Radio Girls

by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  His lips were moving, he was talking, but Maisie couldn’t take any of it in. All this time, and now here he was. He seemed too big, too much, as if he’d been consigned to memory and was now made solid—it was like a series of fun house mirrors, with everything too big and small and distorted. She had the most horrible sense of wanting to break out and be in normal space again.

  “I’m overwhelming you, aren’t I? I’m so sorry, darling. It’s just I . . . I don’t know what to . . .”

  “Neither do I,” she breathed.

  “I can’t tell you how I missed that voice.” He picked her up and kissed her. “Have dinner with me,” he whispered into her neck. “At my flat. Come home with me.”

  She wanted to. She wanted to be with him. Feast off him. Feel everything she’d only ever dreamed about and wondered and hoped. But the suddenness of it, the popping up of him, a jackrabbit in spring . . . Her head was too distorted. Somewhere in the din, she heard Phyllida’s firm advice, reminding her to keep her head, at least, if she couldn’t keep her heart.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not at your flat. Somewhere in Soho or Chelsea.”

  “I’m longing to be alone with you, darling,” he murmured, stroking the exact spot on the back of her neck where he always made her tingle. She leaned into him, feeling that melting sensation. Just go. Just let go. Just let yourself have this.

  “No,” she said, and saw his brows jump at her firmness. “No, it’s too soon, after all this time. No. We’re going for a meal and then I’m going home.”

  He looked startled, then smiled and was more gallant than ever, whisking them into a cab and soon after a bistro. And they talked, and ate, and laughed, and she wondered if she saw something in his eyes, some sort of unease, but decided that was the peril of journalistic pursuits. She was always looking for something more in things, creating a danger of seeing things that weren’t there.

  I must work on that. Can’t be devoted to the truth if I’m living in even half a fantasy.

  For all that some people decried the Marie Stopes clinics as hives of immorality, only married women were officially allowed to partake of their wares. Maisie felt more of a fraud wearing one of Lola’s more understated rings as a wedding band than in a wig and heavy makeup. She tried not to fidget with the ring as the reception nurse was asking her a few rudimentary questions and taking her through to a little examination room.

  What she really wanted was a pencil. So many questions, a long story to write, asking about the numbers of women who came in, their ages, their backgrounds. Were they excited? Desperate?

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Simon,” the rosy-cheeked young midwife greeted her. “I understand you want a diaphragm?”

  She had a firm, Mary Poppins sort of voice, and Maisie wanted to ask her to come broadcast. She listened to the midwife’s brisk explanation of the device and instructions, hearing the voice rather than the words and thinking how useful this would be for their female listeners. Then she heard what Reith’s response would be to such a proposed Talk.

  “Yes, it really is that easy,” the midwife said, mistaking Maisie’s smile for a response. “Now, just relax and take a few deep breaths. It won’t hurt, but it’s not terribly comfortable, I’m afraid.”

  It wasn’t. The midwife was professionally gentle, though the word “manhandling” came to mind.

  “It’s easy to get nervous giggles, but do try to just relax and breathe steady. It’ll be much quicker,” the midwife ordered. “There! You are now wearing a Dutch cap.”

  “Can you fit me with wooden shoes, too?”

  The midwife chuckled.

  “How many of the women ask that?” Maisie wanted to know.

  “Only a few,” the midwife assured her. “Any questions?”

  A thousand. But none that the midwife meant.

  “No. I think I’m all right.”

  “Well, any discomfort or concern of any sort, you come straight back to us. Don’t feel awkward.”

  Considering where the midwife had just had her hands, Maisie thought it was past time to mention feeling awkward. But she only said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Mrs. Simon. Good afternoon.”

  “Well-done,” Phyllida congratulated Maisie after the whispered confession in the tearoom. “Though after all this time, I’d keep him waiting a month at least.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “No. I suppose you don’t. Well, here’s hoping you’re a producer soon and that saves you from the Marriage Bar.”

  “And you’ll be Talks assistant.”

  “I will, won’t I?”

  Their delight was tempered by the reality of Reith. His deep chill toward Hilda escalated the more popular Talks became.

  “You’d think instead he’d hire four strapping lads to carry her on their shoulders wherever she went,” Phyllida said.

  “Or keep us drowning in sandwiches and cakes all day long,” Maisie countered.

  “Or meet us every morning to bow thricely and wish us maximum productivity.”

  “Do you girls really have to giggle so much?” Fowler said, looking up from his Chelsea bun. “It’s highly distracting.”

  “Just trying to inspire you with sound, Mr. Fowler,” Maisie assured him.

  And so here she was, sitting down to a supper she could barely eat in Simon’s “awfully bourgeois flat” in Primrose Hill. “But it’s part of the family pile and a lovely view of Regent’s Park,” he said, both introducing and dismissing the place.

  They were served with an excess of deference by “my man, Trent. He’s all right. Aren’t you?” He looked dyspeptic, actually.

  The room was almost overbearing in its insistence on masculinity, with heavy, dark furniture and drapes. A walnut bookcase was stuffed with leather-bound books, and Maisie counted two rolltop desks, one closed, the other with a typewriter peeking out between piles of papers and vases full of bouquets of pencils.

  “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 ma
ny 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.

  It’s only a discarded draft, nothing to worry about, she told herself. But it was addressed from London, and the date was practically scratching at her eye. “15 August 1929.” When Simon was still meant to be in Germany.

