Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  People are embarrassed—emotion does not belong in a government office. The beautiful photographer is distressed, she leans towards Mark, touches his arm, whispers something in his ear and they leave together.

  Wayne is smiling again, smiling all around, “So!” he rubs his hands together, stands and shaking hands as he goes, starts for the bar that has been set up in the reception area. “There'll be no time for fun and games after tonight—so let's party!”

  Lav knows she should leave. Things are nagging at the back of her mind, a fur-ball of unpleasant thoughts, of suspicion, a feeling of discomfort and betrayal. Everything and everyone in this room is wrong—the lights are wrong, the faces wrong, the music someone has switched on is wrong—and Wayne Drover's report, she is now sure, is disastrously wrong.

  Or are these forebodings something she has imposed upon the scene? She looks blasé, hardly disconcerted at all, as she stands sipping her drink, watching Mark Rodway leave. His outburst confirms the hostility, the basic surliness she has always sensed in him.

  By now the rest of the DFO building is empty. The media consultants troop off down the hall, returning with chairs they have appropriated from other offices. People sit, drink and talk, Mark is forgotten, the Oceans 2000 report is forgotten.

  The conversation becomes animated, ranging over a variety of subjects: the quality and quantity of the wine, the unbearable spring weather in both Ottawa and St. John's, advances in colour printing, the cost and wisdom of buying Canadian art, bilingualism, multiculturalism—and by this circuituous route shifts to a discussion of the contrasting cultures of provinces, more particularly of Quebec and Newfoundland.

  “Newfies and Quebecois are just alike—neurotic as hell!” the man named Jay says. Alice and Wayne, being natives, try to moderate, dousing little arguments that spring up behind this statement.

  Jay is right, one of the consultants maintains. He has been in Newfoundland before—flown in from Texas by an oil company after the Ocean Ranger disaster, damage control job—“Look,” he says, “Newfies got bigger chips on their shoulders than niggers!”

  Alice stands up and announces that she is going home before the Newfie jokes start. After she leaves everyone feels slightly guilty. There is a deliberate change of subject. The talk turns to places they have worked, projects and people they might have in common.

  Lav has hardly spoken all evening. She is possessed by a terrible lethargy. What will I do? Where will I go when I stand up? she asks herself. And what about tomorrow and the next day?

  She continues to sit—as the people around her run out of things to say, as the conversation winds down, as one by one they leave.

  At last only Wayne, the Englishman and Lav remain, drinking, not talking.

  “What shits Jay and Desmore are!” the Englishman says quietly.

  But Wayne is not concerned, “Oh well—takes all kinds!” He gets to his feet and begins to pull on his coat, “Let's go find some solid food.”

  Clive says he can't. He still has to talk to the printers about the cover of the report.

  Wayne's attention is immediately focused, “You don't mean to tell me the covers are not printed yet!”

  “Not to mind, old chap—all is under control. They're working overtime—I want the covers plasticized.”

  Lav hears herself giggling. She has never heard anyone speak the way Clive does, like a stage Englishman.

  Wayne gives her a sharp look, “Come on, both of you, we'll get soup and sandwiches down at the hotel. Then you can come back here and Lav and I'll find something to do—won't we, old girl?” Wayne mimics Clive.

  Wayne is in high good humour. After they eat he wants to go on, to make the rounds of downtown pubs but Clive says no, no he must really get back—just in case there's a cockup.

  “His heart's in the right place but with that accent he's likely to end up in the harbour if he tries bossin' a St. John's printer,” Wayne says as the Englishman leaves. “We'll have one drink, then I'm going to take you somewhere interesting,” he tells Lav.

  Although it is already late she does not object. The hotel lounge is empty of people but comfortably filled with shadows and soft music. Beyond the tall windows, ribbons of light shimmer across the black harbour, waft in lonely sparks up the black hills. Lav imagines deserters, or smugglers—doubtlessly ancestors of Wayne Drover—climbing those cliffs, each one carrying a lantern. She is half-drunk, bemused, longing to confide in someone, has to hold herself back from telling Wayne about the journal, about her mother, about not wanting to return to Ottawa.

