Pirate King (11 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ALL:
How pitiful his tale! How rare his beauty!

S
ATURDAY MORNING BEGAN
at the specified ungodly hour of nine o’clock, when a cohort of unkempt and ill-shaven pirates came face to face with a flock of scrubbed and radiant young ladies. It would be hard to say which side had the greater shock. The girls put their curly yellow heads together and giggled; the men turned (according to their age) surly or scarlet beneath their stubble, kicking their dusty boots against the boards.

Fflytte mounted the stage steps and took up a position between the two groups, rubbing his hands in anticipation. “Now,” he said with the air of a schoolmaster calling together his unruly class, that they might be inculcated into the amusements of the Latin deponent. “Here we are! We’ll be working together for several weeks, and although some of us know each other, many of us are strangers. Let me do a quick run-through on the story we’ll be working on, just to remind you, and then I’d like to introduce each of you before we split up to begin our rehearsals.

“Once upon a time,” he began (thus proving himself a quick judge of an audience), “there was a musical stage-play about a young pirate named Frederic.” He lit into the worn tale as if he’d just invented it that instant: Frederic repudiates the pirate band to which he has mistakenly been apprenticed all these years; repudiates, too, the affections of his middle-aged nursemaid; encounters a group of pretty sisters, bathing on the shore; falls instantly in love with Mabel.

Hale and I stood looking on, Hale with amusement, me with amazement: The little director might have been a storyteller around a camp-fire, flitting between the interests of the girls (romance!) with those of the men (sex!) and weaving together apprehension (the police!) and tension (can Frederic and Mabel ever be together?) with humour (the sisters speak pointedly of the weather, to permit the flirtation of the young lovers) and satisfaction (a good fight scene!). The girls gasped when Fflytte revealed that the pirates were taking them captive; the pirates looked uneasy when they heard that the Major-General was bringing in the troops. And when Fflytte revealed that the pirates were, in fact, noblemen in disguise, and thus acceptable husbands—

I pray you pardon me, ex–Pirate King!

Peers will be peers, and youth will have its fling
.

Resume your seat, and legislative duties
,

And take my daughters, all of whom are beauties
.

—they applauded, one and all. Personally, I’d found the story both thin and somewhat distasteful, a sort of nineteenth century precursor of
The Sheik
, concluding that because the pirates were peers (and marriageable) the abduction of a group of young girls would be forgiven. Still, both girls and pirates seemed to find the story satisfactory, and Fflytte bowed.

When the huzzahs and buzz of conversation died down, Fflytte went on. “However, we are not making a movie about
The Pirates of Penzance
. The subject of our tale is the movie crew who is making a movie about
The Pirates of Penzance
, and whose lives come to intertwine with the lives of their stage counterparts. For example—Daniel, stand up, if you would—Mr Marks here plays Frederic, and he also plays the man directing the film about Frederic. And—Bibi?—this lovely lady is at one and the same time Frederic’s Mabel, and the director’s fiancée. And our Ruth—Mrs Hatley, please?—is also the fiancée’s aunt. Major-General Stanley, the father of all those girls—Harry?—is also William Stanley, the director’s fiancée’s father and financial backer of the film.

“And now for the daughters themselves.”

Fflytte’s voice paused for the translator to catch him up, yet Pessoa went on, and on. The pirates were all gawping at him with expressions ranging from confusion to outrage, and he went on, with increasing volume and insistence, until his gestures began to look more like those of Álvaro de Campos than those of Fernando Pessoa. Eventually he ran out of breath, and in the pause, questions shot across the stage at him. In an instant, we were back in the same wrangle we’d had before. The voices climbed in volume until, at a crescendo, La Rocha’s squeaky voice cut in with a sharp question. To which Pessoa responded, in a state of considerable frustration, with a brief phrase, half of which I’d heard the previous morning from the startled man in the breakfast-room. The phrase was accompanied by a hand flung in Fflytte’s direction, and its meaning was crystal clear: “Because he’s a [blithering] madman.”

It must have been a strong adjective, because as one, the pirates blinked, looked at each other, looked at the waiting Fflytte, and burst into laughter.

This time, La Rocha got them back into order before Fflytte could blow up. The pirates rearranged their faces and pasted a look of expectancy over their mirth. Fflytte glared, but the techniques of working with actors could be applied to Portuguese non-actors as well: He stretched his arm towards the girls, to regain the men’s attention, and began to introduce them.

Fflytte’s variation on the original plot—that there be thirteen girls, all of marriageable age—caused the pirates less concern than it had me. I could not fit my mind around the ghastly gynaecological and logistical nightmare of four sets of triplets (and one single birth, Mabel); they merely nodded. Perhaps they assumed that the Major-General had several wives.

In any event, the actresses had been hired first by their looks (blonde) and then for their variations in height. Fflytte had not yet noticed the creeping imperfections of their precisely regulated heights. He might not notice until he turned his camera on them, since only Linda was shorter than he. I made a note on my pad to consult a shoe-maker, to have lifts made for the laggers. Edith—and one or two others—would have to slump.

He ran through their names, from “Annie” to “Linda,” blind to the moues of dissatisfaction that passed over several rosebud mouths at these substitute identities. “June” turned her back in protest.

