Waiting for Time (9 page)

“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 window, 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.”

These words, written by a world-respected stock assessment expert, together with a dozen other studies indicating that the seas of the world hold almost unlimited potential, convince Lav that there is no reason to take a graduate student's grim predictions seriously. Zone PK3 is one of the richest fishing grounds in the world and will doubtless remain so.

At day's end, more mystified than angry—perhaps the young man is mentally ill, depressed or revengeful for some imagined wrong—she leaves work and drives to Memorial University in search of Mark Rodway.

It takes almost half an hour to find the Maritime History Archive—an underground cavern just off a network of tunnels below the University. The low-ceilinged room seems empty. A young woman sitting at a desk near the door does not even glance up when Lav walks in. She wanders around and eventually finds Mark hidden in a cubbyhole, his chair tipped back, his feet resting on a heating pipe. His head, blonde hair falling forward, is bent over a large book he has propped open on his knees.

It is a pleasant sight. Despite her annoyance and unease (for that is what her anger has become, a kind of motherly frustration—she could shake the young man, demand to know what's wrong with him, what foolishness he's been up to), she stands for a minute studying the youthful face, the bony fingers resting on the book. The scene reminds Lav of a seventeenth-century painting called “The Young Student”—the same dark background, the long blue-clad legs, the worn leather binding of the book, the slanting light that touches the planes of face and hands. Only Mark's feet, in mustard-coloured work boots, red laces dangling, are at odds with the remembered painting. She is surprised by a rush of desire.

“Hallo,” it is a kinder greeting that she had planned. Nonetheless his chair comes down with a thump and his look, a mixture of guilt and embarrassment, is disconcerting.

“Why?”

He blinks, as if he does not know what she is asking.

“Why in God's name did you send that stupid report off to Ottawa?”

“Because I knew you'd never send it,” the surly look has returned.

“Of course I wouldn't have sent it—you stupid, irresponsible child! I've spent the entire day checking the so-called facts in your report—and not one of them can be substantiated.”

“Depends who you ask,” he says and mutters something about being weighed in the balances and found wanting.

Lav has no time for his silly jokes or the Bible riddles he is so fond of. She enumerates the many ways he has broken civil-service protocol, lists the documents she has combed through, in fact, delivers an exhaustive lecture on the North Atlantic ecosystem, throughout which Mark sits, head bent, book on knees, finger marking the page as if waiting to return to his reading.

When she stops talking, having pointed out that he may well have undermined his own future as well as hers, there is such a prolonged silence that she thinks he has fallen asleep. She begins to feel quite foolish. Towering over the slouched figure she wonders how much of her tirade the young woman at the desk has heard.

Eventually, without looking up, he says, “Not a fisherman on the water wouldn't tell you the same's in that report.”

“Fishermen didn't tell—you did—and fishermen aren't the ones who will read the report,” Lav snaps.

“No one ever reads our reports,” he mutters.

“Obviously, someone read yours. Otherwise, why this sudden invasion by Wayne Drover?”

The name seems to bring him fully awake. “Wayne Drover—so that one got his slimy hands in the pie!”

He sits up straight, attentive, schoolboyish, ready to explain everything to the teacher, “That frigger's back and forth between here and Ottawa all the time—buttering up Timothy Drew's constituents, playing footsy with the Board of Trade, with anyone who'll do Drew a bit of good when election time rolls around—the university types, the church crowd, the Confederation Building boys—Drover's not a bit particular who he sucks up to. It all takes a lot of time but he loves it—grabs any excuse to come down here and play the king's messenger—‘do’ lunch with the lawyers and C.E.O.s, get invited to their cocktail parties, wine and dine their wives.”

Lav has never heard such bitterness in anyone's voice. Why he hates Wayne Drover she cannot imagine, does not want to imagine. His anger drains hers, he seems very young—young and rash and perhaps a little crazy.

Mark stands, and clutching the heavy book to his chest as if it were a shield, gazes beyond her left shoulder and returns her lecture: “Wayne Drover knows all the right people, he's done them favours and they owe him favours. Never fear, the likes of him is losing no sleep over what a couple nobodies like us sent up to Ottawa. I knew if he got his paws on our report it'd be rendered useless—defused I think they call it.”

When Lav interrupts to point out that it was not “our” report he sent to Ottawa, Mark ignores her.

“You'll like Drover,” he says, “I've watched him work—he'll be ever so charming, ever so helpful. Before he even steps off the plane he'll have a new spin on our data—have it abridged, rationalized and deodorized, just like that stuff you spent the day reading—tarted up so it wouldn't hurt a fly much less a career civil-servant like yourself.”

Lav can think of nothing to say. “We'll talk about this in the office,” she tells him.

She is about to leave but he passes her the book he's been holding. “None of that was what I asked you to come here for—there's something I think you should see,” he says.

The book is a ledger, on the leather cover, embossed in dulled gilt are the words “Ellsworth Brothers—Record of Shipping 1810 to.…” The leather is worn through at the edges, the boards show. It is the kind of book Saul would have enjoyed repairing.

Mark turns the book over as he passes it—so that the blank back cover is facing upwards. It is a gesture that will, in memory take on a slow, almost ritualistic quality.

Years later Lav will think of herself standing like a novice in that low-ceilinged room, holding the open book and watching Mark Rodway's finger move down the stained page. Imagination again, imagination imposed over memory. She probably felt no premonitions as she peered down at the faded handwriting, seeing, just above Mark's finger, her own name—Lavinia Andrews—seeing it for the first time. She is pleased with the way it slopes hopefully upward away from the straight blue lines of the ledger.

Mark launches into a long, murmured explanation that Lav hardly hears. Something about looking through microfiche material on shipping in the main library, noting the Ellsworth Ledger listed as one of the source documents, deciding to have a look at the actual ledger, seeing that the shipping record ended in the fall of 1824 with not half of the book used, flipping to the back of the book, finding her name.

It occurs to Lav that Mark is more embarrassed about the document they are holding than he had been about his own treacherous report. She would like to know what has embarrassed this usually unflappable young man—could it be something he's read in the book?

She looks down at her name—Lavinia Andrews—written in a round, childish script. It is the name she had once wanted to be called, the name her mother steadfastly refused to use. On her first day of school Charlotte had conceded, in the face of a childish tantrum, that her daughter could be registered as Lav instead of Scrap—the hated name she had been called up to then.