Hilda, along with Arthur Burrows, the premier presenter, was becoming synonymous with the BBC. It was possible, Maisie conceded, that Reith’s absence from the parade of praise was the problem, but he could hardly fault Hilda for that. Besides, he wasn’t without recognition—he had been awarded the Knight Bachelor and was now “Sir John Reith.” With the grace he decided came of being ennobled, he insisted the staff continue to address him as “Mr. Reith.”
“Yes, well, you no longer have to nudge,” Reith acceded. “But not every broadcast has to be challenging.”
Maisie wasn’t sure what Reith meant by “challenging,” but her own opinion, born of Hilda’s, was that a Talk should always have something new to say, in some new way.
Onwards and upwards, and all that.
It was a miserable cold spring in 1928, and the Talks Department was huddled on the floor again, everyone vying for a place nearest the fire. In the six months Maisie had been the proper Talks secretary, she felt her greatest skill was securing a prime spot with the most frequency.
“At this rate, we’ll all have chilblains in June,” Fielden muttered. He never cared that no one responded.
“We’re going to expand the poetry and book discussions,” Hilda announced, reading from her green diary. “Virginia Woolf is coming in for a few readings, and Rebecca West, but it looks as though Vita Sackville-West will be our permanent fiction reviewer.”
“With so many bluestockings, we could compete with Selfridges’ hosiery department,” Collins hissed. Only Fielden heard him, and gave him a withering glare. He allowed no one to impugn Our Lady.
“We’re fixed very nicely with political and household Talks, and Talks on the arts and sciences. But I think we could do with more in the way of general interest. And perhaps the occasional foray into light absurdity. Any thoughts?”
It started to rain, fat drops tapping at the windows. Maisie snapped a biscuit in half, liking the swishy crunch sound. She thought of something Hilda had written in her notes on broadcasting, that it was “a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which hitherto we have been deaf. It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth’s surface.” Such a lovely way to describe this curious creature they were continually inventing. The stranger inviting itself into a silent home, asking to become a friend.
“Miss Matheson, what about a Talk on memorable sounds?” Maisie burst out, watching the drops splatter against the glass. “Sounds that mean something to people, something about their personal experience? A scythe in the harvest, or typewriter keys?”
“She would say typing,” Collins again, more sotto, still voce.
“Marvelous,” Hilda congratulated her. “We could thrill the Sound men for days. Of course, what would be really delightful would be to take a microphone up and down the country, asking people about sounds and perhaps recording those sounds in real time. Wouldn’t that be evocative?”
Hilda sighed, momentarily despondent at radio’s limits. There were valiant attempts at broadcasting outside the studio—the sports announcers were very keen on it—but it was a deeply cumbersome affair that thrilled and vexed the engineers equally and whose results were not quite on the cusp of satisfactory.
How do you choose just one gorgeous sound? Children laughing. Bees in a summer garden. The rattle of beads on a dancer’s dress. A kiss.
“Why are you blushing?” Fielden asked her, not even trying to be sotto.
“I have tuberculosis,” Maisie confided. Everyone laughed. Another nail in Invisible Girl’s coffin. And she’d had another Talk idea accepted. She hummed as she headed to the mimeograph room, her cheerfulness compensating for lack of tune, when Cyril loped into place beside her.
“Hallo, New York. How are you?”
Cyril. She felt a rush of nostalgia for all the days he hadn’t entered her thoughts. He had the nerve to still be deliriously good-looking, hair flopping over his temples, freckles, dark blue eyes. That high-voltage smile, so contagious as to almost make her smile back. She clenched her jaw.
“I’m doing very well, Mr. Underwood. How are you?” she asked, affecting what she hoped was a professional tone awash in detachment, sparing him only one curt nod as she continued to stride down the corridor.
He kept pace with her. “Never a dull moment—more’s the pity. A chap could sit down then. The DG expects a great deal from Schools, you know. Minds of the youth, and all that.” He gave a vague gesture to indicate all those minds.
