Radio Girls (34 page)

“Want to come and help me oversee?” she invited Maisie. “After all, you helped birth it, didn't you? Fair enough you see it through to its end.”

Maisie looked up at her and started to cry.

“You don't have to if you'd rather not,” Hilda said.

“It's been such a superb program, exactly the sort of thing I want to do, and now it's over. And I've been so busy, I never properly appreciated it.”

“This is why I warn the staff about egotism,” Hilda said, passing Maisie a handkerchief. “But you don't really think that's your one and only idea that's going to make a series, do you?”

“I hope not, of course. But it was awfully good, and it mattered.”

“And the next one will be better. Are you going to stop being a little goose now and come do your job?”

Maisie blew her nose loudly and gave Hilda an apologetic smile.

“That was my last little honk.”

“What a relief.”

The next morning, Hilda was almost buried in every newspaper in Britain, all blaring the headlines about Labour's win and the women who had helped make it happen.

“‘The Flapper Election'? Really? Those silly lads, so prosaic,” Hilda tutted.

Prosaic, but poetic, Maisie thought. And it was something, being touted as having counted for so much.

“The main thing is we brought results,” Hilda said, echoing Maisie's thoughts. “The sun is even shining, and the world doesn't appear likely to end.”

“Just beginning,” Phyllida chimed in from her desk.

“Be upstanding,” Fielden muttered, stumping into the office. “Apparently the DG is in a bit of a temper today.”

“How can you tell?” Maisie asked.

Fielden gave her a baleful look. “The old Tory's displeased about the election results, it seems.”

“
Quelle surprise,
” Hilda murmured.

“We should be grateful he doesn't demand to know whom we all voted for,” Fielden said.

“Maybe he'll add that to the questions he asks potential new employees,” Maisie suggested. “But just the men.”

Even Fielden laughed, which made Maisie wonder if Hilda's observation that the world wasn't ending was perhaps a touch premature.

Later, when Hilda was going to lunch, she jerked her head at Maisie to follow her.

They were halfway up Savoy Street when Hilda pulled a lumpy parcel out of her holdall and handed it to Maisie.

“This will help you when you pay your little visit. Don't open it now.”

Visit. To Siemens. A dozen snakes rose in Maisie's belly and began to do the cancan.

“So you think I'm ready?”

“As much as anyone can be. Go to Siemens first. Friday is a company meeting day.”

“How do you know?”

Hilda grinned. “I don't know why I'm encouraging this. I daresay I've gone soft.”

Later, Maisie sneaked the parcel into the lavatory and opened it. It was a pocket camera. She turned it over and over in delight.

Oh, Mr. Hoppel, Mr. Grigson. You might have a lot of money and influence. But I have the power to expose and embarrass you. Good luck buying your way out of that.

The offices of Siemens in London were in great behemoths that exemplified the worst taste of the Victorian era, though Maisie admitted she might be slightly biased against any building that housed Siemens.

The nearby restaurants had claimed most of the workers who weren't engaged in meetings, and the few who remained in the parts of the building where Maisie entered were only of the coffee-and-sandwich hierarchy, and thus too bitter to notice another mere secretary.

Maisie could hear Miss Jenkins's brittle voice lecturing her on office patterns. Circling the first floor. The second. The third. She found her target on the fourth. A corner office, because it would be, with Hoppel's name engraved in a rather florid style, very last century.

“Look for locked drawers first,” Hilda had advised.

His secretary's lair featured files and drawers that opened with nary a creak.
But he wouldn't keep anything I'm looking for in here
.

Maisie felt thoroughly businesslike and even blithe as she entered Hoppel's office and tested the desk drawers until she found the one that was locked.

“An innocent nail file is one of the finest tools of the trade.”

And per Hilda's instruction, Maisie's nail file bent the lock to her will with shameful ease.

The first few files were all the usual company documents. Reports, budgets, projections, the daily tedium that would have been her lot to type and file if she hadn't landed in the Elysium that was Savoy Hill.

Then her hand closed upon a fistful of pamphlets. Smiling the smile of grim triumph, she discovered copies of all the Nazi pamphlets Hilda had been accumulating, covered with annotations on plans for the media and how it would support the cause.

She took a picture, and for extra good measure whipped out her pad and covered it in shorthand.
All the best spies should go to secretarial school
. Then she found another report, this one indicating funds allocated for the promotion of the Nazi party, “should they prove to be the friend to industry they promise.”

And then a file marked G
IFTS.

She checked her watch. She'd been here seven minutes. “You want to never be longer than five minutes in any one spot, if you can help it,” was one of Hilda's rules. But G
IFTS
!

The first gift was the shifting of a small portion of UK profits to the Nazis, with the understanding that Siemens would be given an exclusive government contract should they come to power. The second was a bit more oblique, merely indicating “valuable cause in education and edification.”

