The sandwiches arrived, along with two bottles of ginger beer.
“Ah, excellent,” Hilda crowed, pressing a large coin into the happy page’s hand. “Bit outlandish, sending for victuals from the pub when it’s just our little meeting, but first days must be marked.” She busied herself finding napkins.
Maisie’s gratitude mingled with mortification. Hilda shouldn’t be spending her own money like this. It made Maisie feel indebted to her before she’d earned a penny.
“I mean to make ‘efficiency’ our byword here in Talks.”
Hilda was so efficient as to be able to eat while talking and somehow remain elegant. Maisie’s attempt at combining efficiency with elegance was far less successful. She wrote with her pad balanced on her knee, leaving her other hand free to shovel in food, and hoped Hilda was too absorbed in her soliloquy to notice.
Women notice everything, though. I bet she’s seen every mend in my stockings. I bet she knows I have to cut my hair myself. I bet she thinks she’s drawn a straw so short, even Thumbelina couldn’t drink out of it.
Hilda dabbed her lips.
“Terrific challenge, talking about new art on the radio. Let’s schedule a meeting with Sir Frederic at the British Museum and Charles Aitken at the Tate—very able man, Aitken. We’ll explore some possibilities . . . I think it might be really compelling to have a curator or art historian speak with an artist about a current piece. Wouldn’t that be thrilling? Paint a picture, if you see.” She smirked.
The glossies also said that men didn’t like women making jokes, but perhaps it was different when there were no men present. Maisie didn’t want to laugh. That would imply she was relaxing.
“You’ve done fine justice to those sandwiches, Miss Musgrave.” (Was that a compliment?) “Before we segue to biscuits, do tell me something of yourself.”
“Er, well, there’s nothing much to tell,” Maisie demurred.
“Nonsense. And if you don’t mind me saying so, that’s a very bad habit, playing yourself down. We all have a life story, age notwithstanding.”
Maisie didn’t want to talk about herself. She did, however, badly want biscuits.
“What made you apply to work here?” Hilda asked.
“There was an advertisement,” Maisie answered, surprised.
“There are always advertisements. Why the BBC?”
“I . . . er, well, I . . . It was a job I thought I could do. And it, er . . .”
Blissful distraction wheeled in with the basket post. Hilda glowed with Christmas joy.
“Ah! The second round!”
“Here you are, Miss Matheson. Enjoy it.” Alfred balanced another foot-tall pile of papers in Hilda’s in-tray. He started even more violently than before on seeing Maisie again, and she was too busy inhaling a biscuit to greet him.
“Have you met Miss Musgrave, my new secretary?”
“Hallo.” He nodded, and shook his head all the way back out the door.
Hilda moved to tidy the letters. Maisie hoped that wasn’t going to be one of her assignments. It looked as though it would be lethal simply to breathe too close to the pile.
“You look alarmed, Miss Musgrave. Correspondence comes in by the veritable hogshead all day long. Didn’t Miss Shields tell you?”
It seemed rude to say no.
Hilda gave the now-symmetrical mound an approving pat. “I call it my Tower of Babble. Though in fact nearly all of it is interesting. Or useful. And some of the criticism is downright entertaining.”
The white-and-pink guilloche enamel carriage clock perched in pride of place on top of the desk sang out the hour. Hilda glanced at it and tossed back the last of her ginger beer.
“Time to face the DG! Director-general,” she clarified, seeing Maisie’s blank face. “Our master, Mr. John Reith, director-general of the British Broadcasting Company. But nearly everyone here calls him ‘the DG.’ Are you finished?”
Maisie nodded, her longing to see Mr. Reith eclipsing her desire for another biscuit.
Hilda plucked the green leather diary from her desk and glanced at a bookmarked page. Maisie shifted her gaze downward, noticing Hilda’s smart mahogany shoes, low-heeled, with three straps and a double-stitched edge. They gleamed like new, though they might have been several years old. This was what Georgina meant about buying good quality. Hilda, though she obviously had money, didn’t seem the extravagant type, or one to buy every latest thing, leaving still-good items to languish in a cupboard or be dispatched to a church’s charity box. Perhaps she rubbed saddle cream into the leather every night to keep her shoes so fresh.
I’ll do that with my new shoes, from the first night.