Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  “Can you see the harbour?” Mrs. O'Reilly asked when Lav told her that she was living in the Martin house.

  Lav told her no, but Alice had insisted, “Surely,” she said, “you can see the harbour from upstairs?”

  Every day for a week or more, polite but persistent, she asked the same question—as if some miraculous good fortune came with a view of St. John's harbour. Then, one sunny morning, Lav realized that the bit of deeper blue between Crotty's two chimneys was the harbour.

  “I knew very well you'd be able to see the harbour from that house!” Alice O'Reilly said with great satisfaction.

  That very evening Lav had dragged Roger Martin's overstuffed chair from his study, pulled it across the hall, up the three steps into the kitchen. Chipping two white-enamelled door frames in the process, she installed the chair in front of the big many-paned window. Now, every night before bed, she spends an hour or so sitting in the chair. Only here does she have any sense of being in a different place—a place distantly akin to the island her mother described.

  As she sits watching St. John's harbour fade from grey to black Lav feels very much a visitor, an observer, detached from the real life of the place.

  I will do my job and leave, she thinks. It is foolish to imagine otherwise. I will make no real connections, never be invited into the houses I walk past, will not have conversations with people like the woman on the hill or the clerk in Crotty's store. The urge to do so seems unnatural, slightly vulgar, possibly dangerous. She will have to cultivate detachment. Reviewing those pleasant, well-ordered years with Philip, she decides that detachment has served her well.

  She pours herself more wine and speculates on what she might do if there is a letter from Philip in the mail on the table behind her—a reply to her casually worded card telling him she has closed the house in Ottawa.

  She imagines Philip writing from Australia—a wild, impassioned Philip who will surprise her—he has, after all, proven himself capable of surprising her. Lav amuses herself for some time conjuring up this new Philip. A man who, having cut himself adrift from geography, can now cut himself adrift from history, from order, from habit, from tradition—free himself to follow some new arrangement of urges, impulses more suited to Australian dust and sunshine, to heat and desire.

  “Come at once—cannot live without you!” this most unPhiliplike man will write. And what of her? How will this Lavinia, this woman of rusting hair and lengthening snout, respond to his siren song?

  It is almost midnight when, having finished the wine, she finally picks up the mail. There is no letter from Philip. There are bills for light and fuel oil, a scrawled message from Roger Martin reminding her to have the furnace checked and cleaned—a remarkable thing to have thought of in Caracas! There is a magazine, a flyer for Papa's Pizza and a brown envelope with “Delivered by hand—To Dr. L. Andrews, From M. Rodway” written across the outside. Inside there are three sheets of paper.

  The top sheet is Mark's hand-written note: “I've come across something you might be interested in. Could you meet me at the University—in the Maritime Archives—after work on Monday? Oh yes, the attached telexes came in after you left. Me-ne, Me-ne, Te-kel.”

  A coded message from her research assistant—a warning, perhaps.

  The second paper, just three lines typed under the DFO heading, reads, “To: Dr. L. Andrews, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Research Station, St. John's, Nfld. From: Dr. Ian Farman, Policy and Program Planning, Science Section, DFO, Ottawa. Puzzled by the implications of your preliminary report. Please reassess material keeping in mind the attached memo from Communications. “

  Puzzled indeed. What preliminary report? And, more disconcerting, why has Ian Farman, who must have eaten at her table a dozen times, not added a personal note to his nasty little memo?

  The last paper is a copy of another office memo. This one is addressed to Ian Farman and signed by someone named Wayne. Wayne has given himself neither surname or title.

  I am not going to like this—I know I am not going to like it, Lav thinks as, gripping the paper under her elbow like a handbag, she makes herself a cup of tea, takes it to the bedroom and, without undressing, crawls into bed where she reads the damned memo.

