Radio Girls(97)

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.





EIGHTEEN




As 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.