Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  In the days before the arrival of Wayne Drover the office takes on a life of its own. Under Alice's supervision desks, computers and filing cases, magically filled with files, roll into place. Melba, the smoker, is installed in the general office and the ragged collection of blue books is packed away in acid-free cartons.

  On Wednesday Wayne Drover arrives, hurrying towards her, hand outstretched, saying “I'm only here to help,” or has she imagined these words to fulfil Mark's prediction?

  Trailing him are two younger men who look like junior auditors. Lav does not go towards them but waits in the doorway of her office.

  She estimates Wayne Drover to be in his late thirties—probably a year or two younger than she is—and an inch or two shorter. His hair, longer than is fashionable, is untidy, his tie is loose. He carries an oversized briefcase, which, with his billowing trench coat, gives him the appearance of taking up more space than he does. It also makes the men behind him look tidier, smaller, more buttoned-down than they probably are.

  “Wayne Drover and team,” he announces, turning aside to plant a loud kiss on the cheek of Alice O'Reilly who, smiling and blushing, kisses him back.

  Before Lav has time to register surprise at this he is shaking her hand, “Glad to meet you, Dr. Andrews—your friend in Policy and Programs suggested I drop by,” looking straight into her eyes he smiles. His face is round and guileless.

  “Have you read that preliminary report?” She asks this without a smile or a word of welcome. Mark was wrong about one thing—she is not going to like Wayne Drover.

  “Not really,” he says and follows her, standing in the doorway of her office, surveying the room. “Cheap furniture,” he says, and indeed the sofa groans as he throws himself down on its dusty-rose cushions.

  Lav goes to sit behind her desk, as far from him as she can get. Political appointees like Wayne Drover, Philip used to call them information managers, consider it a handicap to know what is contained in the packages they manage, and so, knowing what the answer will be, she asks if he would like to see their material.

  “Wouldn't do any good. I'm no scientist—I'm taking Dr. Farman's opinion that the report you sent up to Ottawa is wrong, dead wrong. ‘Basically flawed’ was what Dr. Farman said—that's good enough for me. Mind?” he is patting his pockets in that absentminded way smokers search for cigarettes.

  “There'll be an election this summer, you know—and I don't think the old man got the chance of a snowball in hell—people are barely over our givin' that extra quota of cod to the French, now they're all aflap about selling spawny caplin to the Japanese—spawny caplin for Christ's sake! We used to dump 'em on the gardens!”

  He has found a cigar. “Mind?” he asks, lights before Lav has a chance to reply and smokes in silence for several minutes.

  “Could be handled, of course. Could be controlled—most things can be if a minister sticks to his script. Trouble is, the old man won't—what's more, he gets snotty with reporters. And if Timothy Drew goes, half the transfer payments coming down here goes with him—a dozen federal projects—all this!” He waves at the cheap furniture, cigar ash fluttering around his cherubic face. It is not clear what will be gone—the room, Lav, the Oceans 2000 project, the building—perhaps the entire province.

  “Still, I'm an optimist!” abruptly he changes track, veers off in another direction. “The last optimist, that's me! An endangered species—I should be protected,” he grins, “but then, where would they find another optimist for me to mate with?”

  Recharged by his own wit he sits up and grinds his cigar into the pristine ash tray. “Who knows? Maybe Good Old Tim'll pull it off one more time—people owe him, lots of people owe him. Maybe he can convince the PM to have a word with them Europeans—keep in your own yard or we'll stop drinkin' your booze! Not worth much really, but a nice gesture—good copy. Then too, voters have short memories and that's all to the good!” He jumps up, walks to the window and stands looking out at the cliff face.

  The man is a surprise, cruder that Lav had expected, more obvious. Neither intimidated nor charmed, she asks what he's come for.

  “I'm no dummy about fish, Dr. Andrews. I may not have a doctorate in marine biology but I know more about fish than you'll ever find out by staring at scraps of cod gut from some little cove up on the northeast coast.”