The newspaper, most likely, or perhaps something about the BBC. Maisie grimaced and snapped a picture. She returned everything to its place and the drawer locked beautifully.

She was out the door; she was in the corridor; she was leaving. And there was Hoppel, walking straight at her.

Bloody hell
.

She ducked her head, relieved her hat was already pulled low.

“You,” he accosted her. “Who are you? What are you doing on this floor?”

“So sorry, sir. I'm a new girl, sir, and I got a bit lost.” This time, she tried to force Phyllida's accent out of her mouth.

“I'll have to speak to Miss Hensley. Only executive secretaries are allowed up here. Were you running an errand for my girl?”

“No, sir. I lost track of what floor I was on, sir. Was supposed to pick up drafts, sir, and deliver them to . . . they who do our advertising,” she improvised.

“Well, you won't find those up here. Go back down to Miss Hensley on two and get her to sort you out, and tell her to be more mindful in her instructions. I am not impressed.”

“Very sorry, sir.”

She skittered away, feeling great sympathy for the maligned Miss Hensley.

Maisie was rounding the second flight of stairs in Savoy Hill when she heard them. Men shouting. No one was allowed to shout in the corridors. They risked getting sacked. She sped up, nursing a foolish hope it was Siepmann.

As she bore down on the crowd that was trying to go about its
business but couldn't tear itself away from the bloodletting, she saw Cyril and her hopes soared. He often trailed in Siepmann's wake.

“It's not your business, Reith!”

Oh. Eckersley. In a booming voice reverberating more than his beloved transmitters.

“I'd suggest you control yourself, but clearly that ship has sailed,” Reith shouted back.

“And I'd suggest to you that he who's without sin cast the first stone, but you've never committed a sin in your life, have you? Maybe you should. It might loosen you up a bit.”

“Gentlemen!” Hilda joined the fray, hands out in a gesture intended to be beseeching and instead looked reminiscent of Augustus Caesar. “Let's not create a ruckus, shall we? Mr. Reith, I understand your concern, of course, but you know Mr. Eckersley's the top in his field. We couldn't possibly ask for better. If the Engineering Department hasn't suffered, then surely—”

“Don't try to charm me, Miss Matheson!” Reith roared. “You may have bewitched every other snake in the garden, but you may consider me impervious.”

Hilda recoiled, shrinking just enough to be noticeable before she tried again.

“Forgive me. I'm hardly trying to charm. I'm only thinking of what's best for the BBC. And Eckersley's part of that best.”

Eckersley put a hand on Hilda's arm.

“No, Miss Matheson, not anymore. I'm not going to be treated like a naughty schoolboy, and certainly not because of my private life, which, may I add, is no one's business bar my own!”

“We have standards to maintain,” Reith said, arms folded. “As I said before you lost your temper in such an appallingly schoolboy-like manner, if you are willing to heal your home wounds, I will be happy to forget I ever heard anything of it.”

“No one cares except you,” Eckersley told him. “You may be my superior here, but you're not a confessor. I tender my resignation,
effective immediately. Replace me with an altar boy, or an aspidistra, or Samson—I'm sure one of them will perform to your standards.”

Eckersley thundered off to his lair, and the others dispersed quickly, zigzagging on the theory that a moving target is harder to hit. Hilda remained steadfast, so Maisie hovered near her.

“I do understand that he and his wife were very unhappy,” Hilda ventured, in her most winningly placating tone. “No one likes divorce, naturally, but the actions of the chief engineer in the BBC are hardly the stuff of interest to the general public.”

“I am setting a tone here, Miss Matheson,” Reith said. “I cannot abide anyone being unseemly towards their family. And I'd thank you not to interfere where you don't belong!”

He strode back to the executive suite, and Hilda, her face apocalyptic, marched back to Talks, not seeing Maisie.

“Well, one might see where he has a point,” a faintly amused, silky voice snaked into her ear. Siepmann. “It is no great leap from ‘unseemly' to ‘unnatural,' after all, and that would have a dreadful effect.”

She wished he didn't linger quite so lovingly on the word “unnatural.” His smile made her appreciate the far more honest sludge of the Thames.

She kept her arms folded tight around her, staring after him as he left.
That's history, isn't it? How much damage a man can do, with so little?

“I'm sorry,” Cyril whispered. She hadn't realized he was there. They locked eyes briefly. He seemed to want to say something more, but she pulled away from his gaze and hurried back to Talks. There was a lot of work to do.

“Imbecile should have stuck it out or gone to the governors,” was Phyllida's shrugged response to the dearth of Eckersley ten minutes later. “All right, so he's a louse to his wife, but what does that have to do with anything? If every man who behaved like a complete toad
were forced out of his job, then . . . well, you know, it would open up a lot more jobs for women.”