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Magteld phoned from the Jacobshospice the same evening, while I was making supper. Her voice was hushed, as if she was alone in a candlelit room. She was tired from travelling: a flight unique among the dozens she had made, in which she had to be carried on and off the plane on a trolley. A disability taxi took her and Diny straight to the hospice. Sanneke greeted her, clutching a bottle of prosecco. It was a ceremonial journey, like a pilgrimage, carefully planned and laden with symbolism. She would not see Scotland again. She would not see Sleen again. It was far from certain she’d see the house she’d found us again. I wasn’t even sure she’d see me again.
She described her room, which had an en-suite bathroom and an annexe with a desk and a guest bed. ‘Everyone’s lovely here,’ she said, and her voice sounded less strained than it had done for several weeks. The anticipation of the journey, the fear she would be too sick to travel, had dissipated.
The next morning we spent a frustrating hour trying to make video contact on her iPad. As the failures mounted up, her emails became terser and silted up with exclamation marks, until she gave up and we opted for a daily phone call. She was sleeping more in the daytime, like a toddler, as the effort of holding off the cancer exhausted her, so we settled into a routine of speaking mid-morning. Every day I heard her voice, I felt I was pulling myself a little closer towards her on a long chain. Through the day I sent her pictures of the boys and little comments by email. How had we managed, twenty years earlier, to distil our love into one chaste handwritten letter a week?
At home there was a week to fill, a house and a history to be dismantled and packed away. My father was spending a few days in Glasgow, and my cousins were driving up from York at the weekend to help with the packing. The children had finished school, and I had worked my last shift. There was no time to be bored or fearful.
Her emails were staccato and excitable, like postcards from someone whose sight has been restored after years of darkness. She told me about shopping trips with Sanneke, local cafes she had discovered, meals out with her parents. Being an international city, The Hague had an enviable range of takeaways and she wanted to try them all: Portuguese, Nepalese, Surinamese, Thai, Bulgarian. A favourite Riesling was on standby in the fridge. She ordered books for the iPad her parents had bought for her birthday: The Great Gatsby, Bridget Jones, Anna Karenina. She was challenging death, testing whether it had the nerve to snatch her away in the middle of Tolstoy.
Marlies drove across from Arnhem with one-month-old Maas, so Magteld could see and hold her nephew. In a photograph from the hospice she is waving a toy giraffe and gazing down at him, her eyes sparkling with joy. When Euan was born, Magteld’s grandfather was dying of cancer. Luc and Diny visited us at my parents’ house in Norwich and made a home video of their grandchild. Opa had been told his cancer was untreatable while Magteld was pregnant, but he was determined to live long enough to see Euan. He managed another month. His granddaughter would live barely a decade more.
My father went home in midweek, leaving me alone with the boys for forty-eight hours until my cousins arrived. We went to the Transport Museum, their favourite day out in Glasgow, made lunch and supper and kept on filling boxes. I tried to block the thought that it was a trial balloon for single parenthood.
It was hard to know if Euan and Adam missed their mother. They didn’t seem concerned about her absence, or the house being decanted into packing cases: pictures vanishing from walls, shelves drained of books, the stock of toys depleting. It was hard to keep things normal and familiar. Euan was spending the last two nights at respite, which gave me time to pack up his bedroom. Over in The Hague Luc and Diny had booked a beach house for the first two weeks, where we would stay while the house was being renovated. I worried about how the boys would handle this itinerant lifestyle, but on the surface, at least, they seemed unperturbed. I told them they would see their mum soon and focused their attention on their imminent seafaring adventure.
Magteld’s voice on the phone sounded more robust and confident with every passing day. Was I imagining it, or was she pausing less often to catch her breath?
While she was in the Victoria Infirmary Magteld had got to know Pauline, a young woman with learning difficulties who had very little speech and was dying of cancer. Nobody apart from the nurses ever came to see her. It was hard to gauge how much she understood about her fate, but Magteld had managed to break through her anxiety and form a kind of friendship. She had garnered that Pauline was interested in knitting patterns, and as we sat in the dining room before she left Glasgow, Magteld gave me an errand.
