After a little rumination and negotiation, I devised a hybrid solution. At the end of the month I was handed half her remains in a plain white cardboard tube and took her home on my bike, in a plastic bag. She took up residence in a corner of the bedroom, in between the clothes and handbags that I still hadn’t managed to shift, but home again.
People warned me the first Christmas would be the hardest, haunted, like Dickens’s tale, by memories of years gone by and visions of an impoverished future. To fend off the loneliness I arranged to spend the entire Christmas and New Year period with Magteld’s parents in Sleen. At home I brought back a tree that Euan had chopped down with his Scout group during a weekend camp. Another small milestone: it was his first night away from us since we’d moved. No longer constrained by domestic debates about the size of the tree, I picked the largest specimen available, a good seven-footer, and installed it in the far corner by the window. Magteld had been a fan of Christmas shops, and over the years we had accumulated a small gallery of wooden reindeers and plastic fairies. The three of us adorned the tree with the trinkets of those days spent rummaging in oppressively lit boutiques, doing our best to honour her sense of balance and symmetry. When it was finished, and I switched on the lights, a vestige of our Christmases past in Scotland appeared in our Dutch living room. The same objects, the paper Santas the children had made in their classrooms in Glasgow, the preserved pine cones and the long-skirted angel with her wand: all were there, just as they had been a year ago, framed by another window in another city, where Magteld had surveyed her handiwork, fashioned by arms that were not yet withered, and we clinked glasses of prosecco.
I planned to spend my time in Sleen sitting by the wood-burning stove with a book in one hand and a whisky in the other, the ghost of Magteld hovering close by, in the house where she had been born. But most of the time the house was too busy. The six grandchildren filled the house with wild, cackling laughter and the drumbeat of small feet on floorboards. Euan spent two days assembling a mountain of Lego bricks, turning the house into a miniature construction site. And then, on the third day, the rest of the family dispersed, leaving the two grandparents and the three of us.
The boys became restless. They wanted to go home.
And by home they meant The Hague.
The weather was damp and cold and miserable, and nearly all the local attractions had shut down for the winter. On the last two nights of the year Euan and Adam both fell ill with a sickness bug. So we staggered into 2015, drained by the efforts of minding sick children, clutching glasses of whisky and celebrating the New Year twice: once in real time and again an hour later as we watched the BBC’s coverage from Scotland. How far we had come, how much we had gained and lost. Magteld had started the year with a troublesome cough and not even survived half of it; the children had adjusted to a new home and seismically altered lives. As for me, I had achieved my main ambition for 2014 of becoming an immigrant. And Magteld had made it home, to the house she chose, in her own country, in defiance of fate. A dream we had nurtured for years, in harsh and oppressive conditions, bloomed, in the end, for two weeks. Yet as long as my memory exists, they will be etched in my mind as the most precious of days.
15
In the last half-century the rose-ringed parakeet has established itself in the coastal cities of the Netherlands. The bright-green birds arrived in the 1960s as pets, transported from their natural home in equatorial Africa and India and kept caged in the more muted sunlight of north-western Europe. A few escaped and, incongruously, withstood the challenges of the larger, fiercely territorial seagull and the damp climate. They endured the snow-covered fields and mist-bound frozen canals of winter and gradually made themselves at home. Today the population numbers around 10,000, a third of which overwinter in The Hague. In summer their emerald flash and deep-throated chirp punctuate the wide open sky, while at twilight the trees outside the parliament building tremble and chatter as the parakeets hold court, their silhouettes flickering against the streetlit sky.
In the early days, whenever I doubted my wisdom in bringing my children across the sea to Magteld’s country; whenever I felt detached or disoriented or weighed down by the task of fitting in to Dutch society; whenever the pressed and manicured landscape made me long for a rugged hillside and a teeming waterfall; whenever, in short, I thought about packing up and going home, I drew inspiration from these flamboyant incomers. People barely notice their dazzling, arrow-like tails as they glide over houses, down past canals and over sand dunes, cackling as they go, singly by day or in small flocks as they retire to their nests at dusk. But I noticed them. They were migrants who had cultivated a corner of a foreign field, adapting while retaining their identity and carving out a niche among the natives. If these distinctive creatures could thrive in the thrawn Dutch environment, what did I have to fear?
