All the Time We Thought We Had

by Gordon Darroch

  I kissed her goodbye after lunch. I wasn’t worried, this time, about not seeing her again. She would be there on Friday, and the next week we were seeing an oncologist about a new course of treatment. The fear had ebbed.

  On the way to the airport I checked in on the house, where a delegation from the family was working like bees to decorate the empty bedrooms. Magteld had chosen the colours herself, wheeling herself round the wide aisles of the DIY store, concentration etched in the lines of her face. The builders were rapidly installing new back doors and two bathrooms. Metal ramps were attached to the thresholds so Magteld could move about the ground floor. One day, I hoped, we would carry her up the stairs to see the children’s new rooms.

  In Glasgow I bought a new pair of trousers and a jacket as I assumed the role of the émigré. Two removal men arrived on Wednesday night and reduced the house to a shell in a few hours. The van left in the morning to catch the overnight ferry from Hull. On the final Friday I had lunch with my parents in the Babbity Bowster pub, a ritual that had begun two decades earlier on one of my first visits to the city.

  I boarded the train at Central Station, bound for Edinburgh airport and Amsterdam. The sky was dark violet, as if a storm was ushering me out of the country. At Schiphol airport I was waved through the border without a whiff of ceremony. It could hardly be further removed from the jubilant arrival Magteld and I had imagined for years. Everything was drably familiar: the baggage carousel, the black-walled basement station and the yellow trains, the glass and concrete palace of Den Haag Centraal. Only when I reached the hospice and took Magteld in my arms again did I feel a stir of accomplishment.

  On Monday morning I took the boys to the town hall to register as residents. Magteld had already registered, using the hospice as her home address. I packed our passports and the sales contract for the house and boarded the tram to the centre of The Hague. We sat down opposite a courteous, unsmiling young woman, and I set out the paperwork.

  ‘Is their mother not with you?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s here, but she’s in a hospice,’ I replied. ‘She’s too sick to travel here.’

  I gave her Magteld’s name and the address of the hospice, emphasising she was a Dutch national. The woman scrolled through her screen and ruffled the papers on the table a few times, accompanied by increasingly vigorous shakes of the head. There was no record.

  ‘If she’s moved here from abroad she needs to register in person,’ she told me.

  ‘But she’s in a hospice . . .’ I began.

  ‘What is that, a hospice?’

  I hesitated. Had my pronunciation let me down? Was there a different Dutch word I was meant to use? Or were hospices simply beyond the scope of this woman’s experience?

  ‘Well, she’s seriously ill . . .’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Was there a medical reason for you wanting to move here?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said with a tingle of irritation. ‘That came later.’

  But she was unwavering: the rules were the rules and there were no exceptions. New migrants, including returning Dutch citizens, were required to present themselves in person. She handed us our residency papers and made an appointment for us to return with Magteld, in two weeks’ time.

  A week later a typed letter arrived from the mayor, Jozias van Aartsen, in English, welcoming us to his city. It began: ‘I am delighted that you have come to live here and I hope you will soon feel at home’ and came with a free voucher for the library. The underlying message didn’t escape me, however, and the following week the first municipal tax demand duly landed on the doormat.

  The folder containing Magteld’s medical history squatted on her desk in the hospice. Most of its pages were devoted to the last eighteen months. We gathered it up and took it down to the hospital, where Dr Barrett had arranged an appointment with an oncologist.

  The first hurdle was getting past reception. The receptionist needed to see proof of Magteld’s insurance cover before giving her clearance. But she was only eligible for health insurance once she had registered as a resident, and that had been stalled for another two weeks. There was a nervous stand-off for a few moments, the irresistible force of Magteld’s cancer grinding against the immovable object of Dutch bureaucracy, until I remembered the European health cards in my wallet. For the time being she would have to be treated as a tourist.

