Pirate King

by Laurie R. King

  “I shall see you in the morning. Perhaps Mr La Rocha will come up with some more likely pirates.”

  “One can but hope,” he agreed. With some effort, he retrieved his near-flat packet of cigarettes, looked mournfully at their state of damp collapse, and inserted them back into the pocket. With a brief tug at his hat-brim (sending a dribble of water to the floor) he took his leave and went back out into the night.

  I enjoyed a deep, hot bath, then crawled into a bed that neither tossed nor rolled beneath me, and slept for many hours.

  Rested, warm, and clean, I descended the next morning with a bounce in my step, buoyed by the anticipation of a breakfast that would remain in situ. My benevolent mood lasted until the first sip of coffee.

  My hand jerked at the shriek that tore through the hotel restaurant; coffee shot over my table and my person, the gentleman at the next table contributed a juicy expression to my Portuguese vocabulary, and one of the waiters dropped his tray. Simultaneously mopping my clothes and searching the vicinity for the source of the harpy’s scream, I soon found it, and the day disintegrated around my feet.

  The thirteen daughters of the Major-General formed, as I said, a stepping-stair of curly blonde heads. Their height-determined names had been assigned that first hour on the steamer: “Annie,” “Bonnie,” and “Celeste” were the picture’s nineteen-year-olds; “Doris,” “Edith,” and “Fannie” played seventeen-year-olds; “Ginger,” “Harriet,” and “Isabel” sixteen; and “June,” “Kate,” and “Linda” assigned the age of fifteen. Mabel, the eighteen-year-old lead, was out of place in the arrangement, being a middle daughter in the opera.

  In truth, half of the girls were in their twenties—even Mabel (Bibi) admitted to twenty-six, and I suspected the woman playing Annie was nearing thirty—where the others’ heights did not match their ages: middle sister “Fannie” looked the youngest of all, although as I got to know her better I decided that her wide-eyed simplicity was acute stupidity; sister number five, “Edith,” had a tom-boy personality that made her seem less than the fourteen years her mother claimed for her, and a world younger than the seventeen her height had automatically assigned her; “Linda,” on the other hand, was eighteen, but so tiny she had no problem playing the youngest sister (although her growing bitterness at being treated like a child—by attractive young men, most of all—was already threatening to incise frownlines on her diminutive features).

  (Oddly, considering his passion for realism, Randolph Fflytte did not bother to explain a family with four sets of triplets. And it goes without saying that The Pirates of Penzance, even with its lesser chorus of daughters, has no rôle for the heroic mother responsible for producing them. Neither did our own Pirate King.)

  It was tom-boy “Edith” who had proved a problem from the beginning, first because she had shown up on the docks at Southampton half an inch taller than when Hale had hired her three weeks earlier, and second because she was such a handful. If Isabel or June (ages “sixteen” and “fifteen”; actually fifteen and fourteen) discovered a fish-head between the sheets of her bed one night, it was sure to be Edith who had been spotted sneaking away from the galley with a bundled newspaper. If Doris’ hair-comb was mysteriously coated with honey, Edith would be discovered with sticky fingers. She was one of the actresses who had come with mother in tow (or in the case of “fifteen”- [fourteen] year-old “Kate,” an elder sister) but the maternal person could do little to keep Edith under control.

  For some reason, on board the steamer from England, Edith had forged something of a tie with me, despite my spending most of the time in solitary contemplation of the waves. Unlike the other girls, who came looking for me when they had a complaint and otherwise regarded me as beyond the pale (my sensible shoes, no doubt), Edith seemed actively to seek my company. Why the child should regard me as a kindred spirit, I could not think. Certainly any vague affection for me did not stand in the way of her trouble-making.

  All of which meant that when a youthful shriek split the peaceful coffee-and-toast-scented air of the hotel, one’s immediate thoughts went to Edith.

  I stood, pressing the linen to my damp thigh as I went in search of the catastrophe. Sitting on the floor before the closed lift door was June (who, although fourteen, at the moment looked more like eleven) with one hand clapped to the side of her head. I hurried to kneel next to her, examining her fingers for signs of seeping blood.

  “June, what happened?”