One pin-sharp morning in February I was rounding a corner on my bike, having just taken Euan to school, when the wheels hit a spot of black ice and glided beneath me, bringing me down in a graceful parabola. It seemed to happen in slow motion, giving me time to think, in the partial second before I reached the ground, that this might be my last moment. But the momentum was mostly contained by my right shoulder, and the tap of my head against the ice-bound road wasn’t even enough to knock me unconscious.
In the few minutes I lay there, four people materialised around me and started competing to call an ambulance. One helped me to my feet; another wheeled my bike from the kerbside; another produced a cloth; a third asked which relative he should call. Nobody panicked. The Dutch instinct for order is a wondrous thing. By the time I was upright they had already formed a committee and a plan of action.
The ambulances were all busy transporting other black-ice casualties, so I would have to make my way to the nearest A&E, which happened to be at the children’s hospital. A man named Peter offered to drive me in his Volvo. I explained that I still had to pick up Adam, who was waiting for me in the house, and take him to school.
‘Can you call him?’ asked another man, who had just got off the phone to Sanneke.
‘No, he can’t use the phone,’ I said.
He looked disturbed, clearly assuming I had left a toddler alone in the house, rather than a nine-year-old with a communication disorder. My head was bleeding, but Adam would be distraught if I didn’t come home.
So Peter took me first to the house, where I collected Adam, still clutching the blood-soaked cloth to the side of my head. I checked myself in the bathroom mirror, saw the red streaks down the side of my face and tried to wash them away. We took Adam to school and drove on to the hospital.
‘This is a children’s hospital,’ said the receptionist, barely looking up. ‘The adult hospital is twenty minutes away.’
Peter retorted, ‘This is an emergency and all the ambulances are out. He was told to come here.’ This man, whom I’d barely known for ten minutes, was pitching himself against bureaucracy on my behalf, drawing on another hardwired custom.
The receptionist relented and asked for my insurance card. I thanked Peter, shook hands and went to sit in the waiting room, which was decorated in primary colours and filled with toys but empty of people.
After ten minutes a junior doctor came along, wearing the kind of friendly expression that children’s physicians instinctively adopt. He gave me a butterfly plaster and a tetanus injection. I’d planned to go for a run once the children were in school, so when I rolled down my sleeve I exposed my running clothes underneath, making me look like some kind of hapless superhero. The doctor smiled, shook my hand and let me go. I was tempted to ask for a lollipop. I fetched my bike from where it was standing, undamaged, a kilometre away, and pedalled away, feeling the pain swell in my shoulder.
We scattered the remainder of Magteld’s ashes on a windless, shimmering blue day in early March, a week after what would have been her thirty-ninth birthday. I had arranged to go out from Scheveningen harbour on a fishing trawler and fling her burned dust
over the waves she had crossed so many times. Magteld’s birthday had traditionally heralded the arrival of spring. This year, as we went to release her, the season was in full spate: crocuses and daffodils lined the roadside, and a week earlier, as the boys and I cycled along the canal, we had spotted two goslings pottering by the water’s edge. The afternoon sky was an unblemished sheet of blue and there was barely a whisper of wind as we gathered in the harbour: the boys and I, Magteld’s and my parents, her sisters with their husbands and children.
Scheveningen in March is just emerging from hibernation: a few trawlers scuttle in and out of the harbour, squares of light pour out of the café windows, and the sands are no longer the exclusive domain of joggers and dog walkers bending into the whipping winter wind. We stood on the sunlit quayside watching the long scoop-like trawlers come in, wondering which of them would be taking us out. As confirmed landlubbers we had dressed for the open sea in sturdy raincoats and shoes.
A man from the crematorium was supposed to join us, but as the time drew near there was no sign of him. We started approaching passers-by and asking if they were from the crematorium, which prompted some startled reactions. When he arrived, Rene was instantly recognisable from the camera slung around his neck and the cardboard urn in his hand. Magteld was with us; the reunion was complete.