  “Urgently suggest the following rationale be given to Dr. Andrews as a broad basis for her Oceans 2000 advisory report being finalized in St. John's, Newfoundland: The report on Zone PK3 should be regarded as just one model among many being used by government in developing a strategy that will promote science and technology as the driving force for economic activity on Canada's coastal waters. It is the Minister's hope to put in place a policy that will be responsive to the needs of the private sector and consistent with government's strategy to maximize development and exploitation of the resources of our oceans for the benefit of the people of Canada.”

  Below the cunningly worded paragraph, separated by three asterisks, its author has added a note, presumably to Ian Farman, “Will be in St. John's next week—think I'll check this Dr. Andrews out. Wayne.”

  Lav lies in bed holding the three pieces of paper. She studies the signatures, two of which are machine-printed, rereads each word. Uncertainty settles like a rock in her stomach. She suspects Mark Rodway. What has he done? Why has he dropped off this stuff? Who is Wayne? What does “developing a strategy that will promote science and technology as the driving force” mean? Why urgently suggest? What preliminary report?

  She feels disoriented, ill, a tourist picking her way through some foreign maze. It is late, it seems like days since she left the office. She has drunk too much wine, is not thinking clearly. She tosses the papers onto the floor and falls into a fitful sleep.

  All night long her ageing salmon swims, first through shifting, weed-filled sludge, then through computer printouts, along watery pathways that rattle with the tap of keyboards smelling of formaldehyde.

  She wakes on Saturday feeling only slightly less ill—knowing the night has been fish-haunted, telling herself she should go straight in to the office, track down the mysterious report referred to in the memos. Over coffee she decides to try and forget the memos—after all, nothing can be done until Monday.

  She will dedicate the week-end to her physical well-being, do something about appearance, about her face and hair. She consults the phone book, lists dress shops, makes appointments. She finds a fitness centre, has a swim and workout, a massage. She visits three dress shops, a shoe store, then a beauty parlour, gets her hair coloured and styled, has a facial, a manicure. She is cossetted, glossed, coiffed, complimented. At great expense she is pampered. Those who say money cannot buy happiness lie.

  On Sunday it is pouring rain and windy. The three pieces of paper are still on the floor near her bed. Lav ignores them. Instead she tries on the dresses, the wool suit, the scarves and shoes, all her purchases of the day before. She admires her newly rinsed auburn hair.

  Later she lights the living room fire, settles down with a volume chosen at random from the Martins' shelves. Called Fallen from the Sky, the book seems intended for children but is filled with clamourous, unchildlike tales. Stories of how the earth and sky, once one, were torn asunder, how gods and goddesses fell, became vulnerable to pain, to sin, to death.

  All through the blustery afternoon she sits by the fire drinking tea, devouring crackers and cheese, reading of Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite, of how they wreak ungodly vengeance upon one another and upon poor humans. Gods, like humans, seem driven to teach what they cannot learn, succumb repeatedly to the charms of mortals and sometimes suffer endless tortures to help them. Prometheus dares the wrath of Zeus to bring man fire, Pandora opens her cunningly contrived box, Balder the Beautiful dies, he sails out to sea in his fiery ship, “burning like autumn foliage and the earth wept for him and cold and darkness followed.”

  Lavinia wept for him.

  The sound of her weeping shocks her. She had thought herself content, pleased with her own company, with the fire and the book. But she reads o
f Balder's death and is attacked by sadness. A shroud of despair, all-embracing impersonal sorrow, drops down upon her and she weeps. Beyond the edge of her weeping there is something else, something closer, more personal. But ice and sleet rattling against the window drowns it out and she huddles on the sofa sobbing for all the poor gods and poor humans who must die, their possessions scattered and their stories forgotten.

  When the weeping stops she lies sniffling in misery until dark, until there is not a spark of fire left in the hearth—then she goes to bed.

  three

  “After that nothing was ever the same.” People say such things. “That was when it all started,” they say, “From that day on, everything changed,” or “I knew right away.” Conventional, comfortable phrases, phrases that give the illusion of order, of neatness, of one's ability to compartmentalize, to separate event from event, to disentangle.