  Wayne Drover does not turn around but his voice is cold and she knows his face has changed again. “I was born on the seaward side of those cliffs. My father fished outta' the Battery fifty years. Dawn 'till dark for fifty years—and he never made more than nine thou a year in his life. Stunned bugger!”

  “Still and all, that's not what you want to know, is it? You want to know why I'm here,” he turns to face her, beaming down, benign, boyish, sincere. “I'm here to help you prepare the Oceans 2000 Report. Not just me, of course—Tony Mallard and Keith, too—and a few others in three or four weeks time when we're ready to decide on presentation, layout—that kind of thing.”

  Lav protests, such a deadline is impossible, no fair assessment of the material can be made in three or four weeks—nor in eight or nine weeks. She mentions acoustic surveys that have not been graphed, material still coming in, blue books filled with uncoded data.

  Wayne Drover doesn't seem to hear a word. When she has finished he walks towards the door, still smiling, shaking his head. “The Minister will be in Washington in May, after that he's coming straight up here. Big announcement, press conference, policy report on the fisheries—the works!”

  She reminds him that she's been promised six months, maybe a year, in which to complete the final report—but he will not listen.

  “Look, love, we'll be into an election long before then. Now I'm supposed to torment the life out of you—breathe down your neck night and day—but if we understand one another that won't be necessary. My boys will look after everything—analyze your material, compare it with other studies, even write a good first draft—that's what they're trained to do. So let's just relax and see what the experts come up with, shall we?”

  Wayne Drover pauses with his hand on her office door. “Any questions?” he asks and looks relieved when Lav shakes her head. “That's it, then—now that you know how important this report is to Mr. Drew—and to me—I'll leave you to it.”

  And he does. Depositing his briefcase in the office next to hers, he vanishes.

  For a day or two Lav ignores his directions. Applying herself to the data, she begins a review of everything she, Mark and Alice have done. She is soon discouraged. Tony Mallard and Keith Laing do not need her help, in fact, make it clear that they want her to leave them alone. Mark is rarely seen, Alice and Melba Summers, overwhelmed with the reams of paper being circulated by the men from Ottawa, implore Lav to ask for another assistant.

  Lav's own working day shrinks. There is nothing for her to do. Soon she is leaving the office at noon, is spending most of the day at the university. Things she would have spent hours mulling over a few weeks ago—the constant busyness of Wayne Drover's assistants, their prolonged conference calls to which she is not invited, Mark's frequent absences, a chatty phone call from Ian Farman, his casual inquiries about how things are going—now seem unimportant.

  Supperless, sometimes lunchless, she drives daily to the university, hurrying through cavernous tunnels to the unpleasant room that houses the Maritime Archives. The place is hot and airless, the Ellsworth Journal heavy and awkward to hold, but she is determined to find out everything the book can tell her about the Andrews family and Cape Random.

  The careful script has quickly deteriorated into an uneven scrawl, Lavinia's letters becoming more and more illegible as they climb the page. There are many misspellings and many words scratched over. Sometimes complete lines are obliterated.

  Lav learns to read like a blind person, using her fingertips to trace pen ridges along the underside of the heavy paper. She forgets her resolve to stay fit, stiffness develops in her neck, a dull ache in her left shoulder. Th
e lovely toffee colour fades from her hair. She becomes more and more frustrated with the discomfort of the archive. She wants to give herself up to the book, to read without the distractions of a hard chair, of hot feet and a freezing back. Each night she tries to convince Lori Sutton to let her take the journal home.

  “You know I would if 'twas up to me,” the young woman has become familiar, seems to regard Lav's persistent requests to take the book as a kind of running joke.

  Lori Sutton and Lav are almost friends, observers of each other, anthropologist and subject—though which is which would be hard to say. The young woman watches the older with a kind of puzzled condescension—trying to place Lav in the social order she is arranging.

  Lav, for her part, watches Lori with fascination, intrigued with the process by which people invent and reinvent themselves. Why has she herself never learned this trick? The girl reminds Lav of her mother. How soft I've always been, how malleable, how conforming to any role life has assigned to me, Lav thinks.