Our boat was moored beside another trawler so that we had to walk down a gangplank, up one ladder and down another to get on board. The children went ahead, laughing at the clatter of their shoes on the wooden planks. The boat was simple and functional, with two long wooden benches down the middle, a wide gangway on either side and signs instructing users not to wash or fillet their catch on the seats. The Dutch flag drooped at half-mast. I set the tube of ash down at the end of the bench and propped up a photograph of Magteld against it. She was sitting on top of Ben Lomond, hunched slightly into the wind, beaming contentedly, in a picture I had taken more than a decade earlier before the boys were born. The freedom of the hills, the freedom of the sea: it was all the same now.
The vessel with its rasping engine cut through the glassy water as we moved out of the harbour, passing giant diggers that squatted above us on the quayside like armoured beasts, gleaming in the sunlight. The thick ropes dangling over the side of the boat skipped and danced on the foaming waves. Whenever we crossed from Newcastle to IJmuiden Euan would sit entranced by the billowing skirt of water that seemed to hold the ship aloft. It took a considerable force of nature to persuade him to stay still for any length of time, but the majesty of the sea entranced him. Magteld and I enjoyed those crossings, too, for their sense of occasion. The seventeen-hour sea journey was a gentler, more indulgent form of travel that allowed us to bypass the bloodless abattoir of modern airport security. After we moved to The Hague the children made me promise never to take them on a plane again. It was no great sacrifice.
The engine dwindled to a hum as we reached the spot where the dispersal was to take place. I had explained to Rene that I wanted to scatter the ashes in both directions, towards Scotland one way and the Dutch coastline the other. We could see the latter; the former was down to guesswork and the wind direction. He smiled uneasily and went off to consult the captain. It wasn’t a matter of where we wanted the ashes to go but where the wind would take them. I knew that, but the symbolism of the moment was more important to me than meteorological concerns.
I opened the tube, reached inside and pulled out a handful of dust. It felt dry and gritty and strangely light. We’ve all seen those photographs of sand magnified thousands of times until they resemble cocktail snacks, and I speculated that maybe somewhere in this grey powder there was a grain that bore the exact likeness of my dead wife. Perhaps they all did; perhaps the universe had ordained it that way in secret complicity. Perhaps benign forces had laid on the sunshine and stilled the wind, though more likely not, since the reason we were here at all was that a woman we loved had died of cancer at the age of thirty-eight. I pulled my hand out of the tube and hurled the first clump of Magteld’s ashes into the sky. They swelled into a small dark cloud, lingered in the air for a moment, then vanished. I don’t think any of them made it to Scotland. But perhaps a grain or two did.
Scheveningen waterfront, with its chunky flats and the palatial Kurhaus hotel, slid into view as the captain turned the boat round for the second half of the ceremony. We took it in turns to dip into the container holding what remained of Magteld and cast her to the waves. We scattered rose petals and flung sunflowers in after her, watching their yellow heads bob and drift on the cobalt blue water (the flowers were a last-minute innovation, both to honour her life as a florist and to give us something visible to mark her patch of ocean). The crosswind was against us now, so we had to fling the ashes in a hard underarm sweep that doubled as a goodbye wave. The children hugged each other tightly, leaning against the railing of the boat, their excitement suddenly muted. When Adam wiped his eyes I assumed it was to clear the ash blowing back onto the deck, but then we saw him looking at the picture of his mother. He had connected it with the charred powder being tossed over the side of the boat.
The engine stirred again, and the boat circled the area where the sunflowers were bobbing on the waves. The captain gave three blasts of the horn to signify the end of the ceremony and raised the Dutch flag from half to full mast. A few of the sunflower heads were still just discernible as we peered out, but as we headed back towards the harbour they sank beneath the waters, their part in the drama complete. We took leave of Magteld once more and felt our grief rise to the surface. We embraced, sobbed, clutched each other, sought softness and warmth beneath the rustle of winter jackets. The boat pulled in, nestled against its fellow trawler like lovers on a still night, and we clambered over the metal ladders, up the gangplank and onto the quayside.