  But life will not be disentangled, has no pattern, and events are connected only in the random way of pebbles tumbling from a narrow-necked bottle—each pebble nudging the other, each one that falls making room for another to fall. For most of us—barring getting hit by a truck or having the earth drop out from under our feet—there is no moment, no hour, no day, when we can say “after that nothing was ever the same.”

  Yet that is what Lavinia Andrews will say.

  “After that stormy Sunday nothing was ever the same,” she will say “After that night of weeping, events in my life did not wait upon one another, did not politely nudge one another into being. After that everything tumbled helter-skelter—past and present, public and private, reality and imagination melding together.”

  That is the way she remembers the days that followed—but of course, days and events must happen in some order, in fixed time—and we must recall them in that order.

  On Monday morning Lav wears her new scarf, her woven jacket and the tight slit of skirt she bought on Saturday. She takes great care with her toffee-coloured hair, with makeup that must camouflage all signs of last night's weeping.

  Alice O'Reilly, waiting in the lobby, pacing beside the security desk, notices none of this.

  “They're moving us! Moving us! Without a word—without as much as a by-your-leave—we're being carted body and bones up to the top floor! And that's not all,” she rushes Lav towards the spiral walkway. “Wayne Drover and his crowd'll be here before week's end. Won't say which day, of course, just, ‘Arriving mid-week from Ottawa!’”

  Alice pauses to assess Lav's reaction, apparently not as dramatic as she would wish. “You know who Wayne Drover is?” she asks and, when Lav shakes her head, looks shocked, “Sure I thought everyone in the department knew that one! Wayne Drover's special assistant to Timothy Drew—went to Ottawa with the Minister when he was elected. From here, Wayne is—grew up in the Battery—but sharp as a tack.…”

  On the way to the new offices Alice elaborates on Wayne Drover's career, the campaigns he has run for Timothy Drew, on his failed advertising firm, his failed marriage, his ambitions. The man appears to be something of a local celebrity.

  The space they have been given is large and airy. Lav points to windows, closets, the corner countertop already holding a kettle and coffee perc—as evidence of their new status, tells Alice she should be pleased.

  “I don't like the feel of it—never known anything to happen this fast—usually you hear about stuff like this weeks ahead. There's something queer goin' on—always is when the political people move in—and mark my words that's what they're doing. This space is too big to be just for support staff—me and Mark and whoever else we need.”

  “You're in that middle office over there,” Alice points to five private offices that open on the reception area. “It's a nice office—you have a window and some new furniture's already been moved in. Maintenance says that office left of yours is for Wayne Drover, the others are for Drover's glow boys—which means they'll be staying a while.” Alice suddenly notices her supervisor's newly groomed self and asks sharply, “Did you know about all of this?”

  Lav assures the woman that she is as surprised as anyone, quickly asks if they've been told who will be travelling with Mr. Drover.

  “Well, the Minister's not coining—thank God for small mercies! But Wayne'll have two or three of his own staff from Communications—Tony Mallard and Keith Laing more than likely—or perhaps that Chinese woman photographer he had with him last time.” Alice frowns but not, apparently, because of the Chinese photographer but because of someone called Melba Summers who Wayne Drover always brings up from the steno-pool. “Melba smokes—do you object to people smoking in the office?”

  Lav chooses to ignore this question, asking instead if Alice has seen Mark this morning.

  “There's something on your desk—a report Mark dropped off, told me he might be leaving the project.”

  Alice gives Lav another accusing look. This move, Mark's talk of leaving—she knows Lav cannot be innocent. “This'll be a busy week—it would have gone a lot more smoothly if I'd had notice,” she says before turning to a man who has come pushing a trolley piled high with boxes of their printouts.

  The office Lav has been given is attractive. There is no computer, no clutter. The shiny, black surface of the desk contains a telephone and a file folder—nothing else. Behind the desk there is a rose-coloured chair. In the opposite corner a small coffee table, a sofa and easy chair, also rose-coloured, have been arranged beside a window that looks out onto the cliff face.

