment, not understanding why Magteld should be so terrified of losing her way on a journey of less than a mile. And then one afternoon I came home to find Euan sitting at the kitchen table, laughing gleefully, and Magteld beside him, beaming in triumph, as if she had butchered a dragon for supper.
Another time she took Euan to the doctor’s surgery, which was fifteen minutes away along a well-known route. An hour later she phoned, her voice crackling with despair, from Anniesland Cross, five miles adrift and on the opposite bank of the River Clyde. How on earth, I thought scornfully, could you not notice you were crossing the river? Euan was burbling in the background, oblivious to his mother’s anguish. Eventually she persuaded a taxi driver to escort her back across the river to her own neighbourhood. He had the compassion and sensitivity not to charge her. A passing cabbie saw in an instant what I had dismissively overlooked for years: that Magteld was ashamed and distressed at being unable to find her way.
The upside to Magteld’s wayward sense of direction was that it turned every journey into an adventure.
On one of the first evenings I spent with her in Sleen we went to the cashpoint. Soft rain flickered in the streetlights as we crossed the wet streets to the bank, on the other side of the village. On the way home I noticed we were going a different way. ‘Is this the scenic route?’ I asked, at which she laughed nervously. We clasped hands and meandered slowly back to the house. She smiled with relief as we approached the front door, where I brushed her wet hair from her face and kissed her.
‘The scenic route’ became a recurring motif whenever one of us took a little too long to co
me back from the supermarket.
It didn’t stop her enjoying hillwalking, and sometimes enhanced the experience. On a weekend in Glen Coe we set out from the village on a bright May morning to conquer Bidean nam Bian, one of the peaks looming over the village. Surely, we thought, it would be a simple matter, once at the summit, to walk along the ridge and back down again, guiding ourselves by the main road. But once on the ridge we lost sight of the road and trudged through the band of snow capping the summit, bagging another peak and making our way down a matted hillside where the thick grass was undisturbed by walkers’ boots. As we picked our way down and the sun fell behind the hill we started to worry where the road had gone. It had been some time since we had seen another walker. Weariness was starting to creep in. And then we saw, further up the hillside, a brown speck, and another, and as we looked more closely we realised a herd of deer was traversing the hill. They moved majestically, loose-limbed and unruffled, unlike the coy specimens that quiver by the roadside. We sat, silent and awestruck, for a few minutes, before continuing down the mountain.
Half an hour later, as a gloom spread through the valley, we made out the dark contour of the road and tramped towards it, where the driver of a passing campervan stopped and took us to the village. It was a good two miles away, and we were relieved not to have had to cover it on foot.
Magteld measured the progress of her cancer treatment in the same terms: not as a conventional straight line or charted territory that could be expressed in trig points and contours, but as a forest trail of makeshift paths and sudden clearings. In her first blog after being diagnosed she wrote: ‘I’m not always going to be brave and the road will be a bit rocky at times, but I’ll have the odd route touristique too.’ All our journeys have the same destination; all that differs is how we get there.
I wanted to fall in love with Magteld again. Properly, this time.
Once we had accepted the children’s autism, once we had resolved to stop grieving and stay together, from this day forward, in sickness and in health, we could start making up for lost time. We had moved between cities and across borders, laughed and danced and cried and fought and made love. Like long-discarded cocoons, the two self-absorbed teenagers who had met in Italy bore no resemblance to the people we were now. Magteld had acquired a capacity for exhaustive negotiation, the kind that had allowed the Dutch to tame their landscape and shape their country over centuries, and discovered untapped reserves of guile and tenacity.
She gave up work soon after Adam was diagnosed so she could pour all her energy into the boys’ care. Special-needs education required her to learn a new vocabulary and feed the insatiable bureaucratic Minotaur. She needed the skill and patience of a watchmaker to make sure the cogs of the system kept turning in harmony. Her diary filled up with meetings where she juggled educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, social workers, occupational therapists, school teachers, nursery staff, play workers and child psychiatrists. She became adept at nudging and coercing officials to see things her way. Calm, assured, decisive, nerveless and sometimes as stubborn as a rusty doornail.
Euan’s diagnosis came too late for him to be placed in special education, so he spent his first year in the local primary school. The school was in a draughty building at the top of a hill, and as autumn tightened its grip the wind and rain swirled around the roof, howling and battering like a starving wolf. Euan became too agitated to stay in the group, and his classroom assistant took him out for walks around the playground. After a year he transferred to another school, three miles away, that was better suited to his needs.
When Adam’s turn came he was offered, after months of prevarication, a place in a different school that catered for children with challenging behaviour. Magteld drove out to see it and concluded quickly that it would be a disastrous move for a boy who hardly spoke and was highly sensitive to noise and tension. She called a meeting that afternoon with the deputy head of Euan’s former school, and by the end of the day had secured him a place. The council officials tried everything to coax and cajole her into changing her mind, but Magteld had learned to say no with a smile.