  “It's not far to walk—and it's a nice night,” Wayne says and to her surprise, (Have I been expecting to be invited to his room? she asks herself), he leads her out of the hotel by a side door.

  It is a warm night—soft, filled with the smells of new grass and spring. They walk away from the hotel, east towards the hills, towards the water. Within minutes they are on a narrow, rutted path with no sidewalks and few lights. Cars, parked for the night, are pulled tightly in against foundations of houses or abandoned helter-skelter in the roadway.

  There is no one about. On their left, wooden steps lead up to the houses. Houses lean, one behind the other, tier upon tier against the cliff face. Lights shine down, yellow from kitchens, blue from living rooms. By tilting her head back Lav can see lace curtains, bits of ceiling and on the railings of dangerous balconies, white cats perched like birds.

  Wayne Drover walks on her right, holding onto her elbow. Beyond him there is nothing. Blackness and the sluggish, ominous swish of ocean brushing against concrete. “This is the Battery,” he says—then a little later, “We're almost there.”

  They turn, climb sixteen wooden steps, cross a long veranda, open a door and step into a cluttered, overlit room. The face of Knowlton Nash flickers from a small television screen, his mouth moves but no sound comes out. Next to the television is an ivy plant that has been trained to grow up the wall, along the moulding, around half a hundred school pictures of two children, a boy and a girl evolving from childhood to youth. The television and the pot of ivy are both set on top of a huge wood stove. The floor is covered with piles of newspapers across which floor lamps trail black cords. There is a stairway, untidy bookshelves, a sofa, a rocking chair occupied by a cat, a refrigerator and a thousand other things.

  Overwhelmed by the room, Lav teeters in the doorway until Wayne touches her back, urging her over the threshold, “Go on in, girl, no one's gonna bite you,” he says, moving past her towards a huge window.

  In front of the window is a table covered with newspapers. A floor lamp has been pulled over to the table where a woman sits, she is grey-haired, wearing glasses. She holds a pair of scissors, pointing them like a spear at the news item she is reading.

  “Hi mudder,” Wayne says but the woman does not look up, does not move. Despite her grey hair there is something childlike about her as she sits there, the picture of preoccupation, comfortable in her terry cloth dressing gown, her pink-slippered feet curled around the chair rungs.

  “Hi mudder!” Wayne obviously enjoys his exaggerated pronunciation of the word. He bends forward, kisses her cheek.

  She comes alive, jabs with her scissors at the news story. “See that! See what the buggers are doin' to us now? Takin' away the trains! Made them so uncomfortable no one could use them—then took 'em away because no one used em! Next thing the planes'll go, then the busses!” She glares up at her son as if he is to blame for this outrage.

  Seeing Lav she says, “Sorry,” but without conviction. When she stands and turns towards them Lav sees she is the witch-woman, the strange crone who had demanded a ride down from Signal Hill.

  “Mom, this is Lav Andrews—Dr. Andrews, this is my mother, Verna,” Wayne is very formal.

  Both women nod, shake hands. “Uncommon name, Lav—not from here, are you?” Wayne's mother says.

  Lav mutters some reply. She feels like one of those passive fairy-tale creatures she used to wonder at, silly, feckl
ess girls who are led into the forest or abandoned on the doorstep of witches' huts.

  Something about Lav puzzles Verna, perhaps she is trying to remember where she has seen her before. Lav braces herself for more questions but Verna turns to her son: “I'd given you up—thought you'd stay at the hotel tonight.”

  “Worked late, Mudder, both of us,” Wayne tells her. He jiggles the rocking chair until the cat jumps down, “Have a seat, doctor dear,” he grins briefly at Lav before lunging towards the television sound button.

  The announcer's voice blasts forth, but Wayne, hunkering in front of the set, does not adjust the sound. “The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans for Canada today met with the President and his advisors. Both men report that considerable progress has been made on a bi-lateral agreement to promote understanding of the ocean environment off the coasts of Canada and the United States.”

  The voice comes over a clip of Timothy Drew shaking hands with Ronald Reagan then cuts to a scene of the President and Timothy Drew on the deck of a yacht. “This afternoon the Minister dined with the President,” the announcer says and goes on to describe what was served.