‘I want you to buy a couple of knitting magazines and take them in to her,’ she said. Selfless, attentive and practical: a gesture that epitomised how she dealt with people.
I bought the magazines from a newsagent by the hospital, just before evening visiting. I chose two, one of which came in a plastic bag with a free set of needles. At the reception I began a faltering explanation of what I was doing. Thankfully Magteld had briefed the nurses before leaving hospital, and they escorted me down the ward.
Pauline was sitting in a chair by her bed. She flinched a little when I approached her. I tried to explain who I was and why Magteld had sent me. I produced a magazine from the bag and held it out to her. She nodded hurriedly with half-gritted teeth. The whole scene felt like one of those scenes in a Victorian period drama where the earnest, well-meaning hero visits an orphanage for the first time and realises how far he has stepped outside his circle of privilege. However good my intentions, I didn’t have Magteld’s capacity to reach people. Perhaps I needed more time.
I left the magazines piled on her bedside table and said goodbye. The nurses at the desk told me they would help her open the packages. I hoped it would calm her to sit in her chair, clacking her needles and spinning out the patterns in defiance of fate.
After dropping off Euan at respite, I spent all of Saturday with my cousins, packing up his bedroom and the kitchen. On Sunday morning we went into Glasgow, for the last time as inhabitants, to drink coffee and buy Adam a toy. Then we packed the bags to take with us in the car to Holland. All week I had focused on the ferry journey and distracting the children from what we faced on the other side.
Adam was already wide awake when I went into his bedroom on Monday morning. ‘Ready for the boat?’ I asked. An excited grin spread across his face.
We fetched Euan from the respite house. He was clutching a balloon from his farewell party the night before. His face, too, was a mask of excitement. What a privilege of youth, I thought, to be able to quit your native city without a pang of remorse.
We went home and gathered up the suitcases. It was eleven o’clock; we were due in Newcastle in around six hours, which gave us a good margin. The next day I was signing the contract for the house at the lawyer’s office in The Hague at lunchtime. Everything was set.
With the boys and bags in the car, I decided to give the tyre pressures one last check. As I tugged at the valve there was a loud hissing sound and the dial on the pressure gauge plummeted to zero. Somehow I had contrived to tear a hole in the rubber, and air was flooding out. I looked at the slumped tyre in raw panic. Were all our delicate plans to founder at this stage because of some overzealous pumping?
There was a garage a mile away, beside the Battlefield monument and the Old Victoria Hospital. I pumped the tyre as full as I could and set off, hoping the air would not expire too quickly. I explained the situation to the mechanic, who looked at me slightly wearily, glued the valve shut and wished us on our way. The setback cost us thirty frantic minutes.
The mood was more relaxed when we stopped for lunch by the English border. Gasps of wind shot across the hillside and blew fat clouds across the sky, allowing the occasional flicker of sunlight to steal through. We sat and ate sandwiches on the Scottish side while watching a flock of sheep in England trot through the rippling grass. Technically, now, the boys were migrants in transit. I was not, since I was flying back five days later to
tie up the removal and wouldn’t emigrate for another ten days. It was a disorienting experience, but we were getting used to weaving new plans from scraps and loose threads, each new structure a little flimsier than the one it replaced.
The sea was stirred by a benign wind, the kind that rocks you to sleep rather than shakes you out of it. I had ordered drinks and snacks in the cabin. Emigration should be marked with some kind of ceremony, I felt, even one as mundane as snapping open a cold beer, a couple of soft drinks and a packet of crisps. When we woke I discovered the sea breeze had delayed the journey by an hour. I took the boys out on deck and we watched the Dutch coastline loom sluggishly into view. We finally rolled off the boat in IJmuiden harbour at eleven o’clock; my appointment at the lawyer’s office, an hour and a half’s drive away, was scheduled for half past twelve.
The office was tucked away in The Hague’s outer suburbs, between glass-fronted shops and solid blonde-brick apartments. Our agent was waiting in the street when the satellite navigation system delivered us to the front door with ten minutes to spare. Luc and Diny were there, too, and took the boys off to the beach house while I went inside.
