It was Cyril who took her over to the bar.
“It’s still quite hot. You do look very flushed. A lemonade should refresh you.”
“Thank you,” she said, not hearing him.
It was all too much. The late-summer heat lying so heavily all around them like a gas cloud. She preferred the cooler weather, trusted it more. This blaze was too blinding, encouraging them all to let loose. And she had meant what she said. Relaxing was treacherous.
“Feeling better?” Cyril asked after she downed the lemonade in one gulp. He looked genuinely solicitous.
“I think so. Thank you.”
But there was Siepmann, talking to Reith again, and he had inveigled Hilda into the conversation. His hand was clutching her elbow possessively.
“You know, Miss Musgrave, you . . . ah . . . you’re really very—”
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, a wave of dizziness overwhelming her. She was not going to faint or scream, not where anyone could see. “I’ve got to . . . I’ll be back in a minute. Thanks.”
She wandered through the dusk, trying to think, yearning for silence and solitude. She found herself back at the croquet set, now abandoned—the sound effects men were just as Dionysian as she was when it came to the buffet.
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.”