“Yes, indeed. And how are you liking Mr. Siepmann as a superior? Awfully clever, isn’t he?” she asked, hoping the question would annoy him. She was rewarded with a frown.
“Well . . . yes, actually. Likes details. We call him the devil in the details,” he confided, eyes twinkling, inviting a laugh.
“Do you?” She nodded gravely. “I’m sure he’d appreciate that.” Another prize: the flash of alarm turning him pale, his freckles poppy seeds in a milk pudding.
“You, er, you wouldn’t mention that, would you? I was only joking.”
“Of course you were,” she agreed in a chirp. “I know better than to assume you’re in earnest. Ah, here’s my stop. Cheerio!” She bid him goodbye with a flick of her pinkie, swung into the mimeograph room, and set up stencils at record speed. Her ears were getting very good at picking up sounds, and she sensed him hesitate, swaying at the door, before he went on to wherever he was going.
“Honestly, I was happy never to talk to him again. What the heck was that for? ‘Hallo, New York,’ indeed, that beastly, blasted blackguard—”
“And we’re still just in the ‘Bs,’” Phyllida said. “You’ve certainly learned to talk like a Briton.” She smiled and sipped tea from a flask. It wasn’t really warm enough to eat outside, but it was the first bright day they’d had in weeks and they wanted the feel of sun and air, the tease of summer and country, even though the wind down the Embankment still had a pinprick chill that coaxed tears from their eyes and the mixed odors off the Thames were decidedly urban. They felt hardy and outlandish, the best of what flappers should be, though neither of them could afford to properly look the part.
“I told him I forgave him, or just as well,” Maisie said, the injustice still stinging as much as the air. “It was more than a year ago, and he’s the one who said it was trivial!”
“Maybe that wasn’t so true?”
Maisie hooted with laughter and only stopped when she had to clamp her mouth over the bottom of her chicken pie to stop it oozing gravy.
“I know what the lads think of me,” she said, grinning at the silliness of it.
“Thoughts can change.” Phyllida shrugged, refusing for once to grin back. “You haven’t run and hid, you’re doing good work in Talks, and you’re looking well.”
Maisie hooted again, but Phyllida was not to be deterred.
“It’s true! You’re less scrawny now, and you’ve got nice color in your cheeks.” She leaned closer to examine Maisie. “You’ve even got cheeks! And you don’t look so frightened anymore. You look more . . . Well, you’re still hungry,” she said, breaking out the grin. “Have a banana.”
Maisie finished her pie and took the banana. She knew she’d filled out and she liked it. A boyish look was fashionable, perhaps, but no one wanted to look unhealthy. Her new dress—still plain wool, but better quality—didn’t hang like a rag on the line. Instead, it skimmed what was belatedly but unquestionably turning into a figure. The dress was a nice pale green. “Garland Green,” the shopgirl had informed her in a proud, breathy swoon, as though she’d invented it. “And the trim is Briar Rose.” Maisie still just called it pink.
“Hallo. Would you like company?” The women looked up, Maisie’s cheeks bulging with banana, to see two young men walking their bicycles, grinning at them. Or anyway, at Phyllida.
“
D’ye nae see we have each other’s company?” Phyllida asked.
“Ah, go on,” the bolder one persisted. “How’s about we give you a lift on the bikes, hm? You’d make a fine figurehead,” he complimented Phyllida.
“When I feel like having my bones broken, you’ll be the first one I call,” she promised.
“And we have to get back to work,” Maisie added. “Some of us work, you know.”
“Oh Lord,” the other man groaned. “Northerners, Americans, working girls. A trifecta of misery. Come on,” he urged, pedaling off. The bold one gave Phyllida another longing glance, but followed his friend.
“Which trait do you think was our gravest offense?” Maisie asked, though she assumed the men had only included her by way of convenience.
“Working, no contest,” Phyllida said.
“I suppose it’s not such an awful thing, fellows liking you,” Maisie ventured, handing Phyllida a cake.
“Pah. They like that I’ve got blond curls, long legs, and an enormous chest,” Phyllida scoffed.