When Euan’s school needed a new chair for the parent council her name was put forward and, somewhat to her own surprise, she accepted. She went on to become an advocate for carers, making some of her closest friends in the world of grassroots campaigning and going on lobbying forays to the Scottish Parliament. As more people exploited her aptitude for diplomacy she had to concede that she possessed it. Euan’s school had struggled for years with a leaking roof; half-full buckets were a standard feature in the classrooms and grew in number through the winter. Plans for a new roof had been stalled for years because the council balked at the cost. Magteld harnessed the resources of the parent council to support the school in a fresh campaign. By compiling a log of all the patchwork repairs carried out over the years, the parent council showed that over time they cost just as much money as a new roof, and the children were still having their lessons in leaking classrooms. By the time Magteld stood down as chair two years later, following her diagnosis, the funding had been secured.
Anxiety could still seize her on the cusp of an important meeting. She could reduce herself to a wreck envisaging catastrophic scenarios in which she committed a fatal error or was upbraided by a forceful speaker. But when she began talking, people couldn’t help but listen. She had a gift for taming an audience, perhaps because she connected with and shared their worries. Time and again she entered a room under a cloud and emerged bathed in sunlight.
She took huge satisfaction from outwitting experienced professionals. Learning to raise two autistic children had been daunting at first, but it unlocked Magteld’s finest qualities and introduced her to people whose company she valued: passionate and caring, sometimes idealistic, tenacious and uncompromising, refusing to bow to fate. The name Magteld, or Mechtild, or Matilda, means strength in battle. Fifteen years earlier I had fallen in love with a slip of a girl with an awkward smile and gazelle-like legs. The second time it was with the warrior.
We celebrated the conclusion of her radiotherapy with lunch in a brasserie near the hospital, five minutes’ walk from our old flat on the Great Western Road. In some ways it was a revival of the celebrations that had been suspended when cancer scuppered my birthday eight months earlier. Time could begin again. We ate pasta, drank orange juice and toasted the future. It was a vivid blue Friday morning in April, and we were starting to look ahead once more.
Magteld had expected to feel unburdened. For four weeks she had made the pilgrimage to the Beatson, taking two trains and walking up the hill to be peppered with invisible grapeshot. A square burn mark had formed beneath her shoulder, and in the last few days it had started to blister and weep. She had been warned to keep out of the summer sun in case the treatment had damaged her skin’s resistance.
In the beginning Magteld set her teeth against anything that defined her as a cancer patient, but as the months went by it became part of her identity. Getting through the treatment dominated her field of vision so strongly that it obscured the usual concerns about the future. Now that the veil was lifted, she felt suddenly vulnerable, as if she had stepped naked out of a dark forest. What was she supposed to do now? ‘I felt anxious, as if I had lost something,’ she wrote. ‘Suddenly I lost my focus. I had spent the best part of a year being treated for cancer. I was constantly preparing myself for the next treatment.’
After eight months she had to stumble back into the outside world. She had plans: a visit to her family in June, the holiday in Denmark in August. Above all we wanted to get on with moving to the Netherlands after our year in hell. But these aspirations, which had sustained us through the tough months, now had to be given substance. As emigration became a serious prospect, the attendant challenges shifted into focus.
By the time we visited her family in June, Magteld’s hair had grown back to a short copper-beech coating. A heatwave had set in, with temperatures spiking at
thirty-five degrees. On a visit to the hunebedden a few miles up the road, the boys leapt between the monolithic tombstones, monuments to a forgotten people, as she looked on. Six weeks had passed since her treatment and she was already acquiring a glow.
We planned to put the house up for sale in August. It belonged to a different era now: before autism, before cancer, before the near-collapse of our marriage. The estate agent, a puffy-cheeked, fussily polite man in his fifties, assured us we would have no trouble selling the house but advised us not to rush into a sale.
We flew to Copenhagen, drove for three hours across Denmark and arrived late in the evening. The boys were tired, but the prospect of a night in a pirate-themed hotel room was fixed in their minds like the north star. Three days in the park were designed to dispel the memories of the harrowing months behind us and restore the cycle of our days and weeks. We flew back to Glasgow as the sun was setting, heading due west so that the lingering daylight was frozen in a reddish glow. A sense of suppressed elation flowed through us. After we had spent so long in limbo the hope was powerful enough to burn us.
Before we left Scotland we wanted to take the children for a walk in the hills. Opportunities for climbing would be in short supply in the Netherlands. So on a Saturday morning in early September we packed a picnic bag, pulled on our hiking boots and set off for Tinto Hill, a steady climb to over 2,300 feet and the highest peak in the Southern Uplands, with views from the summit to England.
We parked the car and set off up the slope. The narrow gravel path unwound beyond us like a ribbon. The boys skipped on ahead, revelling in the open space, and we asked ourselves why we hadn’t taken them walking more often. Now that our time in Scotland’s unkempt terrain was nearing its end we wanted to become better acquainted with it. We ate sandwiches by a giant flat-sided boulder, took some photographs and carried on up as the path became steeper and narrower. The wind, which was a gentle current at the base of the hill, gathered in strength, ruffling our collars and teasing our hair and faces.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 7