It was a while before I understood how much importance Magteld attached to the task of choosing a house. I instinctively quibbled over everything: did the sellers see a family of incomers as an opportunity to pump up the price? Would our bedroom, which was on the ground floor beside a main road, be too noisy? Was there really enough space? But Magteld was unbending. For her this was a key part of her legacy. On the phone she painted a picture of the street with its tall, elegant trees, the square at the end surrounded by bistros and grocers, the kiosk selling fresh fish and Dutch snacks, the local high street with its famous cheesemonger. When I suggested haggling over the price she replied in a voice that could have cut an electric fence.
I collected her from the airport, wheeled her to the car from the arrival gate and saw how she puffed and grunted as she climbed into the passenger seat. She was seeing Dr Barrett in a few days to begin her next treatment. She had secured a school place for Adam. And now she had found us a house. There were ten weeks to go until we left Scotland, and we were daring to believe we would make it.
Dr Barrett’s new chemotherapy plan had the merit of being less intrusive than the first. Magteld was prescribed a drug called xeloda which came in tablet form, so she was spared the ordeal of sitting on the chemo ward with plastic tubes sprouting from her arms. All she had to do was go to the clinic every three weeks, have her bloods tested and collect her drugs in a big paper bag, as if picking up an order from the takeaway.
I had planned to take a few days off at the end of February to go walking in the Highlands, but that was back in the halcyon days of mid-January. Magteld insisted I went ahead with the trip. We both needed space to contemplate. ‘I’ll cope,’ she said.
The xeloda brought rapid relief. Within a week the treatment had extinguished the cough that had rattled her lungs. Like a heavy spring shower that leaves droplets on flowers and the sharp smell of ozone, it felt like a small miracle and gave us fresh hope of achieving our improbable dream.
I stepped off the train in Newtonmore, a tiny unmanned station a mile from the village, with a single track and one platform serving the trains going both ways. I alternated writing with short walks in the hills, nourishing the hopeless aspiration of becoming a self-absorbed pen-chewing recluse. It began with a three-mile tramp to the bed and breakfast I had specifically chosen for its remoteness.
Just before I left, there was an unexpected complication. I’d applied for a job in Utrecht and been offered an interview by video link. The date clashed with my Highland jaunt. I decided to incorporate the interview into my trip. Perhaps having the hills in the background, veiled by a curtain of Highland rain, might give me an advantage. In any case it was a more scenic location than my kitchen or an office in Utrecht.
On the first day, I walked up to the most prominent building in the area, Ruthven Barracks, a colossal ruined fortress on top of an artificial mound. Much of the landscape of the Highlands is an uneasy fusion of natural beauty and man-made monstrosities; the route I took, General Wade’s Military Road, was one of several poker-straight highways carved through the mountains to allow soldiers to march north and subdue the unruly glen dwellers. (The barracks were in service for just thirty years before being torched by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s retreating army in 1746.)
On day two I set out under the cotton-wool skies that had hung over the hills all week, but as I walked the wispy rain gathered intensity, in that peculiarly Scottish way that gives you the sense of being soaked from the inside, and by the end I was squelching along a farm track as the smirr filled the tractor grooves, my raincoat drenched and my bare legs splattered with mud, descending through the fields to the house just in time to meet the owner on a trip back from the shops. Rarely have I been more grateful for a warm shower.
The interview, on the last morning, made me think that we might, after all, be able to enjoy a regular life in Holland. Magteld was visibly stronger and I had the tantalising prospect of a regular job, with office hours and steady wages. Could that unimaginable luxury, a settled family life, really flourish in such hostile conditions?
The Dutch fetish for precise measurement infiltrates every corner of life. Everything is scrupulously halved and quartered: six months is more usually termed ‘a half year’, time is measured in top-heavy fractions such as ‘five quarters’ (for seventy-five minutes), and before the euro replaced the guilder there was a coin, the rijksdaalder, which was worth 2½ guilders.
