Waiting for Time (44 page)

She thinks how strange it is that Charlotte and David—yes and her too—all three should have treacherous memories, memories that deceive, that obliterate, that lie.

They are back in the rubbish-strewn parking space, packing things into the trunk of her car before Alf breaks the prolonged silence.

“Maybe he had as good a life as any. Most of the men who came back from overseas left again—ended up workin' out in Vancouver or up in Toronto diggin' ditches, buildin' ships or houses—or in St. John's sellin' cars or neckties. They'd come back summertimes—you still see some of 'em—yarnin' and drinkin', wonderin' why they ever left the place.”

Lav is not ready to accept such a complacent view. “But they had lives—real lives—didn't they!” she climbs into her car and slams the door. Then, “I'm sorry,” she says, relenting, for he has been kind, kinder that she would have ever imagined.

“None of the women mentioned anything about that yesterday—about my father being—being,” she finds it hard to say the word Alf had used. Her voice drops, “simple-minded.”

“No, I s'pose not. I daresay they were trying to remember him for you the way he was before he joined up—the way they think of him now.” Alf Andrews leans against his truck and stares back towards the Cape. She has the feeling he is about to tell her something, hopes he will not. But all he says is, “Why don't you come back to the house for supper?”

She tells him no. She does not want to talk to anyone, does not want to ask any more questions, does not want to be told any more secrets. For the first, and perhaps the last time in her life, Lavinia Andrews knows enough—more than enough.

seventeen

Lav will return to the Cape of course, will return and leave, return and leave—plagued by indecision that will become more acute in December when her son is born.

During the first years of the child's life, Lav is still occasionally distressed by her, and now his, lack of history, sometimes tormented by dreams of brooding fish, still sporadically engaged in a battle against sagging breasts, greying hair, against inclinations towards sloth.

Such preoccupations are, however, incidental—mere background to the business of earning a living, of building a life for herself and the boy who, after long deliberation, she has named David Saul. She carefully explains that the boy must be called by both names.

After the day of her outburst at the press conference, Lav never again sees Wayne Drover. Lav's firing, tactfully expedited one bright morning in an expensive Ottawa restaurant, ends all contact with her former colleagues. No one calls except Ian Farman, whose guilt about the Newfoundland fiasco results in a number of good contract jobs coming her way.

During one of her sojourns in Davisporte, Ian even manages to put her in touch with a job funded by the federal government. A bizarre project involving the breeding of certain species of flounder and flatfish to produce a protein similar to antifreeze—one that might preserve body organs longer than anything now available. Ian had phoned to tell her that the hatchery in Valleyfield needed someone to monitor the project. She, being over-qualified, got the job and returned happily to Davisporte.

Lav had enjoyed the winter she spent living with Selina and Rachel Jane. The job was interesting and Selina was glad to take care of the baby. Lav learned how to make bread, ride a snowmobile and play a card game called forty-fives.

Although Alf had a bedroom in his mother's house, a dark gloomy room built below the long veranda, the women hardly saw him. On the day Lav returned with the baby he had nodded, barely acknowledging her, as if they were strangers—as if the day on the Cape had never happened. That winter he seemed to spend most of his time at the Cat, returning late at night and leaving before the women were up. When Lav asked Rachel Jane what Alf did all day, the girl said, “Drink and lecture!”

Rachel Jane had recently bought a second-hand car and said she was sick of working at the motel, wanted to get away. “If Fadder don't stop jawin' people about the fishery we're not goin' to have any customers left, anyway,” she told Lav and Selina.

Rachel Jane was forever after Alf to get live music and put a decent dance floor in at the Cat: “That way you won't do so much talkin'. We'd get the young crowd and the place'd be a bit lively. There's lots of groups around—that guy Hounsell I graduated with is a drummer now in Gander—got his own band called 'The Spiked Pig,'” Lav heard the girl tell her father one day.

Alf, leaning against the kitchen window drinking coffee—he never sits at the table—had looked past Rachel Jane and caught Lav's eye.

“Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!” he said, and actually smiled.

After that acknowledgement that he remembered their day on the Cape, he and Lav often quoted poetry at each other, competing to see who could recall the most lines.

Unfortunately, three months after it opened, the hatchery closed down. A drug company in Massachusetts had challenged the right of the Canadian government to subsidize research on a product that would compete with theirs. The job ended, and in April Lav and David Saul went back to Ottawa.

In Ottawa Lav can always find work. Shamelessly calling in old favours she finds a half-day job at the art gallery where she once volunteered, and contract work in university labs. Sometimes living in the house she and Philip still jointly own, sometimes renting it, she receives financial advice from Philip's lawyer, gratefully accepts the many baby gifts her mother sends and establishes a friendship with Philip's estranged wife Zinnie, who has abandoned the environmental movement for a staid government job.

Her own children having caused her endless anxiety, Zinnie considers Lav mad, but very brave, to bring a child into the world.

“You'd do better with a cat,” she had told Lav the night David Saul was born.

According to Zinnie the human race has done itself in. “It's not the world that's in danger—just people. The world will get along just fine without us,” she says when Lav tells her the story of what had happened to the Oceans 2000 research.

Despite her grim philosophy Zinnie has a cheerful disposition. She has no patience with Lav's brooding. Introspection, according to Zinnie, is both boring and rude. The two women begin hiking in the Gatineau Hills on Sunday afternoons, taking turns carrying David Saul in a back pack. After a day in the hills they return to talk and eat makeshift meals in Zinnie's decaying house where one or other of her children is constantly in residence, recovering from some financial or emotional crisis. Lav likes Zinnie's children.

“Because you don't have to live with them,” Zinnie says, but she is delighted to act as David Saul's honorary aunt—on condition she can disown him when he becomes a teenager.

