Radio Girls(37)

They were indebted to him, all of them. Hilda, too. And no one more than Maisie. She hoped she hadn’t given him any reason to regret it.




Hilda never seemed to mind what the papers wrote about the BBC, or her. If it was a compliment, she declared it “jolly decent,” and if it was excoriation, she laughed and said, “Well, we can’t please everyone and would probably be a horrid bore if we even tried.” Articles were duly filed, fulfilling Hilda’s particularity about order, but her real interest was in letters sent by the general public, and especially librarians. Literature and poetry were becoming mainstays of Talks, with a combination of reviews and readings, and librarians wrote with the enthusiasm of matinee-idol devotees to gloat about their increased circulation and even the formation of book and poetry circles. “Good Lord, there’s one in Bradford, and I believe nearly the entire town left school at age twelve.”

Maisie viewed poetry as one of those things you were supposed to like. A jumble of words, jazz without music, with a rhythm she couldn’t follow. The poetry readings on the BBC didn’t do much to enhance her understanding, but she enjoyed them more. Hilda engaged terrific readers and bullied them to her will. Maisie still preferred her words linear and clear, sword-sharp and a direct hit to her brain. But the general thrill that ran through Talks when a poem transfixed the listening audience was contagious. And these literary societies mattered. She wasn’t sure what they meant, only that she was as ebullient as Hilda at their creation.

“Even though I’ve got nothing to do with it,” she confessed to Phyllida on their tea break.

“You’re there, aren’t you?” Phyllida pointed out. “Keeping the wheels turning. That’s plenty to do with it.” She had Hilda’s knack for pronouncing something as though it simply was, and there was no argument.

Maisie—the whole department—still gave all the credit to Hilda. She was so persuasive and adamant in securing broadcasters. It was getting harder and harder for anyone to say no to her.

“Excellent!” Hilda erupted, slamming down the phone and jumping for her hat. “I’m having a drink with T. S. Eliot.” She wolfed down a scone and tossed a cup of lukewarm tea down her throat. “I think he’s a bit of a champion with the drink. Best I don’t go in with an empty stomach.”

It was disturbing to see Hilda throw her things in her bag—Hilda being disorderly could only signal the apocalypse. Maisie glanced outside. Oh good. It’s only raining water. Not blood.

“Wish me luck!” Hilda called, racing out the door. A pamphlet dropped. “Doesn’t matter!” She was already halfway down the stairs.

Maisie picked up the pamphlet and hunted for a resting spot. The desk was, as ever, covered in neat stacks of papers, with several pages of a script filling the rest of the surface. Maisie set the pen back in its holder and straightened the correspondence so nothing peeked out from under the top pages. She could just fit the pamphlet in the bottom corner of the desk, but it didn’t look right.

Have I always been this compulsive about order myself, or is it contagious?

The bookshelves were full. It would be scandalous to lay something on any other surface.

I’ll just take it home. A little more reading for the tram.

Her initial disappointment on finding the pamphlet was in German was mitigated when she saw Hilda had made ample notes in English. Hilda’s handwriting was still aneurysm-provoking, but Maisie was getting better at deciphering it.

Not that it made any of this any clearer.

One of the notes was torn from a German newspaper. Hilda had written in red: “equity drop!!! (disaster).” They’d had speakers on finance and economy, but Maisie didn’t know what an equity drop meant, or why it was a disaster. If it hurt the Germans, she was satisfied—all those broken bodies, all those poppies, all the “Surplus Women,” as the papers had it.

But why would Hilda be reading one of their pamphlets?

It was called The Road to Resurgence. Maisie could just make out the author’s name, Adolf Hitler. Hilda’s annotation said this wasn’t meant for proper publication but was just to be distributed on the sly to leading German industrialists. So how had Hilda gotten it? Apparently, the contents were meant to assuage said industrialists about their fear that the Nazi party was anti-capitalist. Underneath that note were two tiny questions in writing even more illegible than usual: “Siemens?” “Nestlé?”

Maisie rubbed her forehead. Siemens. That man Hoppel was an executive at Siemens’s British branch and Reith’s good friend. And he had exhorted Reith to do . . . something; she couldn’t remember what. As to the “Nazi party,” she remembered reading that name over some man’s shoulder. An article dismissive of Germans, but what article wasn’t? Hilda’s robot brain would remember all this information and put it all together, but that was the brain that was reading German publications.

Another question: “Socialists?” Socialists didn’t like industrialists. You only needed to spend one evening listening to men in a pub to learn that.

Germany was a mess, the papers and pub patrons cheerfully agreed. Its economy tattered, government ineffective. Mussolini was said to laugh at Germany, he having taken a mess and turned it into a model.

“Miss? Miss!”

“What? I’m reading!” Maisie snapped. The tram conductor was glaring down at her.