In Scotland all the paperwork is carried out before a house is sold, and the keys are typically collected in a second-hand brown envelope from the solicitor’s reception desk. The Dutch arrangement is more ritualised, with buyer and seller required to sign the contract under a notary’s watchful eye. We were ushered into a reception room with a plush claret-coloured carpet and took our seats at a round table. A secretary served coffee while we waited for the notary. The sellers, a divorced couple, were already seated, with their agent strategically placed between them. Throughout the half-hour session the ex-husband gazed straight ahead through pale, bird-like eyes set into his crimson-speckled face, while his former partner led the conversation. Everybody was dressed in jackets and creased trousers, as if for jury service or a friend’s graduation.
The notary, a bespectacled man with a thicket of black hair and the pursed-lipped inscrutability of the Dutch professional classes, arrived with a bundle of papers and sat down, dividing the documents into two neat piles. On top was a copy of the first owner’s deposition from 1928, written in a slanting wave-like scrawl that had been rendered illegible by the passing years.
He noted Magteld’s absence and explained I would have to buy the house in my own name, as she was not available to sign. A little procedural change was required. The sellers nodded their consent, the secretary was summoned and the contract taken away for correction.
In the meantime the notary read through the contract in a dry, even tone, covering the properties of the house, the fees and charges. Then he solemnly asked if we were willing to proceed with the sale. Only when we had said yes was the house officially sold. The secretary scuttled back into the room and placed the amended contract on top of one of the piles of papers. The notary uncapped a fountain pen from his top pocket, signed the document and passed the pen round the table. Once it was back in his hand the owner took the keys from her handbag and passed them across the table to me: three shining steel slabs. There was a little ripple of applause as she congratulated me and shook my hand. I shook hands, too, with the bird-man, who screwed his mouth into an off-smile and muttered his congratulations.
I thanked the estate agent, stepped out into the sunshine and drove off to the beach house to fetch the boys. It was time to rejoin Magteld.
The Jacobshospice was on Koningin Emmakade, in a redbrick canalside terrace adorned with a ribbon of little gables, with marzipan-striped facades that gleamed in the sunlight. Cyclists swooshed past on one side of the road while trams glided along on the other, separated from the canal by a tight row of trees. It was an unmistakably Dutch scene, with its straight lines and neat brickwork and segregated traffic streams. We stepped into a hallway where the light streamed in from above, and from there into the lounge where Magteld was sitting in her wheelchair.
I reached down to kiss her, felt her spindly fingers crawl up my arms and held her as tight as I dared. Eight days had never seemed so long. Her grimace melted, and her urgent breathing eased a little. Her voice was a little stronger, as I had sensed on the phone, but there was a tension in the way she clutched at me that signalled all was not well.
She clutched the boys warmly and kissed them with relief. ‘Nice to see you, Mum,’ said Adam. It sounded like a cursory greeting, but I knew it meant more, since Adam didn’t normally do social graces. He and Euan went over to the sofa, where their eyes had been drawn by three enormous teddy bears, and Magteld gestured to me to wheel her into the hallway so we could talk.
She started sobbing quietly, forcing the breaths from her dilapidated lungs. ‘Gordon, I lost a friend,’ she said in a soft croak.
The hospice was a blissful place in many ways, where residents were treated as guests and encouraged to read, talk, eat and socialise. It had a library and a garden, and volunteers who would stop for a five-minute chat that lasted half an hour or spontaneously produce a sumptuous banquet for all to share. I felt a stronger sense of life there, among the dying, than exists in many an office or airport or hotel lobby. But there was no way of masking its essential function. Every few evenings a bedroom door would stand open, and a candle would be lit in the hallway, and another resident would silently depart.
Magteld had told me on the phone about Ilse, an elderly woman who was one of her fellow guests. She was in the advanced stages of cancer, and she and Magteld were close friends within a day. They could discuss life and death without inhibition or alarm. They were comrades resisting death, like people who shut their eyes and hold hands before jumping from a moving train. The day before, while the boys and I were hurtling across northern England to catch our ferry, the two of them were sitting chatting with one of the volunteers, until Ilse retired for a nap. They would reconvene over supper.
