Radio Girls (28 page)

“That's the general idea,” Hilda said.

“Perhaps we can do a series, something to teach—no, not teach, but, well, maybe teach—”

“You're wittering,” Hilda said, but she was grinning.

“Yes. Something to help prepare women for voting, learn about the process, how to choose their party interests. I mean, masses of women will think they ought to vote as their father or husband does, won't they? But maybe that's not really what they want, but maybe they don't know . . . I'm still wittering.”

“I wasn't criticizing. From a good witter, inspiration rises.” Hilda leaped up and paced the office. “We can start something once a week. Do more nearer to the election. Invite women from all fields, positions, interests, and talk about politics and women's place in it. We'll be accused of being shills for Labour, obviously—”

“Or the Communists,” Maisie put in.

“Oh, certainly.” Hilda chuckled. “But we'll have Lady Astor first, and we'll keep it all very neutral and informative. Give it a nice,
nonincendiary title.
Advice for Women Voters.
No, that's condescending. We'll sound like agony aunts.
Questions for Women Voters.
That might do.”

“Can we? Ask questions, I mean.”

“The traveling microphone?” Hilda asked, smiling. Maisie nearly fainted. Could Hilda read her mind now? Then she remembered the phrase was one she'd read from Hilda's notes on broadcasting.

“I hope we can try.” Hilda glanced at the carriage clock. “I think we deserve a celebratory lunch. Get Rules on the phone, will you?”

Rules! That was one of the grandest restaurants in London. Maisie glanced down at herself. The Garland Green wasn't bad, but . . .

“You look perfectly smart. Ring them up and I'll book us a table.”

Not as smart as Hilda, though. Maisie looked at her with envy as they approached the restaurant. It was an easy walk from the Strand to Southampton Street and then Maiden Lane. Hilda walked with that swift purpose, that little bounce in her step that was really quite attractive. What would it be like to wake up every day with such lovely skin, such bright eyes? She had just turned forty, but she was so young and beautiful. Vibrant. It was almost hypnotic.

As was Rules. They stepped in, and Maisie squeaked. The plush carpet, buttery lights, magnificent pictures and mirrors, heavy damask tablecloths. Her hands were shaking as she took the menu, burgundy leather and embossed in gold.

Maisie waited until the arrival of her Cornish fish soup to ask if it was “later.”

“No. It's lunchtime.” Hilda grinned. “But I do have some news. We're going to start a new magazine, printing transcripts of our better Talks. And other things.
The
Listener
, it's being called. Bit prosaic, but at least everyone will know it's us.”

“Crikey.” Maisie whistled. “Do you think it'll accept articles from staff?”

“It might even run bylines,” Hilda teased. Then she went on to divulge another piece of gossip—the BBC was deemed successful
enough to warrant a purpose-built home, with ground to be broken in Portland Place in a few months.

Maisie was so stunned, even the arrival of partridge and bread sauce didn't immediately arrest her attention.

“We're leaving Savoy Hill?”

“Don't get sentimental about the old pile,” Hilda warned, pointing a parsnip at her. “It's been a perfectly good starting spot, but the BBC is going to become something even more. If I have anything to do with it,” she added with sudden blood in her voice. “We deserve it. We need a massive hulking beast of a building—elegant and beautiful, of course, but fantastically imposing, with ‘BBC' emblazoned across the top. And we're going to get it. Not till 1932, though, dash it. I abhor waiting.”

“I suppose it took longer to build St. Paul's?”

“Yes, yes. And the pyramids. And at least our builders will get a nice salary, but damn, I want that space. Imagine the studios! And the IEE will be pleased to have the whole of Savoy Hill to itself again. I bet they'll throw a monthlong party.”

Even the thought of the Institute of Electrical Engineers indulging in Bright Young Thing–style frivolity couldn't make Maisie smile, not when it meant leaving Savoy Hill. It was home, probably the place Maisie thought more like home than anywhere she'd actually lived, she realized with some astonishment. Then she was more astonished to find she was expecting to still be there in four years. There wasn't anywhere she'd rather be.