  She shook her head vigorously, letting her hand slip a little—still no gore.

  “June, let me see. What’s wrong?”

  She bent over, shaking her head so quickly that some hair ripped free—but no, that was unlikely. I reached down to peel her fingers away. With them came an alarming quantity of hair. She began to weep.

  With her hand off, I could see a shilling-sized patch where someone had taken a pair of scissors to her pretty head. “June, who did this to you?” I demanded.

  She squeezed her lips together to keep any revelation from escaping. Good Lord, I thought: extortion among the adolescents.

  “Was it Edith?” I asked.

  At that, the child scrambled to her feet and confronted me, her face pink with fury. “My name is not June! I’m Annie, not Annie!”

  Oh, heavens. “I know that, dear, but we have another Annie because silly Mr Hale wanted to give you all nick-names. Surely it wasn’t Annie who did that to your hair?”

  Annie—that is, “Annie,” the “oldest” and I thought probably oldest—did have a butter-wouldn’t-melt look that rode on her peaches-and-cream English features and made one overlook her nosey-parker habits until she turned up in one’s state-room. Still, she’d never demonstrated open aggression towards the younger girls.

  June turned and fled for the stairs. I looked down at the sad drift of pale curls, and got to my feet. If I wasn’t quick, the day would be upon me before I had a chance to snag any breakfast at all.

  June’s mother found me at the same moment my egg did. Manners might have demanded that I put aside the meal, but I had a suspicion that if I were to pause for every interruption, I would starve. Instead I hunched over my plate to shovel in fuel while the woman stormed and fumed and demanded that I assemble all the sisters this instant.

  “Did June tell you who did it?” I mumbled around a full mouth.

  “It could be any of them. They’re all jealous of my Annie’s hair—she’s a real blonde, I hope you know, unlike some of the others.”

  And unlike Annie/June’s mother herself. “Yes, your daughter has lovely hair, and I’m sure we can comb it so the cut patch doesn’t show on camera. Maybe she could wear a hat.”

  “Why would she wear a hat? It would hide her pretty hair!”

  “Or maybe pin on some kind of ornament? Honestly, Mrs, er—” What was this woman’s name, anyway? She was there both as chaperone and to play the part of our nursemaid, Ruth, and acted as if she ruled not only the crew but the principals, judging by her conversation with Hale that I’d half-overheard on the steamer that day, just before the wind blew off her—ah: “—Hatley, it will be easy to conceal, I’m quite certain. I’ll talk to Mr Fflytte about it.”

  The director’s name served generally as an anodyne to affront, and I had come to make shameless use of it to reduce various irate actresses, mothers, or sisters to cooing females. Mrs Hatley was of harder stuff, being a veteran in the world of films and having known the director for years, but even she melted a degree under the warmth of his name. “Would you? I hate to bother him with this, but truly, my baby is quite upset. If Mr Fflytte has a word with the others, to tell them how tender her sensibilities are …”

  If Mr Fflytte did, I thought, every one of them would instantly turn on June and peck her to shreds. “I’m sure he’ll make it right,” I promised, holding her eyes in all earnestness while my hand surreptitiously snaked out to claim another triangle of toast. “Perhaps you should go make sure your daughter is all right?”

  It t
ook several repetitions of the suggestion before the woman grudgingly withdrew, and I was free to press shavings of hard butter into the cold toast and glue them down with a very tasty marmalade. I scraped the side of my fork on the plate to get the last of the egg yolk, and felt the next interruption standing at my elbow.

  “Hello, Bibi,” I said—no need to look up for purposes of identification, not for a person accompanied by smacking lips and the odour of mint.

  “Hello, darling, have you seen Daniel?” she demanded.

  Where is Daniel?

  “Mr Marks? No, I’ve only been down here for—”

  “He swore he’d be down here, he insisted that we had to work on a scene, although really it’s a rotten hour, I must look absolutely hell.” She paused for me to deliver a stout rebuttal of the devastation of her looks, but I merely chewed my toast and turned on her a pair of bovine eyes. Bibi glared. “I mean, it’s all very well for people like you to be dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour, but it’s just not a part of my régime, don’t you know? Daniel said to be here so here I am, only he’s done a bunk, and I can’t think where he’s got to.”

