Pirate King (5 page)

“The porter said I’d find you here,” Hale said. He looked curiously at my little encampment.

“As you shall until we dock in Lisbon. I get sea-sick, down below. And people tend to be rather put off by holding a conversation with someone who is retching over a basin the whole time.”

“ ‘Thou, luxurious slave! Whose soul would sicken o’er the heaving wave.’ ”

“Please!” My upheld hand stopped him from further
Corsair
lines.

“Er, well, will you be able to …?”

“Oh, I’m fine, so long as I’m in the fresh air,” I lied. “But it does mean you’ll need to come up here if you need me.”

He gave a mental shrug and pulled up a stool, to go over some of the last-minute business, including la Graziella’s temporary dance studio. We finished about the time the girls grew bored with the process of leaving England behind, and they returned, to fling questions at him for a while.

He stood up and interrupted the rapid-fire attack. “Could you girls line up by height for me? Left to right, shortest to tallest. No, you’re not taller than she is. That’s right. Is Bibi here? No, of course not. She
is
on board, isn’t she?” he asked me in alarm.

“I’m told all our members are here,” I confirmed.

“Well, I suppose she doesn’t matter, since she’s the M,” he said, confusingly. “Now, girls, we need a way of telling you apart. It’s such a bother to learn two complete sets of names, I’m going to ask you all to answer to your rôle name. Makes life much simpler all around. You,” he said, aiming his forefinger at the tallest actress, a classic English-rose beauty with crimson Clara Bow lips. “You’ll be Annie. Next is Bonnie. Celeste—Celeste, you didn’t wear spectacles before. Can you see without them?”

“Oh yes sir!” She whipped them off and gave him a myopic simper. He shook his head, but soldiered on, to Doris, Edith (she of the ill-fitting clothes), Fannie, Ginger, Harriet, Isabel, June, Kate, ending with the shortest (if by no means the youngest), Linda.

Arranged like that, a dozen girlish stair-steps, one began to see differences: Their hair ranged from June’s pale, wispy curls to Fannie’s rich (suspiciously so) brassy yellow; their eyes ran the gamut, too, from icy translucence to near-violet; their ages went from knock-kneed adolescence to full womanliness. The personalities they had already begun to reveal could now be attached to names: Annie was the one with the air of beatific innocence; Doris the one whose hands were constantly fiddling with her hair; Edith was my gawky and eager assistant; little Linda had the sour face.

Hale stood back and beamed with satisfaction at his newly named girls, so perfectly spaced in their heights that a straight-edge rested on their crowns would have touched each one (until one noticed that Edith had bent knees and Annie was stretching—no doubt they’d worn different footwear when Hale hired them). “For the duration of this project, you’ll answer to the name of your character, not your own, do you understand?”

None of the girls seemed very happy about that, but those familiar with the company looked resigned. I had to say, it was going to make my job that much easier.

The rain began then, and the girls ducked for cover, leaving me to my deck-chair, my tea, my books—and my paregoric.

Before the day was over, my singular method of travel had ceased to rouse comment. When anyone needed me, they could find me. I made a point of responding to their gossip with eagerness, since that appeared to be the only kind of criminal investigation I would be permitted until we reached Lisbon: I laughed at Bonnie’s description of our Major-General passed out into his blancmange, exclaimed at Harriet’s news of Bibi’s tantrum over the seating chart, and made disapproving noises when Edith described the wrestling match between Clarence and Donald, two of our fictional police constables (most of whom were odd-looking, if not frankly ugly—which did simplify the job of chaperoning the girls, a bit). The constables had also received fictional names, although theirs had been based on a sequence of age rather than height.

When I was not required to perform the duties of an audience, I sat on the deck and read in peace.

Read my way through the three too-slim volumes I had managed to bring, in fact, which was most distressing.

Before the dinner hour, Hale came to dictate a couple of letters and to review what we should need when we arrived in Lisbon. When he had finished, he stood there for a moment before asking, “Can I have some dinner brought up?”

“No,” I said quickly. “No, I’m just fine.”

“After dinner, we’ll be using the dining room to screen a couple of Fflytte Films, if you’d be interested?”

“Attractive as that may sound, I think it is not a good idea.”

“But you’re not planning to stay here all night, are you?”

“I’m quite comfortable.”

“Really? Well, if there’s nothing I can do—”

“Actually, there is. I didn’t have much time to shop in London, and only brought a few books. If anyone has any reading material, I’d appreciate it.”

“Certainly. And I’ll send the ship’s librarian along, too.”

“Very good of you.”

Beginning that night, I had a constant stream of women bringing me their bound treasures. One title was brought by no fewer than three of the girls’ mothers, each of whom presented it in an identical, surreptitious manner. The first two I thanked and handed it back, but after the third such indication of prize and respect, I thought I might as well give it a try: E. M. Hull’s
The Sheik
.

The novel, made into a moving picture that put Valentino onto the world’s lips (in more ways than one), had been written during the War by a woman whose husband was at the Front. Whose husband had clearly been at the Front for a long, long time.

