Radio Girls (36 page)

Maisie seized the ball and pitched it back to Fowler so hard he yelped.

She sat back down and handed Fielden her napkin. “You needn't always be so nasty,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. “But I generally prefer it to the alternative.” He suddenly drew close and conspiratorial—she could see all the droplets of gin fizz in his mustache. “No one in Savoy Hill is better at what they do than Our Lady. Some are just as good, maybe, but no one is better. The DG knows it. And he knows the logic of it. Where
does a brilliant person go but up? And where else is ‘up' for Our Lady?”

Oh. The fantasy. Hilda as DG. And if Fielden left, perhaps Maisie could . . .

“That's lovely but ridiculous,” Maisie snapped. “The governors like us modern, but they know perfectly well that the BBC wouldn't be seen as serious if it were headed by a woman. Besides, I don't think Miss Matheson would want the job.” But even as she said it, she thought of all the meetings between Hilda and Reith and how Hilda had a stronger sense of audience and technology and content and Reith knew it and hated every bit of it.

Fielden gazed mournfully into his empty glass.

“Whatever else the Deathly Ghoul is, he wants the BBC to be admired. Siepmann hasn't the imagination to do better in Talks than Our Lady. So they can grumble all they like, but speaking as a master of grumbling, I can assure them it doesn't tend to come to anything.”

It was strange, Fielden being more optimistic than her. Perhaps it was the effect of the sun.

At least he knows to be on the lookout. And I'm not going to let anything happen to Miss Matheson—that's for damned sure
.

Another croquet ball flew toward her and she caught it and stalked away, tossing the ball up and down, to a harmonized chorus of disapproval.

As the afternoon melted into evening, the staff was encouraged toward the marquee stretched over a temporary dance floor. Despite a host of grumbling, the small band held firm to their instructions and played no dances from later than 1921.

“I suppose we should be grateful it's not minuets,” Phyllida said.

Maisie, nibbling grapes, was determining where she could drag Phyllida to tell her what had happened when a voice sounded beside them.

“Enjoying the day, Miss Musgrave?”

Cyril. She glanced at him, and took her time finishing chewing and swallowing before she answered.

“Very much, thanks. You?”

“Copacetic.”

“Now who sounds like they're from New York?”

He laughed, the sun glinting off his hair and all those freckles standing out on his cheeks, and she couldn't help it—she smiled back.

“Maybe you've been a good influence on me,” he suggested.

“That's debatable,” she said.

“Is it? Can you have it be a Talk, perhaps?”

“Now, now, Mr. Underwood. Some of our subjects are arcane, I'll grant you, but never inane. You hear the difference?”

“Clever. I don't suppose you've ever read Latin, Miss Musgrave?”

“I've never even read Pig Latin.”

“Do you know what ‘pax' means?”

“Well, yes, I am a moderate disciple of Mr. Bartlett's, you know. He's fond of any word that means ‘peace.'”

“Well, then. Pax?”

She studied him. Two years had passed since their fraudulent date. Not only did she continue to keep her head up, but she had risen through her department and was on the brink of becoming a producer. His equal. And she had an absent but still fond young man. She stuck out her hand.

“Pax.”

“Thank you. I don't suppose you'd like to dance?”

Maisie gulped and glanced around the venue. Phyllida was being guided in a very expert fox-trot by Billy. Hilda was across the marquee, having a deep tête-à-tête with Mary Somerville.

“You don't have to,” Cyril said hastily, tossing his head to hide his embarrassment at her silence. “I was only—“

“No, it's all right,” she broke in. They'd made peace, after all. “But I'm a spectacularly lousy dancer.”

“I bet that's not true,” he said, taking her hand.

Twenty seconds later, she asked if she could call in that bet.

“We didn't set the terms,” he said, laughing. “Actually, Miss Musgrave, you move rather nicely. You just need a few lessons. And you really need to relax.”

“I never relax. It's the New York in me.”

He laughed again and adjusted his arm more firmly around her waist. Her feet got a vague sense of how they were supposed to move, and she found herself doing something that approximated dancing.

“There, you see?” he asked.

Unfortunately, she did. Over his shoulder, she saw that Siepmann had connived Hilda into a dance. Something about seeing Hilda letting herself be touched by him made Maisie's skin crawl. She wanted to run over and pull him away. No, she wanted to rip his arms from his torso.