  I stopped chewing. “ ‘People like me.’ ”

  “Oh, I don’t mean …” she said, although clearly she did mean. She waved her manicured fingers to indicate my appearance, but had just enough sense to grasp that she stood on the edge of danger. Instead, she stamped her little foot and half turned away, looking, if not for Daniel Marks, at least for someone with the authority to produce him. Without further word, she wandered off.

  My appetite seemed to have wandered away, too. I dropped the remains on my plate, swallowed the last of my coffee, and went to see what other disaster awaited me.

  I got twenty feet when it dropped on me. Rather, he dropped on me.

  Major-General Stanley (or Harold Scott, the actor playing the Major-General—Hale’s habit of calling the actor by the rôle was contagious) came across the lobby on the shoulders of a pair of uniformed hotel employees. I exclaimed and stepped forward, but again, there was a singular absence of blood. Except in the whites of the good gentleman’s eyes—and then the smell hit me, and I halted.

  The Major-General, however, shook off his supporters to stagger in my direction, weaving from side to side as if he’d just come off the ship. “My dear Miss Russell!” he exclaimed. “How superb to see you. Come and have a drink with me.”

  I dodged his grasp, saw him begin to overbalance, and stepped back inside his stinking embrace to keep him from falling. He beamed happily into my face for a moment, then frowned. His eyes took on a faraway look, and I wrenched myself out from under—there are things the job of film assistant most emphatically does not cover. Fortunately for the Major-General, the two young men reached him before he hit the floor. Unfortunately for them, they were not as quick in the techniques of avoidance as I.

  I left them exclaiming in disgust as they more or less carried the now-reeking Yorkshireman towards his room, while a platoon of mop-wielders took up formation behind them.

  I cast a despairing glance at my wrist-watch: It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. We had been in Lisbon just under twenty-four hours.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SAMUEL: Permit me, I’ll explain in two words:

  we propose to marry your daughters.

  MAJOR-GENERAL: Dear me!

  THE PAVEMENTS OF Lisbon were a sea of cream-coloured stones with patterns picked out in black. The streets of Lisbon range from mildly sloping to positively vertiginous. The stones are invariably worn smooth. That morning, I wore shoes I’d purchased in London after Hale’s unwitting snub to my fashion sense—the sturdy pair I had worn the night before were steaming on the radiator.

  Two steps outside the hotel door, my feet went out from under me. I was saved by the ready hand of a doorman, who was probably stationed there for that express purpose. After that I went more cautiously until I discovered that a sort of ice-skating gait best kept me upright. Other pedestrians seemed not to have a problem. Perhaps it was these shoes?

  I skated along the rain-slick Avenida da Liberdade for a while, barely glancing at the fine boulevard with its statues, fountains, plantings, and black-and-cream mosaic pavement. Electric trams clattered past, Lisboans skipped merrily up the glassy footways, and I reached the remembered kink in the road before my foot came down on a sodden leaf and I went down again, this time catching myself on a lamp-post. After that, I tottered. A tiny, hunched-back, ninety-year-old woman with a walking stick tapped briskly past. Two chattering women bustled past balancing baskets of fish on their heads; one of them was barefoot.

  The Maria Vitória theatre evicting us in the afternoons required that we get an early start in the morning. I expected that I would be the first one there, since I’d already got the clear impression that Lisbon’s clock was two or three hours canted from that of London: Here, 10:00 p.m. made for an early dinner.

  To my surprise, the outer doors were unlocked and I could hear voices. I shook the rain from my coat and hat, following the sound.

  Three hats occupied the centre of the second row of seats, looking like the set-up for some Vaudeville jest: The one on the left barely cleared the seat-back; that in the middle was exaggeratedly wide and battered even in outline; the one sticking up on the right bore the perfect shape of the best in British haberdashery.

  Fflytte on the left, Hale on the right, and between them La Rocha. All three were intent on the man occupying the stage.

  In the seat behind La Rocha, straight-backed and hatless, sat Fernando Pessoa.

