Radio Girls (27 page)

“Could you leave us be for a moment, please?” she asked him.

“But . . . I'm working,” he protested. Maisie shot him her most ferocious glare, and out he went. She slammed the door behind him and leaned against its gloriously soundproof surface, grinning in the face of Hilda's fury.

“They've passed equal suffrage. Lady Astor said so. It's being announced tomorrow, but she's told us now on the chance we can do something with a broadcast tonight. Can we? I thought Dame Millicent Fawcett, maybe. She could speak to a rumor or some such, so it's not ‘breaking news.' The papers can't complain at anything to do with Dame Millicent, surely? I mean, not the good ones.”

Hilda's face morphed from purple with indignation to white with astonishment and was now pink with pleasure. She clasped Maisie's hand.

“Equal suffrage? Are you sure? What did she say?”

“She said it meant all women . . .” Maisie choked up. It had never mattered to her before, not politics, not anything. But women had died for this. Phyllida lived for it. It mattered a lot. Her words came out in a squeak. “All women over twenty-one can vote. No restrictions.”

“Oh . . . Maisie.” Hilda yanked a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her face. Her head popped up quickly, eyes damp and glittering. She swan-dived onto the studio phone to ring Millicent Fawcett. Maisie stood behind her, bouncing on her toes. Even through her excitement, she couldn't help looking at the controls and
thinking they'd be such fun to work. It couldn't be so hard if people like Billy did it. Women weren't allowed, but maybe . . .

“She said yes!” Hilda crowed. “I'll go fetch her myself. Oh, we'd best say something to the DG,” Hilda remembered. “Can't risk an apoplectic fit.”

Except that telling him meant giving him a chance to veto. Luck was with them; his secretary said he was gone for the day and no, he couldn't be reached.

“A jolly good night for him to be gallivanting,” Hilda said, sighing with relief. They had, after all, attempted to follow protocol. Now they just needed to rearrange the evening schedule to accommodate the broadcast and write a script of sorts.

“Someday the BBC is going to have the right to do all its own news, hang the papers,” Hilda grumbled with uncharacteristic vitriol. “Honestly, why can't the future be
now
? Even being a political secretary didn't require so much disassembly.”

She clasped her hands behind her back and paced.

“Let's see: ‘Rumbles from Parliament hint at the long fought-for right to equal franchise. If this is true, it will have some real bearing upon our next general election. Dame Millicent Fawcett, one of the great activists for women's universal suffrage, is here to reflect on the legacy of the struggle and what true universal suffrage might entail.' And then Dame Millicent can say: ‘I hope this is the case, as we don't want to remain behind our American sisters, and it's important for Britain, generally a universal leader, to show it trusts all its women with this task.' Hm. This sacred task? No. This sacred duty? Bit hyperbolic? But we can't overstate the import.” Her grin nearly split her face, and she hugged herself. “It will be a terribly interesting election.”

“Where's Our Lady gone?” Fielden asked Maisie, standing over her desk, arms folded, ignoring the furious gallop of her fingers as she typed the script.

“She's escorting Dame Millicent Fawcett here for a special broadcast,” Maisie said, overflowing with the joy of superior information.

“Oh, Lord, not the Fawcett woman.” Fielden moaned. “Perfect name—turn her mouth on and it never stops running.”

“She is an enormously important woman! One of the great suffragettes, and a dame, besides!” Maisie retorted, outraged.

“Damn the dames, I say.”

“Mr. Fielden!”

“I'm a republican. Small ‘r.' It means something different over here, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” Maisie snapped. “I have actually lived in Britain most of my adult life and I read all the newspapers.” She slammed the shift lever over, thundered through her final sentences, and snatched out the papers.

“Well, look who's got a temper on her.” He
tsk
ed, smirking. “What are we coming to?”

“I'll leave you to determine,” she told him, and flounced off to the typing pool to scoop up Phyllida. The nearest spot for a private talk was the second-favorite ladies' lavatory and, after checking under the stalls for feet, Maisie broke the momentous news.

Phyllida gripped hold of the sink and stared at her.

“Nae. Is it really true? It must be. Lady Astor wouldn't spread a rumor. Oh, my life!” She began to weep. “Can you believe it? We're all of us going to have a voice at last.”

“We really are,” Maisie said, and she started crying too.

Both of them were still red-eyed when they emerged a few minutes later. Eckersley saw them and chuckled. “What would you poor girls do without lavatories to bawl in?”

They were floating far too high to bother with a response.

Meeting Dame Millicent passed in a blur. She was frail, with papery-white skin and trembling hands, but like Hilda, her eyes were shining.

“I think I lived to see this out of sheer stubbornness,” she declared in a voice much stronger than her body.

She bore herself with extreme elegance and sat as upright as if she were still wearing corsets. Which perhaps she was. Mr. Burrows, the BBC's announcer, had to be brought into the secret so he could interview Dame Millicent—there was no time to find anyone else. And listeners would think the presence of a man added gravitas to the occasion.

Maisie stepped outside the door, set the
BROADCASTING IN PROGRESS
sign in place, and gave it a fond pat.