She was very lovely. Tall and plumper than was fashionable, her dairy-farm roots evident even in her urbanity. The long legs were wonderfully sculpted, so it looked like she still hiked the hills after the cows every day, though she hadn’t since she was seven. And despite her strident efforts, the loose fashions and flattening corsets failed to conceal her ample bosom.
“I thought I’d find a man to marry me in Savoy Hill,” Maisie said. She concentrated on picking a currant out of her cake, glad her cheeks were already pink from the cold.
“Lots of lasses come in thinking that,” Phyllida consoled her. “And I daresay it happens.”
“What sort of man would you like to marry?”
“O-ho, no, thank you. No, I had quite enough being under the thumb of my father. I won’t be subjected to any other man and that’s that. One way or another I’m going to end up in Parliament. Is that the church bell?”
They braced themselves against the wind for the short walk up Savoy Place.
“Do you think there are Bolshevist spies in Britain?” Maisie shouted, her words buffeted on the wind. It was the perfect weather for asking such questions—you were lucky if the person right next to you could hear.
“If there are, they must feel right at home. Siberia’s got to be warmer than this.”
“But really, do you think so?” Maisie persisted.
“Communists believe in equality for women, so they aren’t all bad, I’d say.”
“If they believe in a single-party state, though, then no one would be allowed to vote.”
“Mad way to cut down on paperwork, isn’t it? And that’s exactly why it’s silly to be afraid of communism gaining a hold here. Even the illiterate know we British love paperwork.”
They’d been gone less than an hour, and each returned to in-trays mountainous with paper, rather proving Phyllida’s point.
Having new energy as well as new cheeks, Maisie felt she was becoming the avatar of the efficiency Hilda demanded for Talks. She read and sorted correspondence as though she’d taken a speed-reading course and could not remember the last time she missed a key when typing. She liked it all, but the constant bustle meant there was scant time for trying new things beyond the typewriter. There was her vague interest in Hilda’s German propaganda, but Maisie wanted to do more within the world of Talks.
Hilda liked initiative in her staff, so Maisie felt bold enough a few days later, when Hilda was signing letters, to ask, “Could I be the one to start putting together notes and things for the Talk on memorable sounds, please, Miss Matheson? Or might I help Mr. Collins?”
“Hmm? Sorry?” Hilda looked up at her from a letter to Alexander Fleming.
“The idea, from the meeting, on sounds?”
Hilda’s expression remained blank. Maisie blushed. “My idea. You said it was good, something we could . . .” She trailed off, feeling silly. Feeling worse than that, because Hilda was frowning.
“There are any number of good ideas, but as you very well know, only a few of them ever become Talks.”
“But you said—”
“That it was a nice idea. It was. It is. And I always hope to encourage all of you, and see you all continuously exerting yourselves. But I am the only one who decides what will be broadcast, and once that decision is made, I delegate to the appropriate staff, as I hope you’ve noticed.”
“Yes, Miss Matheson.” Maisie wished Hilda would snap, like Miss Shields. Her calm, casual manner made Maisie feel ten times smaller.
“Ambition is a commendable thing,” Hilda said, her eyes at last regaining some of their usual warmth. “And I’ve known from the start that you have a terrific capacity. It’s good to want things, to work for them, and ask for them. Just don’t expect to always get them.”
“I didn’t—”
But Hilda finished signing the letters and gave them back to Maisie for sealing. Maisie returned to her desk. Nice as it was to have terrific capacity, she could not stop blushing at the embarrassing realization that she had, indeed, expected to get what she asked for, just because she had the courage to ask.
The reprimand and its reason were forgotten the following day, when at midmorning Hilda asked Maisie to go down to reception and wait for Lady Nicholson.
Lady Nicholson. That was Vita Sackville-West.
Maisie glanced at the carriage clock. Lady Nicholson wasn’t due for nearly half an hour.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Hilda said. “But I’ve got to meet with the fellow from the Foreign Office, and I may not extricate myself in time. I trust you to keep her in good hands, should it be necessary. And you can read till she arrives.”