“Now, Miss Musgrave, I must ask. Do you want to continue as my secretary?”

Maisie clutched the table to keep from smashing through the carpet and into the basement. Hilda's expression was merely curious, as if she'd only asked if she wanted more wine. She opened her mouth to insert something in the crater-sized gap Maisie created, but a sudden, “Ah, Miss Matheson!” made them both look up.

Lady Astor was standing by their table.

“Goodness, Lady Astor, hello!” Hilda cried, jumping up to shake her hand. “It was so good of you to give us that scoop. Do sit down.”

“No, no. Shan't be stayin' but a moment. Knew you'd be here and wanted to offer my congratulations. Very nice work you did, though of course I knew you would.”

“It was largely down to Miss Musgrave, really.”

“Was it?” Lady Astor scrutinized Maisie as though she were a shiny trinket. “Marvelous. I suppose no good imaginin' Reith was admirable about it all?”

“I think the idea of any women voting is still a bit of a shock for him, to be honest.”

“I've drunk sugar water made of sterner stuff than that man, though he's an impressive tyrant.” She turned to Maisie. “I met his mother once, you know. Oh yes, he's got one. Brought her to lunch at the House of Commons, presumably to show off how grand and important he's become. Well, so he introduced me and, not being one to pass up an opportunity, I asked her if was it from her that he got his Mussolini-like qualities.”

Hilda choked into her burgundy.

“What did she say?” Maisie breathed. It was extraordinary, what the upper classes could get away with.

“Oh, she seemed a bit put out,” Lady Astor answered with shrug. “That sort always is. Not stern stuff, that's what I say. Not where it counts, anyway. Hence, tyranny. Though she probably thinks he's very fine. Well, shan't interrupt you any further. I'd recommend the Bakewell tart,” she advised Maisie before sashaying off.

“How did she know how to find you?” Maisie asked after Hilda had ordered two Bakewell tarts and coffee.

“She had a tail put on me when I left her employ,” Hilda said, finishing her wine. “I jest. This is where we always dined after a particularly memorable triumph.”

They grinned at each other. Then Maisie remembered Hilda was upending her world.

“Try to look at it from an outsider's perspective,” Hilda said,
seeing what Maisie was thinking. “You're an excellent secretary, but with your first-rate mind, fearlessness, and knack for finding good stories, you could be just the sort of journalist the newspapers need more of. If you want to pursue it, I'd be happy to introduce you to some useful people. There aren't many women reporters, very few doing serious writing, but I'd lay money you'd be one to break through.”

Even the arrival of the tarts didn't break through Maisie's whirring brain. A mind that was first-rate. Knack for finding stories. Fearlessness. She remembered reading about Nellie Bly, who had written some extraordinary stories. Was Hilda Matheson, Oxford-educated director of Talks at the BBC, extolled in all the papers for her own fine mind and taste and capacity, was she really saying this about Maisie? Mousy Maisie? Perhaps she could join a newspaper, or a magazine, and write every day. Nearly all of Simon's notes told her how tremendous it was to write articles, giving people information and with your name on it, too.

But she had something else to do.

“Miss Matheson, I . . . Thank you, truly. That is . . . Thank you. But I don't want to leave the BBC. I really don't. I love it there.”

She hadn't known how much until now.

Hilda smiled and poured out their coffees. “Good. Because I'd like to promote you to Talks assistant.”

Rules had become a roller coaster. Hilda went on, blithe and blasé. “It's still rather a lot of clerical work, as you know, of course, but it's the only way from which you can eventually be promoted to producer.”

That roller coaster was taking a pretty hairy turn.

“Producer?” Maisie's voice was so high, only bats and Hilda could hear her.

“You certainly think like one. I'd be shocked if you couldn't work like one, and I loathe shocks. Do you want to be one?”

