Radio Girls(101)

“I don’t believe in gifts, Maisie,” Simon announced, smiling. “But I daresay I’m an incorrigible hypocrite.” And he slid a small black box across the table to her.

One fist in her chest became a dozen.

This can’t be real.

She opened it. A ring. An emerald ring. Emerald for May. For Maisie.

“Possibly it’s not really a gift, since I’m asking something rather large in return,” he said, reaching over and slipping the ring on her finger. “My father doesn’t approve, I’m afraid, but I explained you were devoted to England, an admirer of king and country, and whatnot. And that I was determined to marry you because I couldn’t imagine trying to talk with anyone else of an evening.”

This was one in the eye for Georgina. Maisie wondered where Edwin Musgrave was, and wished he were someone she could go to and share this with.

“You’ll marry me, Maisie?”

“Is that a question or an order?” She laughed, and he did, too.

“Oho, the orders come after marriage, my dear! You will swear an oath to obey, don’t forget. Joking! I rather like the idea of a working wife, and in fact I’d be keen to put those magnificent brains to work for me. Think of it, darling. Think of me owning a string of newspapers and magazines and having you to help me! And you’d write. Of course you would. Your name would be all over the pages, connected with your ideas, far more than as a Talks producer, or even if you ever became director. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? ‘Maisie Brock-Morland,’ doesn’t that sound superb?”

He turned her hand around and kissed her palm, looking up into her eyes.

“Yes,” she whispered, though in fact she was answering a very different question. One he didn’t need to ask. He simply scooped her up and carried her into his bedroom.

She wasn’t sure what her body was supposed to do. His body, however, was less alien than it might have been. She had bathed so many bodies in Brighton. And long before, before all the breaking, all the white beds, she’d walked alone through the Met in New York, unsettled and thrilled by the nakedness of men in the classical wing. No one ever sculpted a hero cut down. Hercules always succeeded in his labors. There was no shot, no gas, no bayonet, nothing to land him crushed and limp in a white bed, a body becoming infant-spongy under blue pajamas. But Simon’s body was solid, rangy, unblemished, unbroken, and it knew exactly how to warm and melt her own flesh. Somewhere, sometime, he’d had a different training from hers.

Imagine asking the sound effects men to re-create this.

“Why are you laughing?” He grinned at her, teeth flashing in the semidarkness. “I’m not comical, am I?”

“No. You’re wonderful.”

He was. It was. She was. This was the great wild wood, a primeval forest, and she was a creature unbound.




She blinked awake with a suddenness and completeness that startled her. It was still dark. She was sure that was moonlight peeking in through the drapes. It bathed them in a silvery sheen, keeping alive the woodland fantasy. Imagine making love outside, a midsummer night’s dream indeed, a bed of grass, a roof of trees.

Goodness, I lose my virginity and turn into a libertine.

She looked down at herself. She’d never slept naked before. Her body was still strange to her, no longer scrawny and pasty and scaly with the sheen of unhealthiness barely masked by youth. She had satiny flesh now, pink and plump, and actual curves. Unfashionable, perhaps, but really very nice. Simon seemed to like them, certainly.

A sudden bellow, like from a water buffalo, made her jump, and now she knew what had woken her. Simon snored. He was sunk in sleep, curled on his side, one foot resting on a knee, right hand folded under his face, the knuckles digging into his cheek, left arm underneath it, stretching out, the hand dangling helplessly over the bed.

Maisie squinted at her watch, the only thing she was wearing besides the ring. Four in the morning? There was no point in going home. She would just go to Savoy Hill from here.

She eased herself out of the bed, though the way Simon was snoring, she could probably tap-dance on his head and he wouldn’t budge. Her clothes were in a heap. She scooped them up and made her way to the bathroom.

As she used her fingers as a comb, the ring caught her hair. She patiently unwound it, thinking of all the things she would have to learn now as she adjusted to this new life, this life of wearing an engagement ring. She could see the park outside, bathed in fading moonlight. Wouldn’t that be something, to have this as one’s view every day? A wolf stepped into the light and she gasped. A wolf, in Regent’s Park? She was dreaming. She was in the wild wood.

A man joined the wolf and fixed a lead to its collar, and she realized it was an Alsatian and they were out for a predawn stroll.

The hour of the wolf, they call it somewhere. I remember that. Dreams and reality colliding, all very dangerous and tempting.

Her fingers were itching. She hurried back to the sitting room and dove upon Simon’s open desk. She snatched up a pencil but couldn’t find any paper and had to search the drawers. In the messiest, she found some plain, if slightly crumpled, sheets. She sat on the squashy brown leather sofa and scribbled notes for a Talk: the things you see in the night, so different from the daylight, the tricks our eyes play upon us. Was this how fairy tales had been developed? She quickly covered one side and flipped the page over. Her heart stopped. It was a letter.