Then he had the pirates remove their hats and line up by height, to give them identities as well: “Adam,” “Benjamin,” “Charles,” and so on. (In the play, the only named pirate is the king’s lieutenant, Samuel—naturally, Fflytte had assigned that name to La Rocha’s man, who invariably lingered nearby, as bodyguard or enforcer. As if La Rocha needed either.) It was my job to follow behind the director with a prepared set of cards on which those names were written, pinning each to its pirate’s chest.

Had I not been a woman, “Adam” would have knocked me to the boards. As it was, I permitted him to seize and hold my wrist. I then spoke over my shoulder to the translator, “Mr Pessoa, would you kindly explain to the gentleman that this is merely a way of simplifying matters. We all need to be able to remember what rôle he is playing. And the girls may not have Mr Fflytte’s instantaneous memory for faces.”

Pessoa began to explain, but was cut short by a phrase from Samuel. Adam’s dark eyes did not leave mine, but after a moment, he let go of my wrist, grabbed the card and the pin, and applied the name to his lapel. Wordlessly, I went down the line, handing to each man his card and pin. Some of the names I thought oddly inappropriate—a pirate named Irving?—but their only purpose was to permit Hale and Fflytte to keep track of them.

I had no cards for the two extras, since they were only there in case something happened to one of the others, but as I drew back from Lawrence, the youngest pirate in both height and fact, the spare pirate standing beside him gave a twitch.

The man’s face was half-hidden by the brim of the hat he still wore; if he hadn’t made that sharp and instantly stifled motion, I might have taken no notice. But the movement caught my attention, and my eyes, once drawn to the tension in his clasped hands, could not help noticing that they were different from the hands of the others. His were clean, to begin with, free of callus, the nails trimmed. I bent to look up under his hat-brim; half the stage went still.

It was the Swedish accountant, in black hair-dye and no glasses.

His eyes pleaded. I looked at the fear, heard the heavy silence in the row of men. Then I straightened and spoke to the young boy beside him. “Pin your card on, there’s a good lad, so we know you’re Lawrence.”

As I turned away, I looked over to where La Rocha and Samuel stood, as tense as the others. I gave them a smile, just a small one. La Rocha’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Samuel just studied me; I could not read his expression.

Fflytte noticed none of this. Once the last card was pinned on, he spread out his arms and cried, “Let’s make a picture!”

The actors divided forces, Fflytte taking the girls away to some backstage room while Hale drew the men (less Frederic and the Major-General, they being too grand for rehearsals) into a circle. The cameraman’s assistant carried out a tea-chest, setting it with a flourish before Hale. Hale squatted, working the latch with enough drama to make the overhead ropes draw a bit closer, and eased back the lid. He reached inside, coming up with a wicked-looking knife nearly two feet long, its blade sparkling in the light. The pirates leant forward, interested at last. Hale held it high—then whirled to plunge the fearsome weapon into “Gerald’s” chest.

In the blink of an eye, twelve marginally smaller but equally wicked knives were also sparkling in the lights. Hale exclaimed and stumbled back from the steel ring, permitting the great knife to spring away from Gerald’s person and tumble to the boards with a dull thud.

Only half the pirates noticed. The others were in motion, and Hale would have been left haemorrhaging onto the stage if Samuel hadn’t been faster yet. I didn’t even see the man move before Benjamin’s hand was slapped into that of Irving, who in turn bumped into Jack. An instant later, La Rocha’s voice reached the others; they stopped dead.

Hale looked down: A knifepoint rested against his waistcoat. A button dropped, the sound of the bone disk rolling along worn boards clear in the stillness.

Then Gerald gave a cough of nervous laughter and bent to pick up the fake weapon. Knives vanished, manly exclamations were exchanged. Hale fingered the tiny slit in his clothing and slowly regained colour. I took a shaky breath, and fetched the first-aid kit to repair the slice Irving’s blade had left in Jack’s hand.

We’d been at the theatre less than an hour, and had our day’s first bloodshed, our first narrowly averted fatality.

Following that little demonstration of stimulus and response, Hale took care to explain the stage props. The cutlass he took from Gerald’s hand might collapse into its handle, but the blade was steel. Even dull, it could inflict damage if used for anything but a flat stab. For slicing motions, there was another tea-chest of weapons with similar looks but made of painted wood, wide and blunt enough to be aimed at clothed portions of the body. For faces, there was a third set made from rubber, although their appearance was not entirely satisfactory.

In the matter of luncheon, compromise had been reached, on the days when a matinée was scheduled, anyway: We would work straight through, fortified in the late morning by a brief respite with the despised sandwiches, then end at three o’clock.

So the pirates merrily slashed away at each other for a few hours, and we broke for our not-a-luncheon, after which Fflytte returned with Mabel and her sisters.

And I had my first inkling of the true problems of a film-crew.

By this time, the men—who, as I said, had not begun the day in the most pristine condition—had been leaping vigorously about for a couple of hours, and were not only tired and aromatic but had relaxed into the novelty of being paid to play games.

Then the girls came in.

I should explain that the way Fflytte and Hale intended to compensate for the lack of sound in what is basically a musical event was to design a chorus of motion instead of voices. For example, in the opera, the girls’ initial appearance is cause for a song—
“Climbing over rocky mountain, / Skipping rivulet and fountain”
and so on—but in a moving picture, there would be little point in showing thirteen mouths going open and shut. Instead, they would skip gaily, a chorus of motion along a flower-strewn stream, pantomiming the incipient removal of shoes and stockings for the purpose of a paddle whilst the increasingly shocked (and stimulated) Frederic looks on from his hiding place.