This fastidious attachment to fractions extends to the first major marital milestone, the copper wedding, which marks the 12½-year point. It has some strange repercussions, not least that the anniversary falls in the opposite half of the year from the wedding day. Since we were married on 7 September, ours came around on 7 March, two days after Magteld’s thirty-eighth birthday and the day after her parents arrived.
I wanted to surprise her, but recent events had taken the romance out of unpredictability. It was akin to organising a picnic on the beach while a vicious hurricane was tracking across the ocean. But as her cough cleared I took the chance and booked a Sunday night away in Edinburgh. I wove a conspiracy of silence: her parents would take the children to school, and the breast nurse rescheduled her weekly blood test for Tuesday instead of Monday morning. The anniversary had a greater, unwelcome significance now. Years were like passing comets; Magteld’s thirty-eighth birthday would almost certainly be her last. I wanted to make it a day to remember. I trawled the Argyll Arcade, an indoor hive of jewellers in the centre of Glasgow, for a suitable necklace. The question had crossed my mind as to what the value of such a trinket was to someone who would only own it for a matter of months. Precious metals represent enduring love, while ours was perishing. We had been robbed of the innocence of eternity. But we could still live and love in this condensed distorted time, this exalted present, and the necklace, like the love it symbolised, would accompany her into the grave. So I proceeded with my shopping mission and hoped that the sales talk wouldn’t be too heavily laced with references to lifelong memories.
I gave up trying to explain Dutch anniversaries when the first sales assistant responded with ‘Nearly thirteen, then.’ The shops ranged from musty emporiums with black and gold lettered signs, where stooped and waistcoated owners ponderously laid out their wares on green-baize tables, to minimalist, whitewashed establishments with lavender-coloured carpets and glass counters, staffed by sharp-jawed women in pencil-skirted suits. I chose a modern design, a pair of interlocking knots with a trace of Celtic influence, on a white gold chain.
I told her on our actual anniversary, the Friday before. She replied as expected: ‘But, Gordon, I have to go to the GP on Monday morning.’ Blood tests had supplanted the menstrual cycle as the regulator of her weeks. ‘I phoned the nurse,’ I said, with a look that said, See, I thought of everything. ‘You’re getting your bloods done on Tuesday.’
Later that day we learned that Marlies had given birth to a baby boy, Maas. We opened a bottle of prosecco with her parents, to celebrate life and love, and glance cautiously at the future, like astronomers watching a flaring sun.
Our trip to Edinburgh had become a farewell to the city where we first lived together, eighteen years earlier. For twenty-four hours we would pretend we were comfortable and carefree – though Magteld would need to sleep in the afternoon to relieve the strain of chemotherapy. Her sleep had been disrupted of late by twinges in her back. And although her cough had dissipated, she was still short of breath and could only walk short distances slowly.
I got my first leg-up in journalism at university, when The Scotsman dispatched me to report on second-division rugby games from rickety wooden stands in places like Biggar and Milngavie, where I scribbled in damp-curled notebooks and tried to shut out the November cold that crept in through my socks. In the 1990s the newspaper still had a serious claim to be a national broadsheet and was housed in an eccentric old baronial building, overlooking North Bridge and the miniature canyon that houses Waverley railway station. Several years later, as the
newspaper’s ambitions diminished, it moved out to a soulless modern hangar next to the Scottish Parliament and handed the keys to its stately seat of power to a hotel developer. And it was in the Scotsman Hotel that Magteld and I celebrated our copper wedding.
Fine cobwebs of rain, rustled by a gentle breeze, were draped over the city as we arrived by first-class train in midmorning. The Scotsman Steps, the covered stone stairway renovated by Martin Creed with a different mineral, texture and colour on every step, led up from the station to the hotel’s front door. Despite Magteld’s weakened state and the dreich conditions, we wanted to savour it one last time. Traipsing round Edinburgh’s open catacomb of bridges and stairways, cobbles and archways, wynds and closes is one of the city’s great pleasures.
I had informed the hotel of Magteld’s illness in case she needed help during the night, but also told them it was our anniversary. When we got there we discovered our room had been upgraded to a suite. We took the lift to the top floor, trying to suppress our excitement, like teenagers on a school trip. The lift doors opened and we stepped into our room, with its view across the station’s canopies towards the even grander Balmoral Hotel and its giant clock. With the veil of rain drawn across the blue waters of the Firth of Forth, the Balmoral and the monuments of Calton Hill looked especially aloof. But even in the grey gloom it was a sumptuous view.
