“Who’s making the work that pays you, anyway?” Maisie argued.
“Awfully shrewish, aren’t you? They always said you were a silent one.”
I bet he wears glasses to keep people from seizing that pencil and cramming it into his eye.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we do need these listings to be accurate, you see?”
He took the pages in false surrender and stalked away, a string of grumbles in his wake. Maisie lingered, eyes wandering over the layouts and the pile of magazines, fresh from the printers. A photograph of a large wireless was on front.
“Could I have the loan of some back issues?” she asked.
“What?” He hadn’t realized she was still there. “What do you want them for?”
“Just to read. May I? Three months’ worth? Oh, and the new one, please?”
He scrunched up his mouth. Eventually, the desire to thwart her was overcome by the reasonableness of her request.
“Well, all right, but don’t get the idea I’m a lending library,” he warned. He made a great show of finding a box and going to the storage shelves to fetch the magazines. “You’ll be sure to keep them clean, of course?”
“I shall handle them with gloves,” Maisie promised, lying with solemn ease.
“Now, if there’s one thing Lady Astor cannot abide, it’s being treated as though with kid gloves,” Hilda warned the Talks Department. “The attention she demands for her status is as an MP, not as a viscountess. So long as anyone who encounters her employs the same general respect, politeness, gratitude, but firmness we have with all the broadcasters, you can’t go wrong.”
Meaning, “Don’t bow thricely and no pulling of forelocks.” Or, in the case of staunch republican Fielden, don’t call her “Mrs. Astor.” Maisie was excited. She wanted to bask in the great lady’s presence again. Lady Astor was the sort of woman people stepped aside for, and Maisie wanted to study her mien. It couldn’t all be position, could it? There must be something to learn.
Lady Astor swept in and greeted Maisie as a friend, or at least a favored courtier. She insisted on Maisie’s remaining for the broadcast, which meant getting to see the engineers regard her with respect, but also appreciation. At nearly fifty, Lady Astor still radiated the mesmerizing beauty that had captured fascination, as well as a viscount, in her youth. Maisie could see the shadows of the piled-up curls, Gibson Girl silhouette, sweep and flow of long silk skirts. But what she couldn’t have had then was the laserlike glitter in her eyes that could likely cut through someone more readily than any sword. That came with age.
On seeing Maisie, Billy attempted to melt into the machinery. Maisie, both because she was interested and it was fun to unnerve him, watched his work. Wouldn’t that be something, knowing how to make our broadcasts go? Women weren’t engineers, certainly not under Eckersley’s fiefdom, but still . . . it would be something.
Lady Astor’s broadcast was about Florence Nightingale, by way of introducing their new series on nursing. Maisie’s idea, changed considerably, but from her kernel. As she listened to Lady Astor’s lilting patrician voice—“Women have always nursed, but when Florence Nightingale set down the lamp and opened a school, she turned an expected avocation into a proper profession that has arguably done as much to save lives as penicillin”—Maisie crammed her fist in her mouth to avoid squealing. Did Hilda feel like this every day, or did the thrill wear off?
Can’t imagine which scenario is more painful.
“That was rather fun,” Lady Astor proclaimed when the broadcast was finished. “Good lark, broadcastin’. I hope it lasts. Do give me a tour of the place, will you? I want to see more of our government’s investment.”
“Most certainly,” said Hilda, “but—” She had twenty phone calls to make, plus the usual crisis management.
“Miss Musgrave can do very well,” Lady Astor said. “You’re far too busy; you always were. I’d say you’ll work yourself sick, but you’re healthier than all the colts at Goodwood.”
Hilda’s chuckle echoed as Maisie commenced the tour. Lady Astor might have been Queen Mary (or indeed, the Queen Mary) as she sailed through Savoy Hill. In the Engineering Department, Eckersley was reclined in his chair, reading Electronics Today. In Schools, Siepmann had his back to them, gazing out the window, hands folded behind him. Cyril and one of the assistants were playing darts and joking about their school days. Mary Somerville and the secretary were deeply immersed in revisions on a broadcast.
“I hear typin’; must be the girls,” Lady Astor observed, and indeed the typing pool was, as usual, competing with a herd of stampeding rhinos for terror-inducing volume. But nothing was as deafening as Sound Effects. Lady Astor swung open the door to nod at the sight of the men engaged in a blazing row over a pile of coiled springs.