Maisie grabbed a pad and pencil instead. Vernon Bartlett had just broadcast about Canada’s work in the League, and she couldn’t help thinking about America and its refusal to join. Which embarrassed her, despite telling herself she had no part of it. But I lived in New York most of my childhood. It’s part of me, isn’t it?
She smoothed the page. “Maybe the Congress should poll the theater community about American interest in Europe,” she wrote. All the actors she’d known were eager to ply their trade in London, Paris, Berlin. And every third girl in New York sighed over foreign accents, imagining the romance of the French, the thrill of the Italians, the marvelous marriageability of the British. In the elite classes, many daughters were sent to Swiss finishing schools, many sons to Oxford or Cambridge. Americans, so fierce in their republicanism, their non-monarchy, yearned to meet aristocrats and monarchs, touch a fairy-tale past while scoffing at it. Wouldn’t membership in the League of Nations allow a bit of that, while also getting to exert influence and show off a more perfect union to the world? And yet they stayed resolutely at home.
She crossed it all out. I don’t know what I’m doing. Why should I? She doodled boxes and coils and radio waves. Then she scribbled: “Ask the American embassy for someone to do a Talk about their not being in the League.”
Would that be controversial? Miss Matheson would like that. Let’s see. They’d have to address the war, de Tocqueville’s idea of exceptionalism, or whatever it was, and maybe . . . She’d covered three pages when Rusty tugged on her elbow—she yelped and the pencil tip snapped off.
“Sorry, miss. I spoke to you lots, but you didn’t hear me. It’s the lady, miss. Her car’s just coming. A jolly nice Daimler it is, too.”
“Thanks, Rusty. Would you mind running these back to my desk?” She handed him the pad and pencil. Awk! My fingers! I’m bleeding graphite! She checked to make sure no one was looking, spat on her fingers, yanked her handkerchief from her sleeve, and attempted to wipe off the stains. Then she smoothed her skirt and pushed back her shoulders. Vita Sackville-West, a born aristocrat, might know Maisie was a commoner, but she was not going to be seen as common.
Maisie opened the door to prevent the
lady’s having to do so and immediately thought she was hallucinating, envisioning the great as truly overpowering. Then she realized Vita was over six feet tall and ramrod straight, making her even more imposing. She wasn’t, perhaps, very beautiful, but she exuded something Maisie couldn’t identify that gave her a peculiar attraction. It was hard not to stare at her. She glanced down her long nose and smiled at Maisie.
“Well, good afternoon. Are you my guide?”
“I am, yes, Lady Nicholson,” Maisie answered, fighting the urge to curtsy. Vita’s silky warmth was even more intimidating than Lady Astor’s cheerful condescension.
“Please, no titles here. I’m in my capacity as a working writer. ‘Miss Sackville-West’ will do, thank you.”
“Oh. I . . . Yes, of course. Well, please follow me, Miss Sackville-West,” Maisie beckoned. She would never dream of subjecting Vita to the stairs, so the lift was summoned, and Bill cheerfully took them up. The noise of the lift tended to dissuade conversation, allowing Maisie to study Vita, who gazed straight ahead, utterly at ease. Her simple elegance was arresting. She was fashionable, of course—not like Beanie, who as a young unmarried socialite was expected to be ahead of the trends—but rather as a respectable, admired woman whom every tailor wanted to dress. Hilda’s jackets and skirts were tailored, too, but there were tailors and tailors, and Maisie could see that Vita’s was the kind that helped set the aristocracy apart.
Hilda met them at the lift.
“Miss Matheson!” Vita boomed before Hilda could speak, pumping Hilda’s hand as though she expected to yield water. “Such a pleasure to see you again. I can’t begin to express my excitement for this venture. I am deeply gratified to be asked to participate.”
“We’re very honored to have you broadcast, Lady Nicholson,” Hilda said.
“‘Vita,’ please. Let us begin by being informal. Your reputation well precedes you, and I know I am going to be run absolutely ragged with rehearsal, so we may as well be the friends we’re so evidently meant to be.”
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