In the afternoon we picked our way through Princes Street Gardens, huddled together against the cold, picking out the crocuses and the tentative signs of spring. Looping back through the Grassmarket we took lunch at the Last Drop, a staple of our pub-trawling days, where the walls were still clad in the same collage of international banknotes. Here we had toasted the onset of 1997, Magteld’s first Hogmanay in her new homeland, with Sanneke and Marlies, and taken shelter on windswept Sunday afternoons with haggis-filled baked potatoes and pints of 80 Shilling. Across the road was Armstrong’s, the vintage clothes store, where Magteld picked out a leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses, giving me that squinting goofy look that she used when trying on new accessories, and I bagged a shirt for five pounds.
On we went, up the winding slope of Victoria Street, pausing for breath by the window of a secondhand bookshop, then on to the Royal Mile, past brooding old St Giles’ Kirk and the High Court, where I had once joined the swarm of reporters outside the door, shouting the verdicts of murder trials into their phones. Up and down the street were signs advertising ghost walks: historical tours led by students in fancy dress to monetise the city’s folklore. Further along was the Filling Station, the ageless cocktail bar where Magteld had celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a small party of friends.
I gave her my arm as we staggered down the News Steps, up Market Street and down another flight of steps to the Scottish National Gallery. Though she was tiring by now, Magteld wanted to step into the gallery one last time. We had been here a few weeks into her first chemotherapy for an exhibition titled ‘Van Gogh to Kandinsky’. The title was a little misleading, as there was only one Van Gogh on show – The Sower – and two Kandinskys, but their absence was compensated by less-lauded gems, such as the deceptively naturalistic work of the Scandinavians. A sunset landscape by the Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt stood out for its unmitigated stillness – the lake as smooth as a glacier, the treetops submerging in their own shadows, and not a hint of habitation by human, bird or beast. Its sense of peace and permanence was deeply consoling at a time when our own lives felt so fragile. Another Edelfelt work depicted a dead tree with huge splinters jagging out of its split trunk, amid a forest of timid, upright young saplings, containing both the transience and the resilience of life in a single image. Now the building itself offered solace in its elegant symmetry, the arrangement of paintings and the soft movement of visitors circling the galleries in studied appreciation.
Back at the hotel Magteld sank into the large soft bed, while I perused the little pile of books on the side table. I picked out a volume of essays by F.R. Leavis and went through to the living room, with its darkening view of the Princes Street skyline. I slung on a CD of Mahler’s First Symphony, with its stirring final movement marked Stürmisch bewegt – agitated, as by a storm – and absorbed myself for a precious hour in music and literature.
When Magteld awoke I gave her the necklace. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ she said, but how many more chances would I have to make her feel special? We changed and went downstairs for dinner. She was wilting, and the pain in her spine was rising again, but she soothed it with a glass of wine and made it to dessert.
We climbed into bed, exhausted and relieved. Magteld had the pillows plumped up to support her back, but in the middle of the night she woke in discomfort, got up and walked through to the living-room window. The rain had stopped, the clouds had drifted away and Edinburgh’s vertiginous skyline was lit up by a canopy of stars. It seemed to quieten her. She came back to bed and we nestled together for a while, intimately, defying the malingering proximity of death, before floating back off to sleep.
By morning her pain had subsided. We had breakfast in what used to be the Scotsman’s reception area, then took the lift down to the station, through the back entrance where bundled stacks of newspapers had once been flung out of the door and loaded on to waiting trains. We headed back to Glasgow in our first-class carriage, which felt as if it would turn into a pumpkin once we got out at Central Station and rejoined the flow of time.
‘You two look radiant,’ Diny said as we arrived home.
