Acting on Impulse Read online

  She got a deer in the headlights expression. “I… you know, I think we used to have a list like that.” She turned to her colleague. “Martin, do you remember that list of literary magazines we had? I think it’ll be in the Australian literary magazines file.”

  Martin went off to dig it out, and Kirsty – for such was her name – began an extensive catalogue search for what I was after. “We have so many directories of so many magazines, but I just don’t know if we have…” Her eyes opened wide, as she had a sudden realization. “You know, we have a… there’s a kind of book for advertisers… I can’t recall the title, but it was something like the Newspaper and Magazine Guide…” Feverishly, she began a new search, while Martin proudly handed me a grimy manila folder, slim and dispirited looking with a hand-written label that read “Literary Magazines – Australia.” Not terribly hopeful, I looked inside to find several tissue paper-thin requests that dated back to the 1970s, from the National Library of Australia to assorted institutions asking to know their holdings in the genre, most of which did not seem to have received a reply. A list starkly labelled INCOMPLETE also stared back at me, as did a note about If Revived, a magazine that was issued fourteen times from 1949 – 1959, and the first editor of which was Rupert Murdoch.

  This research was turning up all kinds of fascinating ephemera.

  “The Press Directory!” a triumphant whisper-shout came from Kirsty at her desk, and I ran over to find her requesting the volumes from 1935 and 1938 for me, to be viewed the following day. “It’s a pretty complete listing of the magazines and newspapers in print back then,” she said sunnily. “Good luck!”

  RETURNING the next day, I collected my Press Directory booty and painstakingly copied down the titles of each viable journal that I thought might conceivably play host to a lost Georgette Heyer story. I still couldn’t quite understand why she might have sold the story to a magazine other than the Women’s Weekly, her usual haunt on this side of the world, but she manifestly had not, so it had to be elsewhere.

  My list of likely candidates wasn’t as long as I had feared, but was also not as long as I had hoped. If there weren’t many magazines in which it could have been printed – and surely many of them would be digitized already? – then the chances of finding “On Such a Night” grew exponentially smaller.

  I identified about fifteen publications that might be potential hunting grounds, from Adam and Eve to Woman, and I began eliminating them by the simple expedient of first checking if they had already been digitized, and if they had not, combing through them issue by issue with painstaking and careful precision, one, two, even three rolls of microfilm, each covering at least six months of a publication, per session, ten days in a row. By the end of it, I’d searched nine publications in their entirety (for the most probable period), but some were unavailable at my location, and I’d variously need to travel to the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane and the National Library of Australia in Canberra in order to check those final possibilities off my list.

  In the meantime, I had greatly enjoyed the search, and my immersion in that previous time. I’d loved seeing the articles on the changing roles of women, discovering new writers, seeing the gorgeous outfits on sale for ludicrous prices, and skimming over remarkably familiar-sounding advertorials on “slimming” and make up and “how to keep your man.” (Often all three at once.)

  But with my interstate trips now booked for a couple of weeks away, I decided to return to my radio-based search, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to peruse the Wireless Weekly, in which Dorothea Vautier had so often and prominently been featured. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t actually thought to look further into the magazine the week that “On Such a Night” was broadcast – maybe there’d been some kind of advertisement of the story in its pages? After all, Georgette Heyer was an ever-rising star in women’s fiction at the time – and was already a best-seller in anyone’s language – and so it seemed impossible to me that any story of hers would be given short shrift by any right-thinking editor and consigned either to the back of a magazine, or completely ignored by some lucky radio station’s advertising department.

  It was only as I began to sift through that edition of the Wireless Weekly did I notice an oddity. “On Such a Night” wasn’t only broadcast on Monday, December 6, 1937; it was broadcast every day that week. Not on Saturday and Sunday, but every weekday, from Friday, December 3 through to Thursday, December 7. Now, it would make sense to maybe broadcast a short story multiple times, to give those who missed it a chance to tune in, the kind of thing TV networks used to invariably do before streaming and binge-watching came along and foiled their repeated episode model. But to repeat the story every day across two different weeks? That seemed… odd.

  But then, fifteen minutes isn’t very long. Perhaps “On Such a Night” was one of Heyer’s longer short stories, and it required five days to complete the thing. Or… maybe even more days?

  I called Jen. “So… this is weird,” I said. “You know how I found ‘On Such a Night’ in the radio listing for that one day in 1937? I’ve now realized it was broadcast every day for that whole week.”

  “What?”

  “So I’m wondering… could it be a short story we already know? Like, one of the longer ones – maybe even ‘Lady, Your Pardon’, which was published in the Women’s Weekly in 1936? You did say that Heyer mentioned in her notes that she didn’t remember a short of that title, and I know you’ve said that ‘Pharaoh’s Daughter’ was the original title of that one, but could it be that ‘On Such a Night’ was her first stab at it—”

  “No,” Jen said definitively. “Because we have correspondence about her deciding what to call it: whether to say ‘Faro’ or ‘Pharaoh’. And we know she was furious with Woman’s Journal editor Dorothy Sutherland for renaming it, although I’ve never found it published there and have always thought that she must have made a mistake, and it must have been the Women’s Weekly editor she should have been angry with. Wait, let me check…” After a moment, she is back, clearly with her primary source material at her fingertips. “Here we are, Georgette’s list of her novel and story sales, typewritten by her, and with notes in her own hand.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, it’s quite remarkable. And ‘On Such a Night’… here it is, under short stories. Oh, that’s interesting.”

  “What?”

  “It says here it was sold to the Australian Women’s Weekly.”

  “What?!”

  “‘Serial rights’ to the Australian Women’s Weekly.” A pause. “She—she must have made a mistake… She must have. I’ve been through the whole of it—”

  “Me too!”

  “And so it must have been a different magazine. But why she would have—”

  She trailed off, and there was a helpless silence as we both digested the implications of this.

  “Let me take another look at the Wireless Weekly,” I said, trying to remain positive, “and see what else I can find out about these broadcasts. I’ll call you back.”

  Subsequently, I started digging into the following edition of the Wireless Weekly, and discovered that, actually, “On Such a Night” didn’t just run for five days. It didn’t even run for ten days. I kept going further and further forward in time, until at last I found that the last broadcast of “On Such a Night” on Radio 2GB took place on Friday, January 14, at 11:45 a.m.

  Then I went backward, and found a Wireless Weekly listing for it on Friday, December 24, though no earlier. So not only had it been broadcast over more than one week, it had been broadcast in two separate years. I turned away from Wireless Weekly, and went back to the Telegraph radio programme listings. According to that source, “On Such a Night” by Georgette Heyer was first broadcast on Wednesday, November 17, 1937. And assuming it did indeed run every weekday until January 14, 1938, as the schedules seemed to indicate, then this “short story” was apparently read aloud on no fewer th