She stumbled, and she and Cyril knocked right into Phyllida and Billy.

“Maisie, are you all right?”

She wasn't sure which of them asked. She shook her head.

“Sorry. I . . . I think I need something to drink, actually.”

It was Cyril who took her over to the bar.

“It's still quite hot. You do look very flushed. A lemonade should refresh you.”

“Thank you,” she said, not hearing him.

It was all too much. The late-summer heat lying so heavily all around them like a gas cloud. She preferred the cooler weather, trusted it more. This blaze was too blinding, encouraging them all to let loose. And she had meant what she said. Relaxing was treacherous.

“Feeling better?” Cyril asked after she downed the lemonade in one gulp. He looked genuinely solicitous.

“I think so. Thank you.”

But there was Siepmann, talking to Reith again, and he had inveigled Hilda into the conversation. His hand was clutching her elbow possessively.

“You know, Miss Musgrave, you . . . ah . . . you're really very—”

“I'm sorry,” she said suddenly, a wave of dizziness overwhelming
her. She was not going to faint or scream, not where anyone could see. “I've got to . . . I'll be back in a minute. Thanks.”

She wandered through the dusk, trying to think, yearning for silence and solitude. She found herself back at the croquet set, now abandoned—the sound effects men were just as Dionysian as she was when it came to the buffet.

She seized a mallet and began thwacking wooden balls, hitting each of them so they soared into the air and bounced away, lost until tomorrow's sunrise in the neatly mown grass.

A
s soon as Hilda saw Maisie, she turned into the chapel outside Savoy Hill.

“Or should we perhaps be strolling down the Embankment, feeding the ducks?”

Maisie didn't smile. She told Hilda everything she had overheard between Reith and Siepmann, words tumbling out all over but more or less comprehensible.

Hilda hoisted herself onto the altar. She crossed her ankles and stroked her onyx necklace.

“Funny, really, that there are so many greater things for people's energy and this is how they spend it. Ah well, what can you do?”

“Miss Matheson, I think it's quite serious. We've got to be on guard.”

“We can't be on guard and do good work, and the work must not suffer. As I see it, Siepmann would like to be the next DG, and I daresay he'll succeed. I would be most surprised if Reith isn't grooming him thusly. No doubt there are whispers of a new position for Good Sir John, something quite high somewhere or other. The mind reels. In any event, he's likely trying to persuade the governors to give him a deputy, thus creating a clear line of succession.”

“But—”

“I know. The DG has long since lost love for me. But he can't sack me without cause. That would create the sort of publicity that would end up with his own head on the grass. Besides, much though some of our content makes the governors nervous, I think they would argue for me rather than against.”

Maisie didn't want to admit what she knew—didn't even want to hint at the name “Vita”—but she thought that Hilda was afflicted with a rare case of shortsightedness. The DG had perfect cause, if he ever came to know of it. The question would only be who would prevail in public—Hilda, because she was so widely extolled for her brilliance, or Reith, because whatever went on among the Bloomsbury Bohemia, someone had to take a stand somewhere.

“I think you've got plenty else to worry you, Miss Musgrave,” Hilda said, with a fond smile. “No point taking on something that isn't anything. We'll just carry on doing excellent work, and no one can fault us, can they?” She gave her necklace a final pat and hopped down from the altar.

“Miss Matheson?” Maisie asked as they headed for the BBC. “Your necklace, was it a gift?”

“It was, as a matter of fact. From me to me.” She grinned and held the door open for Maisie. “It was the first thing I bought when I could afford myself a small luxury.”

A luxury. Once all the needed things were in place, and a new home settled, a woman who earned her own money could give herself a small something, just because.

Mine will be a jade brooch, I think
.

Such thoughts didn't banish all the cobwebs, but they didn't hurt.

Though Hilda had warned her to stop attending meetings now that she was snooping on a higher plane, Maisie couldn't resist. It was fun, seeing the Fascists so aerated now that Labour was in power. The fact that no one had advocated the closing of churches, the stripping
of titles, or nobility sent to salt mines didn't mitigate their apoplexy one iota.

“That infernal BBC is poisoning the minds of the British youth!” Lion insisted.

Maisie checked her watch. Four minutes before a mention of the BBC; he seemed a bit off his game tonight.