  But it is the journal that now occupies most of Lav's time and thought. Slowly, carefully, as she feels her way through Lavinia's story—avoiding the contradictory comments: “No!” and “I did not!” that spring up from the ends of sentences, ignoring the vine-like border that encircles almost every page, encroaching on the writing in a maze of curlicues, of maddening loops and swirls—the Cape Random people begin to be more real to Lav than Lori Sutton or the people at the Research Station. At home, after the archive has closed, she begins to draw a chart of the Andrews family.

  One morning Alice O'Reilly passed Lav a note, “Mr. Drover was here yesterday, he left this.”

  Alice has become formal. She disapproves of Lav's new hours, is contemptuous of her for having given up authority without a struggle, for her continued laxness toward Mark Rodway. Alice lets those feelings be known without ever uttering a word.

  So be it, Lav thinks as she reads the note, a command couched as a question—can Wayne Drover drop by her office at five thirty?

  It is almost six before he arrives. Lav pretends to be reading, feigns surprise to find him standing beside her desk, smiling, asking how things are going. “Fine,” she tells him, “Just fine,” and he opens his briefcase and takes out a bottle of Scotch.

  “We'll drink to that, Doctor Andrews—drink to everything being fine. Then I'll take you out for the best supper you'll ever eat.”

  The lack of response does not bother Wayne Drover. He searches in his huge briefcase and produces two glasses—large, thick glasses that carry a golf club logo. He looks happier, better groomed than when he first arrived—someone, doubtless some woman, is taking care of him.

  How did she get into marine biology, he asks.

  “By magnetic force,” Lav wants to say. “Because of the power beneath the earth, the power beneath the sea, because of poetry and bookbinding, because of secrets.…”

  Instead she gives the expected answer—an interest in science, love of marine life. How, she asks, had he come to be executive assistant to the Minister of Fisheries?

  “Oh, I got tangled up with the Drews when I was still in high school. Got a job working with Drew Construction one summer, renovatin' a building on the Southside—Drew's fish packing business—Ocean North it was called then. The family had just taken it over. That's how I first met Timothy Drew—he slipped all us students an extra twenty on the last payday—always good to their people the Drews were—anyone'll tell you that.”

  They drink and chat. At dinner he returns to the story of his summer with Drew Construction. Lav can see he enjoys talking about the Drews. Speculating on how a family acquires money and power is, for Wayne Drover, endlessly fascinating.

  “We did a good job that summer, modernizing the Southside plant. The place operated hunky-dory for a long time—then Ocean North got tangled up with a Japanese company,” he ticks each step off on his fingers. “Far East Cod sold the place to a group of St. John's lawyers—they had a government loan—was them that mothballed the plant. Been boarded up for years now—but the old man got his eye on the place—got this new company, Green Valley Holdings, based in Tennessee. Perhaps we can put a package together—you know, government backing, draggers, fish quotas, export licences, all that stuff!” Wayne Drover hums softly.

  He is completely unselfconscious, uninterested in her opinions or background, so self-absorbed that he expects no disapproval and requires no praise.

  After that he begins dropping by Lav's office every Friday after work. He is just the company I need, she thinks, just the person to keep me from vanishing into the journal, disappearing on Cape Random.

  At work the whole ambience has changed. Wayne Drover is rarely seen but his underlings, Keith Laing and Tony Mallard, have taken complete charge. These two, so ambitious, so alert, so focused, have swept Mark aside. Uneasy and out of place he sulks in corners.

  Alice tells Mark he looks like a wet rooster and, when it becomes obvious that Lav will not, tries to keep him occupied with mundane jobs: collecting mail, making coffee, sending off the dispatches that go hourly to Ottawa—communiques Lav does not read but which Mark tells her all end with the instructions, “Check!” or “Verify!”

  Mark does not mention the archive or the journal. He and Lav never have their serious talk—it seems pointless—his report has been forgotten. They have both been replaced.

