It started to rain, fat drops tapping at the windows. Maisie snapped a biscuit in half, liking the swishy crunch sound. She thought of something Hilda had written in her notes on broadcasting, that it was “a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which hitherto we have been deaf. It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth’s surface.” Such a lovely way to describe this curious creature they were continually inventing. The stranger inviting itself into a silent home, asking to become a friend.
“Miss Matheson, what about a Talk on memorable sounds?” Maisie burst out, watching the drops splatter against the glass. “Sounds that mean something to people, something about their personal experience? A scythe in the harvest, or typewriter keys?”
“She would say typing,” Collins again, more sotto, still voce.
“Marvelous,” Hilda congratulated her. “We could thrill the Sound men for days. Of course, what would be really delightful would be to take a microphone up and down the country, asking people about sounds and perhaps recording those sounds in real time. Wouldn’t that be evocative?”
Hilda sighed, momentarily despondent at radio’s limits. There were valiant attempts at broadcasting outside the studio—the sports announcers were very keen on it—but it was a deeply cumbersome affair that thrilled and vexed the engineers equally and whose results were not quite on the cusp of satisfactory.
How do you choose just one gorgeous sound? Children laughing. Bees in a summer garden. The rattle of beads on a dancer’s dress. A kiss.
“Why are you blushing?” Fielden asked her, not even trying to be sotto.
“I have tuberculosis,” Maisie confided. Everyone laughed. Another nail in Invisible Girl’s coffin. And she’d had another Talk idea accepted. She hummed as she headed to the mimeograph room, her cheerfulness compensating for lack of tune, when Cyril loped into place beside her.
“Hallo, New York. How are you?”
Cyril. She felt a rush of nostalgia for all the days he hadn’t entered her thoughts. He had the nerve to still be deliriously good-looking, hair flopping over his temples, freckles, dark blue eyes. That high-voltage smile, so contagious as to almost make her smile back. She clenched her jaw.
“I’m doing very well, Mr. Underwood. How are you?” she asked, affecting what she hoped was a professional tone awash in detachment, sparing him only one curt nod as she continued to stride down the corridor.
He kept pace with her. “Never a dull moment—more’s the pity. A chap could sit down then. The DG expects a great deal from Schools, you know. Minds of the youth, and all that.” He gave a vague gesture to indicate all those minds.
“Yes, indeed. And how are you liking Mr. Siepmann as a superior? Awfully clever, isn’t he?” she asked, hoping the question would annoy him. She was rewarded with a frown.
“Well . . . yes, actually. Likes details. We call him the devil in the details,” he confided, eyes twinkling, inviting a laugh.
“Do you?” She nodded gravely. “I’m sure he’d appreciate that.” Another prize: the flash of alarm turning him pale, his freckles poppy seeds in a milk pudding.
“You, er, you wouldn’t mention that, would you? I was only joking.”
“Of course you were,” she agreed in a chirp. “I know better than to assume you’re in earnest. Ah, here’s my stop. Cheerio!” She bid him goodbye with a flick of her pinkie, swung into the mimeograph room, and set up stencils at record speed. Her ears were getting very good at picking up sounds, and she sensed him hesitate, swaying at the door, before he went on to wherever he was going.
“Honestly, I was happy never to talk to him again. What the heck was that for? ‘Hallo, New York,’ indeed, that beastly, blasted blackguard—”
“And we’re still just in the ‘Bs,’” Phyllida said. “You’ve certainly learned to talk like a Briton.” She smiled and sipped tea from a flask. It wasn’t really warm enough to eat outside, but it was the first bright day they’d had in weeks and they wanted the feel of sun and air, the tease of summer and country, even though the wind down the Embankment still had a pinprick chill that coaxed tears from their eyes and the mixed odors off the Thames were decidedly urban. They felt hardy and outlandish, the best of what flappers should be, though neither of them could afford to properly look the part.
“I told him I forgave him, or just as well,” Maisie said, the injustice still stinging as much as the air. “It was more than a year ago, and he’s the one who said it was trivial!”
“Maybe that wasn’t so true?”
Maisie hooted with laughter and only stopped when she had to clamp her mouth over the bottom of her chicken pie to stop it oozing gravy.
“I know what the lads think of me,” she said, grinning at the silliness of it.
“Thoughts can change.” Phyllida shrugged, refusing for once to grin back. “You haven’t run and hid, you’re doing good work in Talks, and you’re looking well.”
Maisie hooted again, but Phyllida was not to be deterred.