  “Dear Grigson . . .”

  The fist inside blew up, forcing her breath into icy gasps.

  No. No, no, no.

  Words jumped out at her, screeching and biting like pixies. “Delighted to make the arrangement.” “Grateful for your investment and your faith in me.” “Will not disappoint you.”

  Sun was breaking in around the drapes. Maisie forced herself not to think, to just go to her bag, where the camera was still nestled among a mound of chocolate and the latest Listener.

  Don’t shake, Maisie ordered her fingers as she smoothed the letter, set it under the desk lamp, and took a photo, hoping it would be clear and legible.

  Five thirty now. Her mind and body worked on auto, searching the desk with the clinical precision of a surgeon. Then she looked over at the closed desk.

  The desk was locked. In his own home. Out came the trusty nail file.

  More letters. Letters, letters, letters. She snapped seven more pictures, finishing the reel, and then confined herself to shorthand, not thinking about what she was writing, not thinking about all the talk of cacao, of exclusive contracts with Nestlé, of a great family restored, of plans for an illustrious future as head of a media empire, so natural, with a man of Simon’s breeding and connections and caliber. Simon couldn’t possibly know what he was doing, or whom he was doing it with. He was desperate to help his family. That was honorable, and he was an Honorable. He wasn’t going to be proof against the offer of real help, and especially if it gave him something more, something he always wanted. But he wasn’t going to be a puppet on a string, doing as his benefactors demanded. He just needed to understand whom he was dealing with, what it all might mean, and then he and Maisie could have a bonfire with these papers.

  She slipped the camera and pad back in her bag, locked the desk, and glanced back at the messy open desk. She could just see the corner of brown leather—a diary, it must be. She shifted aside some papers.

  “May we help you?”

  Maisie lurched forward into the desk, banging her knee so hard she thought it might be fractured. It was the dyspeptic Trent, looking as though he’d like to beat her to death and refraining only because he didn’t want blood staining the parquet floor.

  “I was just looking for some international letter paper,” she explained. “I wanted to write to my mother and tell her about my engagement.”

  “And did Mr. Simon say you could have the use of his desk?”

  “I was going to use the sofa, actually. He’s still asleep. But I’m a lark type of girl. Very keen on catching worms.”

  He looked her up and down, probably wondering what the attraction was. Eyes locked on hers, he pulled out a drawer and withdrew several sheets of thin blue paper.

  “Ah, there you are,” Simon murmured. Maisie turned to see him, clad only in pajama bottoms resting at his hips, running his hand through already tousled hair. That body. Smooth, sculpted, strong. She had touched every inch of that lightly burnished flesh. She could go to him now and touch him again. She wanted to. Better to do that, better to touch him, to kiss him, to lose herself in him, take him back inside her, than to believe all her eyes had told her. He had been drawn into something he didn’t understand. Who among us didn’t make mistakes, after all?

  “I thought you’d used and abandoned me,” he said, pulling her into his chest and kissing her neck. “Let’s go back to bed. I’m never up before nine. Trent must think the end is nigh.”

  “I’ve got to be at work long before nine,” she reminded him. “Very busy day ahead, I’m afraid.” Just got busier, too.

  “Mm, busy little bee. And I suppose you want to go home and change. Do you want breakfast first? Trent makes a rather lovely mess of bacon and eggs.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said, instantly regretting it. Her turning down food was a dead giveaway. “Miss Matheson said she was going to stand us muffins and jam this morning, and, well . . . for once, I’m not feeling hungry for food.” She ran her hand down his back, thrilling to his shiver. She could do this. She had the right to touch him now, to . . .

  What the hell am I doing? He’s not . . .

  “I hope you weren’t riffling too much in my desk
, there,” he said suddenly, and she wondered if there was an edge in his voice.

  “No. Just hoped to find some blue letter paper. But the mess was a bit of an allaying force.”

  He laughed.

  “Yes, I imagine your secretary brain looks at that dog’s dinner and wants to fill it with any amount of bourgeois in-trays and labels and files.”

  “Nothing bourgeois about organization,” she snapped. “And I’m not a secretary anymore. I’m a Talks assistant.”

  “Of course, of course, I know. And soon you’ll be a producer and then the director and have the power to come in whenever you like and dictate the whole course of action.”

  She barely heard him. She had to get to the BBC. She had to talk to Hilda.

  “If you’re not going to be a good girl and come back to bed with me, then it’s cruel to stay,” he chided her. “Shall I give you cab fare?”

  “No,” she said. She wanted to walk, clear her head. “No, that’s all right.”

  “I promised the lads a drink tonight, but will we have dinner tomorrow?”

  “I’d love that,” she said, hardly registering either of their words.

  “And what else do you love?” His eyes were teasing, and so warm. So honest.

  “You,” she told him, kissing him again. “I love you.”

  But I have no idea who you are.

  NINETEEN

  Maisie walked slowly down Eversholt Street. All around her was the pulse of early-morning life. Dustmen, milkmen, postmen. And boys, newsboys, delivery boys, shoeshine boys. But not Tommies. Not anymore. No more war. They had fought, and won, and now the former enemy was subdued and come to heel and peace reigned.

  And I’m the Queen of Sheba.

  Maybe it all meant nothing. It might. She looked around her. It was later now. The street was full of the working and middle classes, all heading to different jobs, none as important as her own. Because she had power, didn’t she? She was part of something that was doing something. She was . . . She was on the verge of running late.