  In a part of the journal written by someone called Thomas Hutchings, Lav discovers the name Drew and other names she recognizes. In contrast to Lavinia's erratic penmanship, Thomas Hutchings has written in a consistent, beautiful copperplate. Unfortunately, sometime in the years since, dampness has seeped into the book, diluting the ink and causing it to disappear entirely near the outer edges of many pages.

  Lav searches for, and finds, a magnifying glass—everything exists somewhere in the Martins' house—and takes it to the archive. As she squints through it at the spider-like scribbles weaving in and out, between and around the lines, she finds a third story—a story that is not Lavinia Andrews' nor Thomas Hutchings'—a text existing beside the official text.

  She recalls Saul telling her that such jottings are called marginalia—a beautiful word. In the marginalia Lav finds Mary Bundle. There is something about Mary's voice, so strong, so determined, that she is lost and stays hunched over the book until closing time.

  Again that night Lav and Lori Sutton leave together. Having been in the archive since noon she is hungry and invites the young woman back to her house for a late supper. While Lav breaks eggs and grates cheese she is aware of Lori walking from room to room, standing, as if in a gallery, before some object that interests her, studying it from one angle, then from another, stepping back to appraise it through half-closed eyes.

  “You got some nice things,” Lori says when they sit down to eat and for the first time Lav can detect a trace of respect in the younger woman's eyes.

  “Nothing in the house is mine—even the pictures and books belong to the Martins—the people who own the house.”

  “But I bet you got—you have,” Lori often corrects herself, “have things just as nice in Ottawa.”

  Lav nods. She has told the girl nothing about herself, has never spoken of Charlotte or Philip, of her work, or of Wayne Drover—never said why she spends so many hours in the archive.

  “I've got a plan—a schedule,” Lori says. “I'm giving myself three years—one year to finish my degree and two years to get into a good job. By 1990 I'll have a place like this, and a business card. Do you have a business card?”

  Why are we so curious about one another? Lav wonders. Why do I find the girl's unabashed ambition attractive—would I if she were old, or ugly, or male? What a pair she and Wayne Drover would make! The thought is followed by a twinge of jealousy that disconcerts Lav, and she asks Lori if she will go back home when she graduates.

  “Good Lord, no!” Lori is appalled at such ignorance. “What would I go back there for? Nobody goes home to Chance Harbour after universi
ty—there's not a thing back there except fish.”

  Lori is quick—sees the thought that flickers across Lav's mind. “Oh sure! Fish is fine for the likes of you! Lookin' at fish through microscopes or readin' nice clean print-outs about fish. You don't have to haul it over the side of a boat, don't have to stand in a freezing fish plant—everything covered in slime—and pull guts outta' fish eight hours a day. I wouldn't mind workin' with fish in a lab in Ottawa—or on the Toronto stock exchange, now that'd be a great place to work—saw it the other night on tv—all the good lookin' men in white shirts with their jackets off and their cuffs folded back—some sexy!”

  She becomes serious, “No one goes back to Chance Harbour, girl. Not if they can get a job somewhere else. Oh it's a pretty enough place in summertime, you should see people from away sayin' how nice it is when they visit—and it is, too—all sea and sky and green hills—but you can't live on that, can you? ‘Tis something else in February with a nor'east gale comin’ in the cove and not able to see a hand before? your face for blowin' snow. No, Chance Harbour is no place to go back to. Me mother says the same—she's the one drilled into me that I had to get away—most of the women tell their daughters that. Who wouldn't after six weeks on some friggin' winter make-work project? I seen me mother down by the breakwater movin' rocks around by hand, another time she was cooped up in the school every night tryin' to learn typing she knew she'd never use.” For a moment Lori seems on the verge of tears but she swallows, eats the last bit of omelette and asks Lav why she doesn't make herself known to her relations.

  Lav doesn't understand what the girl means.

  “Well, you said your father was a Newfoundlander—maybe you've got people here—why don't you make yourself known to them?”

  “I don't think so—I hadn't even considered it. My father died in the war, before I was born, and I've never had contact with any of his family.”