  After a short wait we were shown into a narrow side room and introduced to a cancer surgeon who had thumbed through Magteld’s dossier. ‘The last few years haven’t been a very happy story,’ he said soberly. He put us through to his colleagues in the oncology department. I got a phone call the next day and a week later Magteld had an appointment.

  The HagaZiekenhuis was a high monolithic building whose pristine corridors echoed with the rippling sound of staff bustling about in white rubber clogs. Magteld’s new oncologist emerged from a consultation room and shook both our hands. Dr Houtsma was an earnest, softly spoken man with wiry hair, his face steeped in kindness and compassion. He set out the facts of Magteld’s case diligently and without panic. But neither did he shy from the fact that her disease was at a very advanced stage.

  Magteld sat with a small blue notebook in her trembling hand, containing the notes she had scrawled in the hospice. In a year and a half she had gained some fluency in the language of cancer medicine. She discussed the options with Dr Houtsma in the unhurried tone that she had cultivated in meetings with council officials and politicians. Was paciltaxel or carboplatin a better option, she wanted to know. She was taking dexamethasone to contain the inflammation in her lungs, but the side-effects were severe and would soon start to erode her liver, so the dose would need to be scaled back. Dr Houtsma told her to prepare herself for a new course of chemotherapy. A final roll of the dice.

  Before deciding how to proceed, he needed Magteld to undergo a scan to establish the extent of her cancer. There was no need to worry about delays: the scan was already booked for the next day. Then he turned to me and asked, ‘And how are things with you?’

  I jolted in my seat. I was accustomed to being the supporting act or the invisible stagehand in these consultations, but here was a medical professional breaking through the fourth wall.

  ‘Um, well, it’s pretty hard going,’ I murmured.

  ‘It’s extremely hard,’ he corrected me. He had listened attentively to the story of our migration, the speed of Magteld’s decline and the challenges we faced resettling the children. He made a second appointment with the social care department, to see what support we were entitled to as a family.

  By the time we emerged from the consultation room, having shaken hands a second time with Dr Houtsma, the day seemed appreciably brighter. A proper plan would have to wait, however, until after the weekend. More appointments were scheduled over the next few days. There seemed to be an endless stream of specialists lining up to take their turn at treating Magteld, like dancers in a ballroom. A physiotherapy team warned us to check our medical insurance covered all the various treatments Magteld would be undergoing. ‘If you start doing supervised sports the costs can rack up quickly,’ one said.

  I looked at her in her wheelchair, and she looked back at me, lightly shocked. Were they really talking about Magteld getting up and not just walking but playing sport?

  For the boys and me the beach house would be our base for the next two weeks. It was one of hundreds of large brick chalets laid out behind the dunes at the southern end of the city. Gaunt, wispy trees poked out of the arid soil which, when the wind scampered in from the shore, gave it an end-of-the-world feel.

  Magteld’s parents and I went for walks on the beach or sat on the small patio drinking coffee while the boys roamed through the woods and fetched sticks which Adam arranged, diligently, on the threshold. We headed into the city to see Magteld at the hospice, or I took her out for lunch or coffee. Sometimes I would bring her back to the beach house and we would have tea together, in a strange parody of a family weekend break. It
was mainly a matter of eating up the time until she could start her medical treatment again.

  Soldiers remembering a war speak of moments of terror interspersed by spells of unbearable tedium. The waiting, sometimes, could be suffocating. One afternoon at the beach house I went out to the scrub of lawn where Magteld was sitting in her chair, wrapped tightly in a shawl, a soft breeze flicking her hair. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth, I saw as I moved closer, was clenched in a grimace. She was exhausted and on the verge of tears.

  ‘Gordon,’ she croaked, ‘take me back to the hospice.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Just take me back.’

  In the car she told me she had wheeled herself outside to escape the suppressed tension in the house. Her mother had followed her out and asked if she was having a bad day. It had shredded the last remnants of her patience. There were too few days already; Magteld no longer had the luxury of wasting one. She had wanted a brief moment alone, to recover her strength and banish the creeping fear. There was a bad day coming, and she wasn’t ready to face it yet.