Ilse never woke up.
And Magteld was confronted once again with the delicateness of the thread on which all her hopes now hung. Grief and terror floated to the surface. Grief especially: somebody she had connected with so profoundly, in such a precious short time, was gone. And she was left behind, alone, with the death knell clanging in her ears.
I spent my first night in The Hague on the fold-down guest bed in Magteld’s hospice room. Manoeuvring her into the low bed was a delicate operation, but it was worth it to be able to feel her warmth and solidity in the night. I woke before dawn and heard the hum of street sweepers maintaining the city’s orderliness, then drifted off again to the rhythm of my wife’s breathing. We were physically closer in many ways now I had to lift her in and out of her chair several times a day. Her fingers crawled up my arms to gain purchase on my shoulders. Right to the end she retained a vestigial sensuality. Her shallow breath would catch the back of my neck, and we performed a slow, ungainly pas de deux as I lowered her into the chair. Within days the clean-and-jerk procedure of holding her as she stepped into the chair and levering her down became a smooth, practised action.
The physics of our relationship changed. My upper arms and shoulders gained in tone and heft as they adjusted to the demands of shifting Magteld in and out of her wheelchair. I showered her in the en-suite bathroom, washing her limp hair and running the flannel over her knobbly spine, redundant legs and the ruins of her breasts. Her light, playful smile eclipsed the devastation cancer had wrought.
Beneath the window in the annexe was her desk, overlooking the canal, where she wrestled with fat dossiers on cancer treatment and organised the boys’ schooling. There was a pile of folders on one side: her medical records, envelopes from the schools and advisory leaflets on hiring a childminder. Here she would sit, scrawling notes in a book, perusing papers or making phone calls, looking up occasionally as a tram whistled past. In a place where people come to die, she was working to secure her family’s future. She was a supernova, bursting with brightness and energy in her dwindling last moments.
I regretted that for so long I had fai
led to make her feel wanted. To me Magteld became more beautiful in her thirties, as she acquired inner strength and self-confidence. I loved her better when she had learned to love herself. Here in the hospice, we curled up together on her sofa like besotted teenagers and snatched kisses in the lift on the way from her room to the dining area. Actual lovemaking was too precarious, though she never gave up hope.
The Dutch newspaper columnist Klaas ten Holt, who lost his wife Bibian to cancer, described how in the aftermath he had to fight the urge to call up the first woman he could think of ‘in the hope that she’ll stay with me and keep me from this debilitating loneliness’.* All through Magteld’s illness, and especially in the days after she died, I often felt like jumping into the arms of the nearest female friend and pleading with her to take me away from all this horror. And I can see how that might have been misinterpreted. Yet once she was gone, the idea of someone else lying on her side of the bed was too discordant. I’d read of widows who’d smothered their loss in sexual escapades, but when the moment came grief crushed my desire like a vice. Magteld had tried to absolve my survivor’s guilt before we left Glasgow, when she clutched my arm and said she wanted me to find a new partner. ‘You deserve to be loved,’ she said, and looked up with that slender smile. Yes, really: my dying wife, in her final months, wanted to ease the pain of living for me.
Easter was celebrated in the hospice with a lavish breakfast. The dining table was dominated by moulded chocolate eggs which my parents had brought from France to Glasgow, and whose odyssey was completed when I brought them back across the North Sea to be devoured in The Hague. In the afternoon I would fly out to Glasgow to finish packing the house. When I returned five days later it would be as an immigrant.
‘I’m getting stronger every day,’ Magteld said. It became her mantra. By the time I first saw her in The Hague she had dispensed with the disability cutlery and reverted to regular utensils. Above her bed hung her gym, a hard plastic triangle with a rubber band stretched round it. She showed me how she used it to pull herself up, gritting her teeth as she urged her failing arms to raise her from the divan. Within a few days she was able to wheel herself across the vinyl floors. Her breathing became deeper, her voice richer, her expression less strained. One night, as we lay in bed talking softly, she laughed so hard that one of the nurses rushed upstairs in alarm.
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