Buchan shifted his chair again and lifted her right foot into his lap, removing the heavy leather slipper and rubbing his thumb firmly along the length of the sole. Her head lolled backwards. He said, “Pardonnez moi, cheri. Tu es tout pour moi.”
She sat up straight and pulled her foot from his hands. “I must share you with the men in the mess, this is your idea of marriage? I must share you? And your French is terrible,” she said.
He smiled and reached for her left foot. His French was not good, it was true. But at times he went out of his way to speak it poorly, to tease her. He said, “C’est vrai?”
After the seventh month of her pregnancies, his wife endured constant discomfort and the petulance her discomfort provoked was astonishing. Buchan’s resolutely good humour in the face of her anger occasionally needled her into a more furious state of mind, but on the whole it was one of the few things that made the last eight weeks of carrying a child bearable. She winced a smile back at him. “Oui,” she said. “C’est vrai.”
They sat without speaking while Buchan massaged her swollen feet, and before she dozed off in her chair, Marie said, “Pardonnez moi, cheri. Tu es tout pour moi.” She spoke the words with a flawless imitation of her husband’s Scots burr.
“Go to sleep now,” he said.
“You love me, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You love only me, c’est vrai?”
“Oui,” he said. “C’est vrai.”
Buchan watched her sleeping. She had left their oldest daughter at a boarding school in England the past three years in order to be with him in Newfoundland. And even here he was away for weeks, sometimes months at a time. If he added the absences together, they accounted for several years of their marriage.
With the exception of the last two months of her pregnancies, Marie never complained or asked for anything different from him. It still surprised him to see the strength of her will once she committed herself. Her face was the only childlike thing about her any more, that and her devotion to him which he felt less and less worthy of. He had to make a conscious effort not to respond to it with the cloying attention of a delinquent parent. He massaged his thumb the length of the tendon that stretched from her big toe almost to her heel. It was the only thing that gave her any relief now.
At the time Buchan and Marie first met, England and France were about to go to war after a brief cessation of hostilities. He made a half-hearted attempt to talk her out of marrying him. On the HMS Nettby he had seen men disembowelled by round shot, arms shattered by flying debris. The wounded were carted to the surgeon on the orlop deck where they were laid in a row and treated strictly in turn, regardless of rank or the severity of the injury. Many bled to death while they waited. Limbs were amputated with only a mouthful of rum for anaesthetic, a leather gag forced between the injured man’s teeth. On the gun decks, the dead and those men wounded beyond hope were pitched through the gun ports to make way for replacements.
None of these things Buchan felt proper to tell a girl of Marie’s age, but he did his best to imply what marriage to a navy man could mean. Through the years that followed, he thought of himself as an appendage his wife would have to make do without if necessary — a finger, an ear, a foot. He was a soldier after all, he’d managed to find something menacingly erotic in the risking of such things. And he comforted himself with the thought that she had made her decision to marry him in full knowledge of the possibility. But the notion he might have to learn to live his life without Marie had never occurred to him before the last child.
The birth had been a harrowing, nearly fatal experience. Thirty-six hours of labour, a breech, their second daughter born feet first. For a while, the midwife thought she would lose them both. When she passed the afterbirth, Marie bled so much the bed sheets and towels, even the mattress, were beyond recovering and had to be burned. Buchan was cloistered away in another room while the women dealt with these things. He heard the story after the fact, knowing it had been abbreviated, censored in the interest of delicacy. Less than what it signified, he knew, not as horrific as the event itself.
Her constitution never quite recovered from the extremities of that labour and she had fallen into a more and more delicate state of health through this latest pregnancy. It was clear to them both, though it had never been spoken aloud, that the approaching birth could kill her. An increasingly familiar twinge of regret hammered at him, like the heel of a tiny foot kicking at his ribs from the inside.