  * Klaas ten Holt’s columns were collected and published in 2014 as De complete weduwnaar (The Complete Widower)

  10

  The last weeks of Magteld’s life were a time of tremendous hope. I never want to forget that, however contradictory it sounds. We talked of trips to the beach and drinking prosecco at sundown. She found an article in the local freesheet about Vlaggetjesdag, when the first catch of the herring season is ceremonially landed at Scheveningen harbour, and magnet-pinned it to the fridge. Daytrippers fill the quaysides and flock round the dozen stalls serving up that unmistakably Dutch delicacy of raw herring sprinkled with onions and clapped in a white bun. That was in mid-June, six weeks away. Soon after that it would be the school holidays. Perhaps by then she would be well enough to enjoy a short trip away. We even concocted a fanciful scheme to hire a campervan and charge down to Lake Garda, where our story had begun twenty-one years earlier.

  ‘Dr Barrett wasn’t right, then,’ Diny said one evening over a glass of wine. I thought of Magteld’s story of the man with the newspaper and shrugged. The truth was nobody knew how long Magteld had left. All we could do was keep filling up the days.

  The hospice was meant to be a final staging post – in its own words, a ‘near-home’, with everything that implied. Sometimes, however, the guests thrived so well under the round-the-clock care that their condition stabilised and they were able to leave. Magteld’s desire to spend her remaining time with her family, in the house she had found for us, would not be quashed, and she quietly began making arrangements to be discharged. Only later did it become clear how tenaciously she clung to her wish to die at home, in her own bed, with her three boys by her side.

  The house was a jungle of boxes and building materials, the staircase draped in dust sheets and the bed buried under an avalanche of clothes and linen. The noise of drills and hammers tore through the air. The boys’ bedrooms would not be ready for another week, so Luc and Diny took them away for five days to Sleen, the closest thing they had to a family home.

  I went on shuttle runs to the local branch of Ikea, in Delft. Nothing illustrated my transition from tourist to resident better than the fact that I mainly associated Johannes Vermeer’s hometown with self-assembly furniture. Magteld had marked the catalogue on her iPad, picking out table lamps and a picnic table set for the garden. Together with Sanneke I unpacked the kitchen, which had taken me days to decant into boxes, in a whirling few hours. In the evenings I sat, alone, screwing together chipboard panels to the point of exhaustion. Gradually the pile of boxes dwindled, the builders retreated and a home emerged from the clutter. By the end of April I was able to move in.

  I saw Magteld in the hospice once or twice a day, scheduling my visits to work around her afternoon naps. I fetched her from her room, performing the well-oiled transition from bed to wheelchair, and followed her as she rolled herself into the lift. Her eyes glinted as she scrambled with her fingertips to gain purchase on my arms when I transferred her to the chair, and again when I reached down to steal a kiss.

  She had arranged to spend the next Saturday night in the house. If it went well, I thought, she could divide her time between home and hospice. I had metal ramps installed in the doorways and went out to a disability supply store to fetch a roller seat for the shower.

  My parents visited later that week. For them the journey across the sea, from Harwich to Hook of Holland, was more convenient than the long drive to Glasgow. We had tea with Magteld, in the hospice, and I cooked supper in the house the next day. At the end of the meal I brought through a steaming jug of hot water, having forgotten to put the beans in the coffee filter. ‘He’s got a lot on his mind,’ I heard Magteld say from the kitchen, and my parents chuckled. To be in her home, amusing herself with her family, surrounded by the chattels of her life in Scotland, was what she lived for now.