  “Two of a kind—too bad they don't fall in and drown, both of 'em,” Verna scowls at the TV screen. “You want something to eat?”

  “Wouldn't say no,” Wayne says. He is still kneeling before the set but the announcer has moved on to another story, a barge has sailed halfway around the world trying to get rid of its load of New York garbage.

  He snaps the set off. “Well! I'm glad we caught that!” he takes a notebook from his pocket, scribbles something down. “That was pretty good, better than I expected, really!”

  Verna goes to the most kitchen-like part of the room, plugs in a toaster and kettle, comes back with milk, sugar, jam and fruit cake. She sets these things down on top of the newspapers, removing only the scissors and a pile of clippings which she drops into a Carnation Milk carton under the table.

  “Mudder collects nasty yarns from newspapers—background material for the revolution,” Wayne grins back and forth between his mother and Lav, as if expecting some immediate and entertaining reaction from one or both women.

  Unable to formulate an appropriate response, Lav gestures towards the pictures: “You have a sister, I see.” Even this sounds rude, rude and somehow strange—perhaps the sister has been eaten or turned into a cat.

  But Verna answers quite cheerfully, “That's Kelly.” She smiles towards the wall of pictures, “My change-of-life baby—almost ten years younger than Wayne, here.”

  She tells Lav that Kelly is a student nurse. She lives in residence, kept on a tight rein but well treated. “Not like it was in my day. I had a sister went into nursing, they were treated like skivvies back then.” As she talks, Verna slices fruit cake, sets tea to steep, butters toast.

  Just as they are about to eat, the phone in the stairway rings. Wayne answers—“Sweet Fuck!” they hear him say.

  Verna clicks her tongue, “One word I cannot abide.”

  Wayne says, “I'll be right there,” hangs up and immediately begins dialing. “I'm callin' Vic,” he tells his mother. To Lav he says, “That was Clive—little emergency at the building. Nothing fatal—I'll be back before the tea's cold.”

  Apparently to avoid questions about the call he pulls on his coat and goes out onto the veranda. Verna moves from lamp to lamp, turning off every light in the room, “Can't see anything with the lights on,” she says.

  For a minute Lav thinks the woman really is mad, but understands when they sit down—the view from the darkened room is magnificent. They drink tea and watch Wayne pace back and forth outside the window, beyond him is the great dark pool of harbour ringed by the lights of the city. Then a horn blows, Wayne runs down the steps and they hear a car door slam.

  “Vic brings his taxi home—that way we can get him any time of night.” Verna seems unconcerned about her son's sudden departure. She licks butter off her fingers and gazes into the night. “You're the girl gave me a lift down off the hill that day,” she says. “Knew Wayne in Ottawa did ya?”

  Lav explains that she had only met Wayne since her transfer to St. John's. Then they eat in silence, watching headlights wind up the crooked hills, enjoying the heat of the old fashioned iron radiator below the window.

  “I got used to sitting here in the dark during the war—we had blackouts. Couldn't see a hand before your face. There was no streetlights, of course, during the war—even the cars had little tin hoods over their lights—everything was black, black.”

  “Sometimes, though, in the moonlight, I could make out ships slipping into port. Shadows—hordes of shadows—like black whales, a pod of whales glidin' in under the cliffs. You'd almost think it was your imagination, but in the morning you'd look out and there they'd be, a convoy of ships right from here to the southside. A few days later they'd be gone. Wayne's Dad used to work longshore them times and he'd bring men home for supper sometimes. We both had brothers in the Navy, so it was natural—Canadian sailors, English and American sailors. Portuguese and Spanish, too, before the war—and after, when the white fleet came back. Nice boys all of 'em, but we liked the Portuguese best—they seemed more like us, somehow. One of them wrote to us for years and years.” Verna speaks as if she is alone, probably does talk like this when she's alone.

  But then she interrupts herself: “Andrews is a Newfoundland name—I s'pose you got people here?”

  “I could have.” Lav does not tell the woman that she has been making phone calls, has already talked to Alf Andrews, to his mother, even to the old grandmother, Rachel. “Really, I was born here—in Newfoundland I mean. My father was in the Navy, in England, my mother came here when they married,” she says.

