Radio Girls(75)

“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 tsked 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.”

It was positively alien to think of Hilda needing anyone else’s brains. Ellis lit a cheroot and grinned at Maisie.

“It’s not actually my brains she’s after, but kind of her to say.”

Maisie looked back and forth between the two of them. “Is this . . . ? Are you . . . ? You are MI5, aren’t you?” She sagged against the Regency table.

“Ah, girls and their fancies,” Ellis said, winking at her.

“Yes, we’re hopelessly frivolous,” Hilda snapped. “Now, then, have a look at these, so as to offer your dubious yet valued opinion.”