Magteld had seen the doctor on her birthday about the pain in her spine. The diagnosis was a torn shoulder, an injury more commonly seen in rugby players, and she was given an appointment with a physiotherapist. The violent coughing was the most likely culprit, and now that was gone her shoulder would probably recover with therapy. She was happily surprised: ‘At last, something that’s not caused by cancer.’
The pain, however, tightened like a thumbscrew. At first Magteld found it awkward to lift her arms above her head, but after a few weeks she could barely raise them above elbow height. I remember her putting away plates in an overhead cupboard, gritting her teeth and swinging her arms upwards so the momentum would carry them to eye level. The muscles in her upper arms felt tight and knotted and the nerves in her fingers were desensitised. It was becoming harder for her to hold a pen, and her handwriting became cramped and spidery, like an old man’s. The pain seemed to follow a daily cycle, peaking in the small hours of the night. Magteld would wake in agony and get out of bed, hoping to stretch her spine so she would not have to resort to painkillers. At the worst moments she would cry out in the darkness, ‘Kill me now!’, and I would leap up, alarmed, not daring to hold her, and try to lead her back to the warmth of the bed. Only when the pangs had ground her into submission would she relent and let me fetch the bottle of pills from the kitchen.
One morning at breakfast Adam said, ‘Mum, in the night I heard you crying.’
There were less than seven weeks to go now until we boarded the ferry. The days stretched and yawned, buds appeared on the trees, the boys had just a fortnight left in school. Luc and Diny flew back to Amsterdam to see their new grandchild, Maas, and then went away for a weekend to walk part of the West Highland Way. Luc and I, both keen distance runners, signed up for the Nigel Barge 10k race in Glasgow at the end of March. Over the years we had run several road races together, including two trips to Islay for the island’s half-marathon, sponsored by a distillery, where the competitors are treated at the finish to whisky and sandwiches in Bowmore village hall.
Magteld nurtured fantasies of our new life in The Hague: taking the tram to the beach, walking the winding paths through the dunes, with the murmur of the North Sea on one side and the buzz of the city, close by but seemingly distant, on the other. That sense of bliss and balance, the rhythm of walking, the vividness of the sky and the sharp salty smell of the sea – it was all the paradise she needed.
Just as I had all but given up on hearing any more about the
job I had applied for, I was invited for a second interview. There were two candidates left, and I would have to travel to Utrecht. Privately I had assumed that the end of the first interview, when I explained that my wife was terminally ill and I was her main carer, had signalled the end of my chances. And now the dream was back on.
I sat down to book a flight to Amsterdam. The interview was the following Tuesday. I would spend two nights with Sanneke and Sjoerd, with the unexpected bonus of being able to see the house I’d just bought. I clicked through the menus, selecting the cheapest flight: hand luggage only, no hotel, no insurance. Then I filled in my passport details. A message flashed up: ‘Your passport expiration date is before the date of the flight. Please check and try again.’
I looked in my passport. The red booklet had been defunct for three weeks. And then I remembered: before Christmas I’d made a mental note that I needed to renew Euan’s passport before it ran out in mid-February.
Magteld’s organisational instinct kicked in. ‘You need to drop everything else and sort this out,’ she said. Mercifully Glasgow had a passport office which offered a fast-track service – at a premium rate – for disorganised idiots. That meant I could go to Utrecht, but the high-speed option wasn’t available for children, and a regular passport application took around six weeks to process.
Our boat was sailing in less than seven weeks.
Looking back, it seems almost laughable to suggest this was the biggest threat to our plans at the time, but that’s how it felt. I acquired a new passport for myself the next day, dispatched the form for Euan’s, and resigned myself to a nerve-shredding wait.
The following Monday I viewed the house for the first time. Magteld’s house, the place where she had chosen to die. The owners were busy, like us, squeezing their lives into boxes. It was bigger than it looked in the brochure, with the bedrooms in a wing off the main hall and sliding glass doors between the two downstairs rooms so that they could form one large space for entertaining. The courtyard garden was lined with raised beds that were planted up with mature trees, so that from indoors the thick foliage gave the impression of a tropical clearing. I imagined what it would be like on a warm summer’s night, full of people, bursting with life and laughter, as the children retreated to their annexe. She had chosen well.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 10