  I draped my outer garments on the seat at the beginning of the row and sidled along to sit next to our translator. He gave me an uncertain smile before returning his attention to the conversation in front of him which, although it was in English, gave indications that it might require his services at any moment.

  “No,” Hale was saying, “we only need twelve pirates.”

  “Have more,” La Rocha’s incongruous high-pitched voice urged. “I have many.”

  Fflytte, his eyes on the stage, said in a distracted manner, “We only have thirteen daughters.”

  La Rocha stared down at the small man. Then he turned to his lieutenant from the previous evening, whose big figure was planted on the edge of the stage. “Treze filhas! É mais homen que parece.”

  Pessoa’s back went straighter and his mouth came open as he prepared to spring into action, but he paused at the pressure of my hand on his sleeve.

  “There may be a slight misunderstanding,” I suggested: La Rocha’s meaning had been clear in his tone of voice, if not his words, and I did not think relations would be improved by a translation of “He’s more of a man than he looks.” I leant forward to explain. “Mr Fflytte does not have thirteen daughters. There are thirteen girls in the story.”

  The pirate king craned back to look at me, then again at Fflytte. “Entendo. Thirteen girls. And they need ’usbands, yes? Then thirteen piratas.”

  “Just twelve,” Fflytte insisted. “Mabel is already taken by Frederic.”

  Hale spoke up. “Frederic is the apprentice pirate.”

  “ ’Prentice? What is this? ’Prentice?”

  “O aprendiz de pirata,” Pessoa contributed.

  The black eyes swept each of us in turn, silently, before La Rocha showed me his back and returned his gaze to the stage. “Aprendiz,” I heard him mutter. “De pirata.”

  The current would-be pirate on the stage resumed the monologue from his printed sheet, but I found it hard to pay him any attention, distracted as I was by the man ahead of me.

  I rather wished I had come in by the other door, which would have put me on Pessoa’s right: At this angle, my view was entirely dominated by La Rocha’s terrible scar. Temple to larynx, the thing must have spanned ten inches. The heavy red-gold earring winking above it made for an eccentric contrast. Why didn’t the man grow a beard to conceal the injury? One’s own throat went taut, seeing that shiny raised track.

 
; “No,” Fflytte said, sounding as if he had been contemplating some profundity. “The colour’s wrong.”

  “Clothes can be changed,” La Rocha declared.

  “Not the clothing, the skin.”

  “This, too, can be changed.”

  “No, he’s just too light. These are Barbary pirates. This man looks Swedish.”

  It was an exaggeration, but not by much. The other men trying out for the parts of pirates were swarthy, hard-looking men with nicely photogenic moustaches or beards, but the person currently at stage centre would have looked more at home in a European counting-house than as a high-seas privateer. He wore elderly but well-polished shoes, his shoulders were stooped, and his hair was not only thinning, but a most unthreatening light brown colour. His facial hair consisted of an apologetic line above his lip.

  “He’s just not … swashbuckling enough,” Fflytte said. La Rocha cocked his ear back, and Pessoa struggled for synonyms.

  “Er, romântico. Exôtico? Swashbuckling.”

  “Ah. Swashbuckling. He can swashbuckle.”

  “I really don’t think so,” Fflytte said. “He looks like my book-keeper, Bertram, who’s the least exotic person I know.”

  “Next,” Hale called.

  “No!” The syllable echoed through the empty theatre like a crack in glass; the entire theatre stopped dead. The balding Swedish accountant looked near to fainting. I fought an impulse to leap for the aisle. Hale, veteran of the trenches, appeared to be wrestling the same urge.

  Fflytte, on the other hand, turned to peer up at the source of the countermand, frowning in disbelief. “Mr. La Rocha, are you making this picture, or am I?”

  I had thought the silence profound before; now one could have heard a hair settle on the floor. The cracked pane trembled, preparing to shatter in an explosion of deadly shards—until La Rocha looked back at the stage.

  “Go,” he squeaked. The accountant fled. Fflytte sat back in his seat. The rest of us drew breath. Hale settled more slowly, but within a few minutes he, too, was wrapped up again in the casting process. Pessoa’s shoulders gave a motion that was halfway between a shrug and a shiver, as if to shake off an idea he could neither justify nor account for.