Rene led me into the office of the boat-hire company. While we were scattering the ashes the captain had liaised with the navigation centre at Schiphol to fix our exact coordinates, so that we could pinpoint the spot where her ashes had fallen. They gave us a map and indicated a buoy out at sea that we could look to from the shore in order to anchor our memories of this day. Where other cultures weave fables, laced with metaphor and symbolism, around the grand themes of love and death, the Dutch find solace in precise measurement and the permanence of the straight line.
We had supper in a restaurant overlooking the harbour, the kind of place that teems with day-trippers in summer but was now open and spacious. We sat, talked and dined as the light drained from the sky and the flat water darkened. Despite the prevailing sadness a weight had been lifted. Our memories of Magteld were light and insubstantial, and precious, and through these rituals we would gradually uncouple them from our grief, so they could fly up and dance among the stars.
Epilogue
Summer 2015. A year has gone by. The cabinet on Magteld’s side of the bed is still cluttered with the remnants of her life: her passport and purse, her unfinished books and beechwood back massager. Her clothes are still in the chest of drawers, right down to an unopened pack of Marks & Spencer knickers that she must have bought just before leaving Scotland. Her wedding dress hangs in a bag by the door, zipped up in a dry cleaner’s bag. I don’t have any special attachment to these relics, but they’re more comforting than the empty space they would leave behind. Her handbags squat in a plastic crate behind the door (whenever she bought one I would raise my eyebrows in mock indignation and exclaim, ‘Another handbag?’, and she would scowl, in what became a well-drilled vaudeville act). The ashes we didn’t scatter at sea are stored in a tube in the corner of the bedroom, a couple of feet from where she used to lie. Physically that’s all that remains of her now, but I feel nothing for it. I think about scooping up a handful of her dust, letting it run through my fingers and saying, ‘You’re not the woman I married.’ But I’m not quite ready to joke about it yet.
A day will come when I need to rid myself of these things. Well-intentioned, clueless people keep advising me to gi
ve my grief a place. I should get on with my life, I am told. But I am not ready and don’t know when I will be. It is the widower’s dilemma: the need to cast off the debris of the past clashes with the basic need to preserve memories. Bereavement is a never-ending fight against forgetting. Every time I throw away an item of Magteld’s I am conspiring to push her further into the past. The knowledge we must forget, and be forgotten, reminds us of the death that lies beyond death. So for now I ignore the advice to tidy my grief away and keep it out of sight. The erosion of memory will happen in its own time. These keepsakes are my way of resisting that process, of slowing the inevitable decay and all that it implies.
All around the house, pictures of her hang on the walls, moments from her life captured and framed for posterity. Here on the mantelpiece is the picture of her atop Ben Lomond, huddling into herself in a characteristic pose. Probably the wind was blowing fiercely up there and, despite the sunshine, she was fending off the cold. I couldn’t entirely appreciate the beauty of the scene because I wanted to scramble down the mountain and catch the end of the play-off final, where Norwich City were playing Birmingham for a place in the Premier League, as we drove home in the car (Norwich lost, on penalties).
She is standing in the doorway of a bus, in her wedding dress, beside me. I’m wearing a kilt. We are sheltering from the rain. Both of us are smiling, slightly awkwardly, perhaps because we’re worried about getting soaked or spoiling her dress on the way to the registry office, where we will tie our fates and the registrar will charm the celebrants with his bilingual address and melodic unaccompanied singing. Later we will sit with Diny and speculate idly about how we might celebrate our twelve-and-a-half-year anniversary, unaware of the obscene reality that awaits us.
She is sitting beside me on a large wooden chest (£200 from an antique stall on the Barras market) in the living room of our second Glasgow flat at the bottom of Victoria Road. Euan is on my lap, Adam, less than a year old, on hers. Three of us are looking down the lens of a camera held by a colleague from the newspaper where I work, while Euan chews on his fingers. The two of us are smiling contentedly, but the first creeping indications of Euan’s autism are starting to appear, and the ensuing discoveries will strip away the veneer of certainty and control from our lives.
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