The only women working as producers were the very well-educated and even better-connected Beanie and Mary Somerville in Schools.

“But I'm not even educated,” she felt the need to point out.

“By which you mean you didn't go to school. Not quite the same thing. How did you learn, anyway? I've always wondered.”

“Libraries,” Maisie said. “Well, I learned my letters first from a wardrobe mistress in a theater, very kind lady. Georgina—that's my mother—never sent me to school because we moved so much and she didn't really care anyway. So I went to libraries. Some librarians saw me as a project and suggested books and even explained things. One actually tried to help me learn sums and science. Others just left me in peace and I read everything. As much as I could, I mean. It wasn't the same as a real education, but I suppose it was something.”

“I should jolly well say so. A testament to American libraries. But why didn't Georgina just lodge you in Toronto if she didn't want to raise you properly?”

“My grandparents didn't want to keep me full-time. I was more of an embarrassment than Georgina. I don't even know if my parents were married—I only know my father's name, Edwin Musgrave, that's it. In summers, they could ‘educate' me but keep me partly under wraps. And I think they liked Georgina being stuck with me. Saw me as a fitting punishment for her.”

“Gracious. Well, it proves what I've always thought: that it's not how you're born; it's what you make of yourself. Anyway, who gives a fig about your background? There's no point in a new industry if only the same old sort of people do the running of it. I'd promote you to producer now, but that would be blocked. Mind you, he might balk at this as well, though his courtship promise included my free rein over the department. So we can but try. Are you keen?”

“I am,” Maisie said, her voice coming out in little pips—the BBC's pips at the top of the hour.

“Good. Who do you think might replace you as secretary?”

As though it were any question.

“Miss Fenwick is a very fine choice,” Hilda said, before Maisie had opened her mouth. “We ought to be tootling back.” She called for the bill. “It was rather a nice lunch, wasn't it?”

“I've never had better,” Maisie said.

That evening, as Hilda was packing up to leave, she called out to Maisie, “I say, Miss Musgrave, have you got evening plans?”

“No, Miss Matheson. Is it another of Lady Astor's salons?”

“Actually, I was thinking it was ‘later.'”

Maisie lurched from her desk, nearly taking the typewriter with her. Hilda
tsk
ed and tidied up the disrupted papers as Maisie threw on her hat and coat.

“You've got your hat on backwards,” Hilda informed her. Then said nothing else, all the way up to the Strand, where she hailed them a taxi.

“Where are we going?” Maisie asked.

“I've got a friend I'd like you to meet.”

Hilda ordered the driver down an alley, ignoring all of Maisie's questions as they entered a posh, silent building from the back entrance. Hilda murmured something to a man inside the door and pattered up the back stairs, Maisie close on her heels. Down a corridor covered in what looked like the Bayeux tapestry (“Victorians had a quirky taste,” was Hilda's whispered critique) and into a dark study, where a gaunt man with a toucan nose untangled his long legs and rose from a Renaissance Revival chair, grinning at Hilda.

“Topping to hear from you, old girl. Hardly recognize you without a notepad the size of the Ten Commandments in your hand.”

“It's in my holdall,” Hilda said, shaking hands with him. “May I present my secretary, soon-to-be Talks assistant, Miss Musgrave? Miss Musgrave, Mr. Ellis. Known to a few of us as ‘God,' though of course quite ironically.”

“I hope that's short for ‘Godfrey,'” Maisie said.

Ellis raised an eyebrow and offered her a drink. She declined—the snifter looked as though it would engulf her head if she tried to sip from it.

“What about you, Matty?” Ellis said, turning to Hilda.

Matty?

“Always happy to take away some of the club's brandy,” Hilda said. She turned to Maisie with a grin. “God likes doling out nicknames. But he's a clever sort, so we tolerate him. Also, he's a whiz at the sort of thing we're sniffing at, so I thought we might bring in his brains.”