“Voting isn’t a new hairstyle,” she told him in a withering tone.
A stringy young woman behind her, pushing a baby in a pram and holding a yawning toddler at her hip, leaned around Maisie to glare at him. “It’s just right we all get our say, is what it is. We work, too, in case you didn’t know.”
He gaped at her, possibly not realizing she had the capacity to be articulate.
Maisie was next, and stepped up to vote. She wondered how many hands had trembled already today, holding their pencils over the ballots, with all the little boxes. Did most women take to their new, belated right with aplomb, or did they take their time, marveling over the beauty of it all, the silent speech that would be heard?
Or did they think, like she did, that there was a long queue behind her and she had to get to work.
She wrote a thick X, drew over it twice, and dropped the paper in the ballot box.
That’s how you spell a shout. With an X.
“Just you wait until we’re allowed to report our own news,” Hilda greeted Maisie. The day’s programming was like a thrilling tease of what such reporting would be like, as it was all in reference to the election, and they were being granted a special report, an expansive twenty-five minutes long, that evening.
Reith strode into the office, unannounced and in such a bluster that they had to clamp their hands down over papers to keep things from flying into the fire grate. Hilda blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth and smiled up at him. Maisie noted the twist in his mouth as he watched her take another puff, but he said nothing.
“I realize it’s a busy day for us, but as we’re on the subject, I want you to coordinate with Siepmann to do a series suited to young people on politics.”
Hilda started to interject, but he was far from done.
“I hear Labour is poised to win, with all these women voting,” he moaned. “I read and hear the most appalling stories everywhere and now discover it is happening even under my own aegis. I understand that Mr. Eckersley is getting a divorce. He has been . . . involved . . . with another woman, a married woman, and she, too, is getting a divorce. It’s not to be believed.”
Maisie was inclined to disbelieve right along with him. Peter Eckersley? The grim and stuffy chief engineer? What must this poor woman have already been married to that she’d upend her life for an endless series of monologues on sub-mixers and oscillators and frequencies?
“Yes, I’m afraid I heard something to that effect,” Hilda said, grinding out her cigarette.
“Is there anything that happens here you don’t know about?” Reith asked.
“I hope so,” Hilda said fervently. “Awfully dull otherwise.”
“And why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m devoted to broadcasting, Mr. Reith, but draw the line at gossip.”
“Well, I can’t see allowing him to stay on. It sets a bad precedent.” Reith sighed, shaking his head.
“He’s a very fine chief engineer,” Hilda said. “And it’s not as if his personal—”
“He oversees men, young men, and they look up to him,” Reith snapped. “I sometimes wonder what we fought a war for.” He sighed again and stalked away.
“Well, that’s certainly a fair question.” Hilda sighed herself. “Poor old Peter.”
The fate of Peter Eckersley, like the next installment of The Perils of Pauline, would have to wait another day. It was time for the final broadcast of Questions for Women Voters. Hilda had insisted that a coda on Election Day would be fitting.
“Want to come and help me oversee?” she invited Maisie. “After all, you helped birth it, didn’t you? Fair enough you see it through to its end.”
Maisie looked up at her and started to cry.
“You don’t have to if you’d rather not,” Hilda said.
“It’s been such a superb program, exactly the sort of thing I want to do, and now it’s over. And I’ve been so busy, I never properly appreciated it.”
“This is why I warn the staff about egotism,” Hilda said, passing Maisie a handkerchief. “But you don’t really think that’s your one and only idea that’s going to make a series, do you?”
“I hope not, of course. But it was awfully good, and it mattered.”
“And the next one will be better. Are you going to stop being a little goose now and come do your job?”
Maisie blew her nose loudly and gave Hilda an apologetic smile.
“That was my last little honk.”
“What a relief.”
The next morning, Hilda was almost buried in every newspaper in Britain, all blaring the headlines about Labour’s win and the women who had helped make it happen.
“‘The Flapper Election’? Really? Those silly lads, so prosaic,” Hilda tutted.
Prosaic, but poetic, Maisie thought. And it was something, being touted as having counted for so much.
“The main thing is we brought results,” Hilda said, echoing Maisie’s thoughts. “The sun is even shining, and the world doesn’t appear likely to end.”