  “Your mother was a war bride?”

  “I suppose, in a way—but my father died in the war and I grew up in Ottawa.”

  Lav begins telling Verna the good things she can remember about growing up in Ottawa, the small-town feeling of Dugan Street, Saul's shop, the bookbinding, her friend Audrey.

  There is something about the warm kitchen, about the black night beyond the window, about the woman's attentive silence that invites confidences. Soon she hears herself talking about Philip and his precipitous leaving for Australia, about how she had come to be given this job, about how she's neglected it—things she's been wanting to talk about.

  Verna murmurs, “Why ever not?” and “Never!” in appropriate places.

  Thus encouraged Lav creeps up on other subjects. “My mother was probably on one of those ships you saw coming into port.”

  “She's still alive, I suppose, your mother?” Verna says idly, sympathetically.

  “Oh yes, she's remarried,” and Lav recounts the story of her mother's many reincarnations, from Charlotte Hinchley the factory girl to Darling Lottie, from Charlotte Rosenberg the stern, preoccupied wife to cute Charlotte Cabrillo living in her powder-pink house in California.

  As the story progresses she becomes more and more upset. Knowing that she sounds childish, she trys to explain her mother, her coolness, her complete self-possession, how Charlotte has never confided in her daughter, not even letting her know when she was getting married. How she's never tried to make a home, never loved her, how her mother has even managed to obliterate their common past.

  Even Verna's little sounds of sympathy are enough to undo Lav. Crying, sipping tea, gazing out the window and crying again, she tells her about the night she visited her mother, the night Charlotte passed over the letter Lav's father had written. She tells about their latest phone call—about the terrible things she has said to her mother.

  None of it seems so awful in the telling as it did in the living, yet by the time she stops speaking Lav is sobbing uncontrollably.

  Verna pats her hand, putters around the room, brings fresh tea, more toast. Lav is still crying, but comfortably so, when Wayne returns.

  He seems unsurprised. “It's all right,” he says, “everything is all right.” He takes the
cup from her hand, eases her to her feet and holds her. “It's going to be all right, everything is going to be all right.…” Gently rubbing Lav's back he repeats the meaningless, magical, longed-for phrases again and again.

  “We'll see you in the morning, Ma,” he says and leads Lav up the stairs.

  Cried out, past will, past reflection, she sits on the edge of the bed watching Wayne struggle to get the window open. After several blows to the frame he succeeds. Sea air sweeps into the room.

  “Mother keeps the place too hot,” he says. He comes back to the bed, kneels in front of her and pulls off her shoes. Then he removes her dress—red and navy print, the matching navy jacket she has carelessly left downstairs on the rocker now occupied by the cat.

  It is Lav's only concern, this knowing, as Wayne undresses her, that she will regret her carelessness with the jacket. No thought that in the morning she may regret having gone, so pliantly, so passively to bed with Wayne Drover—no thought that he too may regret it—crosses her mind.

  She awakes in the bright, light room and for a hairsbreadth of time thinks she is Lavinia. Sun and cool, salt air pour through the open window. She hears seagulls, sees reflections of water ripple across the white beams above her head.

  Then she notices the faded chenille bedspread—and remembers she is in Wayne Drover's bed. Cautiously she moves a leg and discovers she is alone. She lies there for some time, curled up and comfortable, reflecting upon the consequences of this impulsive lovemaking—embarrassment, heartache, infection, pregnancy, even death, can result from such encounters these days. She considers the last three highly unlikely and decides she can handle the first two. And, of course, it will not happen again.

  Whether from the sex or the weeping she feels refreshed, full of energy, confident enough to wrap herself in the worn bedspread and go in search of a bathroom.

  The upstairs rooms are empty. The aroma of perked coffee drifts up from below. It adds to Lav's hopefulness. She bathes in the big, old fashioned bathtub, brushes her teeth with someone's toothbrush, pulls on her rumpled clothes and goes slowly, for she is reluctant to face Wayne's mother, down the hallway. From below she can hear loud voices and she starts down the stairs, walking quietly, shamelessly listening to Verna's angry voice.