“I believe you just squealed,” Fowler, the sound effects man, told her. A short performance was to close the evening's broadcast, and he wheeled up a trolley bearing a gramophone, an amplifier, a tea towel, and a head of cauliflower.

“I suppose I did,” Maisie agreed. “Good thing I'm not in there.” She jerked her thumb at the studio door. An unscripted background squeal was punishable by firing squad. “What's all this?” She waved a hand at the trolley.

“Items for sound effects, of course,” Fowler answered, with that stunned expression the sound effects men always got when someone asked about their work, baffled as to how they were fated to work among such imbeciles.

“A gramophone, Mr. Fowler? That looks like cheating.”

“Does it?” he asked sharply. “And do you see any records here?”

She didn't. Seeing her properly chastised, Fowler chose to educate rather than upbraid her.

“Here. Put your ear right against the amplifier, and have a listen.” He wound the gramophone and set the needle on a tea towel, so it just brushed the fabric. He tapped lightly on the towel in rhythmic beats, creating a
thump-thump, thump-thump
that, she gradually realized, was the sound of a heartbeat. “Close your eyes,” he advised. She did, the sound washing straight through her.

“Crikey, it's hardly anything to cry about,” Fowler scolded. “You girls, you get weepy over the strangest things.”

Maisie wiped her eyes and grinned, feeling no need to ask where
the cauliflower came in. Even at its most mundane, the BBC was pure magic. That was worth a few tears.

“Tell me, Mr. Fowler, can you create a sound for being so happy, you just want to hug the entire world and never let go?”

He shrank from her in horror. “That's not for an upcoming Talk, is it?”

The newspapers outdid themselves with stories on what was formally titled the “Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928,” and were generous enough to congratulate the BBC on its prescience and fine discussion with the great Dame Millicent Fawcett. Reith's incandescence wilted under the weight of the congratulations that showered on him all morning, though Maisie wondered how many of those congratulations were more about his genius in hiring Hilda.

Reith towered in the middle of Hilda's office. He never seemed to fit there—Maisie thought cozy spaces made him uncomfortable.

“I appreciate that I was not available, Miss Matheson, and so you had to make a swift decision and you decided to err on the side of risk.” His scowl contorted, indicating his general feeling about risk. “It does seem to have been successful. But in future, I hope you will show more discretion, or at least seek the advice and support of another senior. We can't have staff simply throwing on broadcasts without proper vetting. It will certainly lead to chaos.”

Maisie could see that Hilda yearned to tell Reith that senior staff absolutely needed that discretion, and it was flexibility that would help the BBC grow. But she smiled placidly and nodded.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Reith. I do apologize.”

“We have no idea what could have happened,” he pointed out.

“No, indeed.”

“Well, let's be more mindful on another occasion.” He turned on his heel to leave, nodding at Maisie in a way that made her realize he was expecting her to accompany him. “We miss you up in the
executive offices, Miss Musgrave,” he said when they reached the corridor. “You were a pleasant girl to have around.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, rather touched.

“What do you think of this voting business?” Ah, that was why he wanted to talk to her alone. He remembered the devotee of the Old World and wanted some youthful sympathy. “My wife has never seen the need for it—she's happy to let me make all such decisions. We were both quite troubled seeing any women vote, but single, and perhaps uneducated women at the polls, that seems a guarantor of trouble. I know it's all down to these times, but it does worry me.”

“I suppose we'll just have to see?” Maisie said. She couldn't point out America's success with women's suffrage, since he considered Americans to be an ungrateful, degenerate rabble who should be corralled back into the empire.

“It doesn't worry you?” He was asking if she had become one of those. No longer under his watch, had she shunned her beloved traditions, been seduced by the big bad wolf of modernity?

“The British Empire is the greatest the world has ever seen,” she assured him. “Having more of its people involved in its politics can only be to the good.”

He favored her with his most smiling scowl.

“You are a diplomat, Miss Musgrave. And perhaps you are correct. I suppose we shall see. If the election goes poorly, I daresay they can revoke the law.”

Revoke the law? Finally grant rights, then snatch them away again? That sounded like the stuff of satire. Or the Fascist meetings. It didn't sound like democracy.
Of course, there are always laws that someone doesn't like, but . . .

“Miss Musgrave?”

Reith was scowling down at her, without a hint of a smile.

“Sir?”

“I said, ‘good afternoon.'”

“Oh!” She had been dismissed. “Yes. Good afternoon, sir. Thank you.”

“You really
are
a diplomat,” Hilda teased when Maisie came back to the office.

“You heard all that?” The woman had the hearing of a bat.

“It comes in handy.”

Maisie sat back down to the correspondence but couldn't concentrate. She wanted it to be the mythical “later.” She wanted to write about men's fears of women voting, compare it to America. She wanted more stories they could tell, to go chasing stories herself. She wanted to interview women on the street. She wanted to tell Eckersley to work harder on developing a traveling microphone. She wanted to be able to print Dame Millicent's Talk in a magazine. She wanted to vote. Now.

“Miss Matheson!” Her shout nearly made the windows rattle.

“Gracious! Is there a fire?” Hilda looked more interested than alarmed.

“Can we . . . ? I remember we once . . . The general election is to be next year, isn't it?”