Lav finds Ottawa noisier, faster, sharper than she remembers. Ottawa air smells of chemicals, its water tastes of detergent. Things are depressingly well-finished—too shiny.

Only Zinnie and the house make the place bearable—but early in 1992 Zinnie leaves Ottawa, moves to Northern Ontario to teach in a small community college, and Lav finds herself thinking more and more of the Cape.

Always on the look-out for mention of Newfoundland in Ontario papers, Lav is aware that cod, or the absence of cod, has become headline news. In one three week period, she sees DFO's estimates of the spawning biomass of northern cod suddenly dropped from well over 100,000 tonnes to zero. Damage control, Lav supposes, someone in the Department trying to cover their ass. Experts will be flown in.

She considers calling Ian Farman, asking about the possibility of a contract job in Newfoundland. Instead, she calls Selina Andrews, who has watched Lav's shuttling back and forth between Ontario and Newfoundland with a jaundiced eye.

“You might just as well come home and 'bride,” Selina advises. “There's some, like my Vicki, can walk away from the place and never give it another thought—got no feelings about it. Then there's the other kind—the ones like you and Rachel Jane—never content anywhere else.”

For a week Lav agonizes. Ottawa, she thinks, is like a room without a window—safe and secure as a vault. She cannot imagine a future there. But there is a tide in the affairs of men—and of women—and surely moving to Newfoundland now would be going against the tide, going the wrong way. And how will she live in a place so remote as Davisporte? What will she do with her time? How will she make a life for herself and her son in such a place?

In the end she tells Nat Hornsby to sell the Ottawa house. She buys a station wagon into which she packs her four year old son, their cat—a parting gift from Zinnie—and their belongings. Then she drives to Newfoundland.

Lav and David Saul arrive in Davisporte the day before Timothy Drew is slated to make another great announcement. It is almost the first thing Selina speaks of: “Here it is July, and Ned still don't know how much cod him and the boys can take—we're livin' in dread of what that man is goin' to say,” she tells Lav.

Then, having kissed David Saul, hugging him until he squirms away and goes racing into the garden, she pours tea.

“Newfoundland is no place to raise children—no future here—I shouldn't have tried to get you to come home,” Selina grimly sets a tea pot on the table and settles down opposite Lav.

Watching David Saul jump gleefully up and down in the rain-pool that always collects in the mossy part of Selina's yard, the statement seems so foolish that the women look at each other and laugh.

“It wasn't your doing—I wanted to come,” Lav says, knowing this is true.

“I'm worried sick about Ned and them, girl. Remember he got that big loan to have his boat covered with fibreglass? I doubt he's even payin' his interest—last year was worse than the year before and this year they're not gettin' anything.”

According to Selina, predictions of doom have been slithering down the coast for months: television commentators, talk show hosts and government experts advising drastic reductions in fish quotas, travellers telling apocafyptic tales about fishermen who caught 675,000 pounds of cod two years ago and have managed to catch only four fish this year.

“For all that, people along the coast are buyin' gear, overhaulin' boats—gettin' ready for the summer's fishery same as always. What else can they do?”

“Nothing,” Lav answers, though she knows the question is rhetorical. She taps on the window, but David Saul pays no heed. He is crouched down, hands on knees, eyes closed, ready to leap skyward out of the shallow pool. “He's soaked to the skin—I should make him come in.”

Selina nods but neither of the women move. They are held in thrall by the boy's pleasure, by his round, impish face, by the rainbow of spray and light that surrounds him each time his knee-rubbers splash into the luminous green water.

“ Still, I'm some glad to have ye two here,” Selina reaches across the table to pat Lav's hand. “And who knows—the crowd in St. John's keeps tellin' us everythin's all right. Ned says last week the government gave foreign draggers a quota of 100,000 tonnes of cod inside our 200 mile zone—I can't see them doin' that if they were going to shut us down, can you?”

Knowing that she once had some connection with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Selina looks to the younger woman for reassurance Lav cannot give. They lapse into silence, enjoying each other's company, the tea and the sight of David Saul's happiness.

Usually patronized by only a handful of regulars, the Cat is packed full the next night. People who never come near the place are there: Frank Parsons, the school principal; Levi Vincent, the church lay-reader; Connie Fifield the social worker and two nurses from the clinic—most of Davisporte—all staring at the big screen, waiting for Timothy Drew's announcement.

Ned's wife, Doris, comes in after the program has started. Looking as if she's been crying, she slips into the chair Alf has vacated, whispering: “I shouldn't have left the house—but misery loves company and the older boys'll keep an eye on Stevie.”

Someone says “Hush!” as the obligatory scenes flash across the screen: Newfoundland and Canadian flags flutter over government buildings, nets overflowing with cod are hauled into boats that threaten to swamp under the huge weight. Then comes Timothy Drew—smiling, urbane, nodding at television cameras as he strides through Torbay airport.

Lav catches a glimpse of Wayne Drover in the background, then loses him in a moment of confusion, a protest of some kind outside the airport. The cameras hesitate, swing back to the Minister before Lav can identify the shouting people or read their slogans. She smiles, picturing Wayne trying to drag his mother, or perhaps Mark Rodway, out of camera range.

Doris sees the smile. “Must be hard for someone from away to see why we're all so worked up,” she says.

Lav shakes her head. She knows Ned's wife is frantic but can think of nothing that will comfort her.

Selina has told Lav that six years before, when their oldest boy finished school, Ned had built a bigger boat and that he's been improving it ever since. Now Cleary and John both fish with their father but Cleary is talking about getting his own boat. Doris is trying to discourage him, says she and Ned already owe over half a million dollars and that's enough debt for one family.