My final months with TV's Fiona

Jim Hunter pauses just once to regain control of his voice as he talks about his wife, the broadcaster Fiona McDiarmid, who died a month ago from cancer.

"I don't mind talking about it," he says, gently. "It's the things we did together, that I now do without her, that I find particularly hard.î Immediately after the funeral, he gave in to his grief and escaped to Scotland - away from the stunned phone calls and emotional needs of friends and family. Now he's steeling himself to return to the house they shared in south London, unsure how he'll react to the memories each room holds.

Fiona McDiarmid was best known as the presenter of various news programmes on Sky TV, though she began her career on GMTV and, before that, was a local radio journalist. Her face was fantastically photogenic, with perfect bone structure and dark, shoulder-length, bobbed hair. Jim felt a kind of pride when people recognised her in the street. He shows me a picture of her taken last Christmas, dressed in a bright red jumper and smiling widely, her brilliant white teeth and pretty skin unaffected by the months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment she'd then undergone. "You'd really never know it, would you?" he says. "That's such an important photo for me. Both of us knew at that point - it was an unspoken understanding - that it was probably her last Christmas."

It was a battle that began in February 2001, less than a year after their wedding. Jim and Fiona had known each other through mutual friends for almost 20 years - - she was going out with one of his army friends - but it was only in 1998, shortly after the end of his first marriage, that they finally got together. The relationship was intense and happy, their passions and personalities seeming to complement each other perfectly. She encouraged in him a love of musicals and poetry, while together they played golf, went cycling, worked out at the gym, saw "masses of friends". After 25 years in the army, Jim was itching to begin a civilian career - he is now a training consultant at Goldman Sachs - and Fiona supported him through the transition from one kind of life to another. For Fiona, in her late thirties, and Jim, in his early forties, the future seemed only positive and certain. Indeed, Fiona's last remaining goal in life was within sight: because of problems conceiving, she and Jim had entered a programme of IVF treatment at a London clinic.

"She desperately wanted a baby," says Jim. "It was an absolutely fundamental desire and the one thing she'd yet to achieve."

The breast cancer that finally beat Fiona and Jim was immensely cruel. It appeared from nowhere - there was no history of the disease in her family and she led a healthy life - and began aggressively to attack her lymphatic system. "To this day," says Jim, "I never once felt the lump in her breast. It was so deep, you couldn't feel it. Even the experts had trouble finding it." The first sign of cancer, in fact, appeared beneath her left arm: a growth discovered during the fourth cycle of IVF treatment and at an absolutely crucial time, mid-way between the harvesting of her eggs and their re-implantation.

Fiona's GP sent her to hospital immediately, where the consultant took her by the hand and that very same day led her from department to department, for biopsies and X-rays.

That morning she'd been vaguely worried about the cyst beneath her arm which wouldn't shift. By the time Jim came home from the City in the evening, Fiona, then 38, knew the lump was malignant and was a secondary growth.

"We cried a lot that first night, of course," says Jim. "It was such a shock. But it's amazing how the mind adapts itself very quickly. There were two immediate concerns: how far had the cancer spread, and what were we going to do about the IVF treatment?"

Had the decision been Fiona's, says Jim, she'd have gone ahead with the next stage of IVF and had the now-fertilised eggs implanted, a course that would have ruled out treatment for cancer. But the consultant at St George's Hospital in Tooting, able to guarantee neither her survival nor that of her babies, wouldn't condone it. They had 48 hours to decide what to do, but it was a no-win situation.

"I don't think I could have gone against her wishes, if that's what she wanted," says Jim. "It would have devastated me, of course. But the doctor, quite rightly, told her that as long as she was in his care, thought we were looking at a relatively good prognosis. At no point did Fiona ever lose her positive outlook. She was never angry or bitter. She used to say: 'Well, someone's got to get it.'"

After six months of debilitating chemotherapy and surgery to remove both lumps, Fiona was able to go back to work, wearing a wig, and nipping out between programmes for radiation treatment. In the mornings, Jim would switch on the TV to check she'd got to the studio, and marvel at her professionalism. "I knew that she still wasn't well, and that just sitting was painful, but there she was, smiling away, as though nothing at all was wrong."

The doctors remained relatively confident, and Fiona was still determined

"She had no appetite and she was chesty, she couldn't quite breathe. Then she strained her arm swimming, and as we were getting into bed one night, she said: 'Does that feel like a muscle-pull to you?' I felt it and, no question, it was another lump. That's when it got truly scary. We knew that if it came back, it was very, very serious."

They returned to England and another raft of tests, to discover just how vicious and destructive Fiona's cancer was: now it had spread to her liver, her lungs and her bones. "She refused to use the word 'terminal'," says Jim, smiling for the first time.

"Her cancer was 'incurable', not terminal.

She was still incredibly positive, even when we knew that the only thing we could buy was a bit more time by drenching her body in chemotherapy to stop the tumours growing. She would only cry when she saw us crying, her parents and me. She didn't cry for herself - the thing that caused her the most amount of angst was that she knew she'd never be a mum. That just wasn't going to happen."

Doctors don't give prognoses in terms of months left, says Jim. "We had a figure of a year in our minds," he says. In fact, the progress of the disease was rapid and, on occasion, hugely distressing. Jim gave up work to spend as much time with her as he could, but she was never really well. A sailing holiday with her parents in Turkey remains his most cherished memory of that time, "an intensely emotional week but a hugely important one, now and forever".

Though no tumours were ever found in Fiona's brain, the cancer did affect her state of mind. She became confused as her health deteriorated, and for a while "the Fiona we knew wasn't there". Jim and her parents took her to see South Pacific on her 40th birthday, and old friends from her student days at Oxford and her home town of Swindon visited for champagne lunches at her bedside.

Towards the end, she regained some of her old vigour, summoning the strength to "concentrate on tricky issues: the music for her funeral, where her jewellery should go, that sort of thing". Fiona died in her sleep at 4.15am on 5 August. More than 300 people attended her funeral.

"It's hard not to talk in clichÈs," says Jim, "but life

will never be the same again." He will, eventually, go back to their home in Battersea, and then back to work.

Recently, he visited some friends of Fiona's in the country, but found it painful to drive down roads they'd driven together. Everything reminds him of her, even playing tennis.

"There'll come a time, I think, when I can just remember the good times," he says. "But it's not yet."

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. For details of fundraising events, contact Breast Cancer Care, www.breastcancercare.org.uk and Breakthrough Breast Cancer, www.breakthrough.org.uk