“I hear of boys thinking that a coal miner should be treated with the same respect as a landowner! And my own younger sister hopes to go to university and study medicine! She doesn't even wish to get married! These are the spoils of the so-called progressive mind.”

I love being spoiled.

“We must defend our small island against those who would attempt to call it home, while having no right to it. We are the true Britons! I was born in Windlesham. Where were you born?” He pointed to a man near the front.

“Shepherd's Bush!”

“And you?” A woman with a spray of peacock feathers flowing over her ear.

“Holland Park!”

Shouts everywhere, even before the question was asked. “Stow-on-the-Wold,” “Berkshire,” “Leigh-on-Trent,” “Selby!”

Maisie, at the back, heard more ferocity than pride in each voice. The whole room had become a sing-along and the song was a macabre tour of Britain.

“You!” A young man grabbed her by the shoulders and glared straight into her face. “You're awfully quiet. Where were you born, Big Nose?”

“Jew Nose, more like,” his friend sniggered.

She looked down her nose at them very hard.
Be Beanie
.

“Savoy Place!” she said, in an accent she didn't know she could emulate.

“Oh. Well, that's all right, then,” he said, releasing her.

“I'm so pleased,” she told him, wishing the acid in her voice were enough to burn him as she pushed past and outside.

Hilda was, as usual, right. Maisie called a moratorium on the meetings.

The DG's
hedging on my promotion,
Maisie wrote Simon.
But at least he hasn't said no.
Nothing's changed since that chat I overheard with Siepmann, so I'm hoping it was just a lot of sound and fury.

She bit the tip of her pencil, then wrote:

It's been the most beautiful September. The skies are such a brilliant blue, and all the Georgian buildings look like paintings in the afternoon light. You ought to see it. Will you be home soon?

Then she crossed that out. She didn't want to sound needy. Hilda and Vita, if Maisie's calculations were correct, must have enjoyed only a few weeks together before Vita went to Berlin with Harold. Maybe they, too, felt their love grow stronger in the absence. Maisie was sure it was Vita who had given the gift that was Torquhil. It was probably just as well Simon didn't give gifts.

He'll allow the promotion, I'm sure
, Simon wrote back.
Who's more right for it than you? And this is just the sort of program we should have more of, good, solid information about the intricacies of government, so that we dispel ignorance. Ignorance is quite passé, very nineteenth century. We want a capable public, strong minds, strong bodies. That's how we retain our glory, and aren't you just the right sort of person to be one of the leaders thereof?

Sometimes he was the one who sounded like a Communist.

The Week in Westminster
had, at least, been approved. “Another political program, really?” was Reith's initial squall. “Lady Astor will be a regular contributor, and Megan Lloyd George. All the best women,” Hilda promised in her most soothing tones. “And it will be at eleven in the morning, when workingwomen are drinking their tea.” This example of the stalwartness of British women charmed him enough that he forgot the crumpets would be served with politics.

“But he doesn't want to pass around promotions,” Phyllida said, with a sigh both supportive and selfish, because Maisie and Hilda were angling to have her made Talks assistant when Maisie stepped up.

“That would be three women in vital positions in the most important department in the BBC,” Reith fretted. “I think we had at least be sure this new women's fare is a success before we risk anything so radical.”

“I'm not sure how making me a producer is ‘radical,'” Maisie said to Phyllida, who reported all the details of every meeting with a thoroughness that made Maisie think she should apply to MI5 herself.

“To be fair, this is a man who still thinks women riding bicycles is radical.”

Reith's hedging notwithstanding, Maisie was involving herself more and more deeply in the preparations for the program. Broadcasters were already giving them scripts, discussing assorted minutiae about days spent in Parliament. Maisie huddled over a cup of tea and a script by Megan Lloyd George, the sole female MP for the Liberal party. A fascinating story, but one that read like a dry news report.

No, no, you've got to talk to us, Miss Lloyd George. Talk to us like we're good friends and just as clever as yourself. Every word counts, and then it will be your delivery. But if I just shift this and change that, and let's make the story of a first day in Westminster after an election more personal. That will make everyone just love you, and then I think . . .

Two hours later, she presented it to Hilda, who read it straight through.

“Very good work, Miss Musgrave. I can't add anything. You've done it most satisfactorily.”

“I know,” said Maisie. Then she blushed. “I mean, thank you.”

Hilda grinned. “You meant what you said the first time.”

Maisie grinned back. “I know.”