  She sits at the desk and lays her hand on the file. It is quite thin, nothing is written on the cover, she has no doubt that it contains a copy of the preliminary report referred to in Friday's memos, that it will tell her why Mark wants to meet her after work, why Wayne Drover and his communication experts are so hastily descending upon St. John's.

  Eventually she opens the folder. Inside is no handwritten note, no explanation—just fifteen Xeroxed pages, ten of which are simply a list of references and data sources.

  Headed “A Preliminary Paper. From: Oceans 2000 Project, Policy and Program Planning, DFO St. John's,” it is addressed to “The Director, Science Section, Policy and Program Planning, DFO, Ottawa.”

  Lav speed-reads through the first five pages. Certain phrases leap up, “…a steady, well documented and perhaps irreversible decline in the size and numbers of cod landed in Zone PK3. In nine years the number of 3-year-old cod entering this area has dropped by half.…”

  “The practice, by Canadian and foreign fleets, of dragging the ocean bottom has destroyed vast spawning areas.…”

  “The systematic harvesting of spawning caplin to supply the vast Japanese market has depleted the caplin stock and changed the patterns of cod moving inshore.”

  And so on and on, oil spills and the dumping of toxic waste, the trading of fishing rights to foreign countries, too large quotas, too small mesh size, gill nets, ghost nets, double nets, the warnings of fishermen, inappropriate, unanalyzed and incomplete research, inaccurate baseline data, improper monitoring.

  Mark has missed nothing. For there is no doubt this is Mark's report—Lav recognizes the sonorous style, the apocalyptic view, the way bleak fact has been piled upon bleak fact, footnoted, annotated and lined up with the relevant research code.

  All building to the final doom-ridden paragraph—which, to make sure no one misses, Mark has typed in bold face capital letters: “The data on Zone PK3 is almost surely applicable to neighbouring zones and indeed to the entire North Atlantic. The conclusion is unavoidable: unless immediate and drastic action is taken to stop all fishing for many years, this entire ecosystem will, within a decade, be completely destroyed. This will, of course, mean the extinction of several species, including Northern Cod.”

  When Lav puts the file down on her desk, her hands are shaking. Mark Rodway has probably ruined her career.

  She has never been so angry. That a research assistant should take it upon himself to send out such a report is indefensible—outrageous. She walks to the w
indow, takes deep breaths. Outside it is beautiful, spring-like, sunny. On this side of the building there is no sign of ice. The cliff facing her seems to have been landscaped, each depression in the wet rock is filled with moss, with fern and small, Japanese-looking evergreen.

  Concentrating on the green, which is said to have a calming effect, she wills herself to breathe slowly, to consider her options. The damage has been done. Useless now to try and shift blame. Useless now to reflect on Mark's self-destructive character, on his lack of experience, his pessimism, his fundamentalist grandmother, his strange speech patterns. Useless to say that this young man has no authority to submit such a report. Ottawa, Ian Farman and Wayne Drover clearly attribute the report to Lavinia Andrews.

  Is it within the realm of possibility that Mark's conclusions are correct? If so, why have others not seen the evidence? Why has she not seen the evidence? Because of her inexperience? Incompetence? Because she is from “away?” Because she is deliberately blind?

  Slowly Lav rereads the report. The scenario suggested by Mark seems highly unlikely. Still, she gives Alice the reference list, asks her to bring whatever the DFO library has, along with any recent assessments of biomass together with their own print-out summaries on stock assessment.

  She spends the entire day checking baseline data on various commercial stocks of fish, compelling indices of abundance, estimates of biomass. She cross-checks everything—research vessel surveys and catch information from industry, DFO figures and those received from other G7 countries.

  All the papers are hopeful. In startling contrast to Mark's report they all end optimistically. One major study released by an internationally based fishing company just two months earlier concludes: “Since 1950 marine catches have grown almost fivefold to a world-wide industry that is now worth $30 billion, calculating that last year more than 85 million tons of fish were caught globally, and considering the scientific principles and international laws now in place, research suggests that a 100 million ton catch is both practical and sustainable.”