  At the hospice the paperwork was piling up. Magteld worked in concentrated bursts, in between sleeps, declining offers of help from the staff and volunteers. Adam was due to begin school on 6 May, a Tuesday, since Monday was Liberation Day, when the Dutch celebrate the end of the wartime occupation. Euan needed a place at a special school, which was a more time-consuming affair. We had begun the process back in February by contacting schools and education authorities, and they replied with an avalanche of questionnaires to assess his capacity to learn, his social interaction, his hobbies, his communication skills and behavioural problems: Does he mostly play alone? Does he make inappropriate noises? Does he bite? Does he steal? Does he hear voices? Is he suicidal? We waited. Around six weeks later a letter arrived from a specialist school telling us we hadn’t provided enough information.

  We sat in our house and hacked our way through another bundle of questionnaires, including one we had already completed first time around. Magteld kept up the pressure: she made phone calls, followed up paperwork and made appointments, employing the doggedness she had learned on the parent council. And then she waited. Dutch bureaucracy moves like a windmill pulverising a pile of grist, but Magteld didn’t have the luxury of patience.

  One of her visitors in the hospice was Diana, a cancer patient she had befriended on the blogging grapevine. Diana had first been diagnosed with breast cancer around the time Magteld and I were married, nearly thirteen years earlier, and had had secondary cancer for the last five. Living for five years with an incurable disease might seem an unbearable burden, but Diana was indefatigable and inspiring. She immersed herself in the latest medical research, became conversant in the matrix of data that measured the progress of her tumours, and challenged her consultants without fear. She showed Magteld that a terminal diagnosis was far from a helpless situation, and that patients could play an active role in their treatment.

  Social media gave Magteld a sense of solidarity with people who shared an unwanted fate. She got to know them not as patients but as people with jobs, partners, interests, children, political opinions and senses of humour. She loved to watch the replies to her blogs come in from all over the world, from friends and family, from vague acquaintances and people who only knew her as a jumble of pixels on a screen, yet could still connect with the woman who sat in her wheelchair typing, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

  Five weeks had passed since Magteld and I last shared our bed in Glasgow. Seventeen stairs separated it from the ground floor, and she glided up and down them effortlessly until the day she was abruptly taken to hospital. Now a flight of stairs was an impenetrable barrier. In The Hague I had to wheel her into the bedroom, lift her from the chair onto the bed and pull her pyjamas on as if dressing an infant. Yet what a thrill it was to lie beside her on that Saturday night, even though she had to be handled as delicately as an ancient manuscript. She woke every few hours demanding painkillers, or a pear ice-cream to soothe her prickly throat, or dropstaafjes – hard little liquorice sweets – as a nostalgic comfort when the dread of the deep ni
ght came upon her. But just to feel the weight and warmth of her was worth every tribulation. In the morning we would have breakfast together, with Magteld at the head of the table, and I could kiss her forehead and drink in her weary smile, and it would vindicate the battles we fought on the journey to dawn.

  We watched the constant stream of bicycles flow past the window, that classically Dutch symphony of style and function. Bikes customised with flowers, or with beads in the spokes, or plastic crates strapped to the front as makeshift shopping carriers. Mothers carrying children front and back, or towed along in covered trailers, or strapped into vast wooden tubs at the prow end. Bikes used to convey bathroom scrap, small dogs (large ones ran alongside), paintings, musical instruments, and desirable others who perched giggling on the shopper rack.

  The beach was tantalisingly close – five minutes in the car, ten minutes at a fast jog – so I could run up to it in the mornings. We could leave the house at five o’clock on a summer’s afternoon and spend a few hours at a beach shack, sipping coffee or wine as the children played in the sand and jumped in the waves beneath a reddening sun, before drifting home, fresh and recharged. The Hague makes few concessions to the conventions of seaside towns, with the exception of the promenade at Scheveningen, with its casinos, neon-fronted bars, ice-cream parlours and shops groaning with gaudy airbeds and bubble-text T-shirts. Further down the coast the beach is separated from the city by the dunes, where the Dutch have tried to let nature take its course, but the pathways and regimented trees betray their instinct for the straight line. Send a group of Dutch children to the beach with buckets and spades and before long they’ll be digging a canal.