It was appalling. Not so much the writing itself (which was merely the lower end of mediocrity) nor the raw pornography (which it was), but its blatant message that an independent and high-spirited young woman would be far happier if she were just slapped around a bit by a caring sadist. I read every word about fiery young Diana Mayo and her encounter with, abduction by, and ultimate submission to Sheik Ahmed ben Hassen. Then I went to wash my hands, and took the novel back to Mrs Hatley, with a fervent plea that she not let any of the girls read it. She turned pink and said of course not. But had I enjoyed it?

I closed her cabin door and went back to my wind-swept perch to examine by lamp-light my further literary options. Which to read first:
Desert Healer, Desert Love, The Hawk of Egypt
, or
Zareh the Cruel
?

CHAPTER SIX

MAJOR-GENERAL:
This is a picturesque uniform, but I’m not familiar with it. What are you?

T
HE NEXT DAY
, the sky grudgingly cleared. My solitary roost was invaded, with Signorina Mazzo leading the girls in swaying dances meant to evoke trees or trailing smoke, with Edith, my admirer of the ill-fitting footwear, offering to fetch things for me, with regular passengers taking exercise on the deck. In the evening, after the dining room was refused for a second night’s transformation into cinema-palace, Randolph Fflytte managed to inveigle the First Officer into stringing a bed-sheet out-of-doors on the deck—
my
deck—and opened the showing to anyone possessing a First Class ticket and sufficient warm clothing.

The impromptu cinema-house nearly closed on its opening night when Will Currie, our laconic Welsh cameraman and general machinery-operator, was nowhere to be found. His assistant, Artie, proved so fumble-fingered under the pressure of threading film through a constantly-moving projector that his hands more or less ceased to function. Randolph Fflytte and Geoffrey Hale admitted incomprehension.

Hope stirred that I might be permitted a solitary evening after all, but then one of the actors—our “Bert-the-Constable”—stepped forward to see what he could do. Bert was a fit, swarthy-looking young actor whom I was sure the camera would appreciate as much as a couple of the girls did (although thus far, he had maintained a degree of aloofness towards them that I, for one, was grateful for). He had a brilliant white grin, a Cockney accent, and fingers as clever as Will’s when it came to machines. In a moment, the projector was turning, and the outside lights were switched down.

Roman Galley
began to sail across the bed-sheet (although I thought the topic of ship-wrecks might have been avoided) followed by the first reel of
Moonstone
. At that point, some of the older girls (the younger having been dispatched to their beds) began to murmur a rebellious desire for something other than a Fflytte offering. Hale was prepared, and handed a film can over to Bert.

I took another swallow from my bottle, nestled into my furs in a haze of drug and moving picture, and was startled out of my wits when my husband’s name appeared on the flickering screen.

Buster Keaton in “Sherlock Jr”

I jammed the cap onto the small bottle and launched it overboard: too late.

Sherlock Jr
was, bizarrely, a similar film-within-a-film, the embedded adventure of a young fantasist whose nap-time clamber onto a cinema screen translates into a picture by the “Veronal Film Company.” The audience around me laughed uproariously, but it made me quite dizzy to watch Keaton’s phlegmatic battering by a rapid change of scenery. It was no less disorientating when he became a Crime Crushing Criminologist with an assistant named Gillette faced by a pretty girl, a dastardly foe, a criminal butler, and the most astonishing sleight of hand and stunt-work that I had ever seen. I blinked, decided that I was plastered to the gills, and waited for the next film to be as hallucinatory.

But that one was called
The Perfect Flapper
, and although many of the characters projected onto the sheet were drunk, I was clearly not.

I went the rest of the voyage without benefit of opiates. Sobriety did not help: I remained ensnared in a make-believe world.

Eventually, on a dreary, sleet-spattered November morning a thousand storm-swelled miles from that untidy Covent Garden office, I wove down the Lisboan gangway in search of a poetical individual. It being 1924, and the weedy, artistic look being all the fashion even in this distant enclave, there were several melancholics who fitted the description. I eliminated those bearing expensive accoutrements—two wrapped in thick overcoats and one sheltered under an elaborate silken umbrella—since any man taking stray translator jobs was unlikely to have generous resources. When I had also dismissed those men already in groups, I was left with three persons. One looked far too eager: He had to be waiting for a loved one. Another looked as if he should be in bed: If that was my man, his pallid languor suggested it would be less work to learn the language myself. When my boot touched down on the solid dock, I elbowed my way through the crowd to the undernourished, bespectacled figure that remained.

“Senhor Pessoa?” I asked.

He dashed the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette to the ground and snatched off his hat. “Miss Johns?”

“Her replacement, Miss Russell,” I said. “Is all ready?”

“I booked cars for the day, as you requested,” he replied, “although as foreigners, you should have been safe enough …” A disturbance behind my back made his voice trail away and his jaw ease open.

I did not need to turn around to know what he was seeing, although I did. There is an undeniable fascination with oncoming catastrophes, a basic human inability to tear one’s eyes away from runaway lorries, banana peels on crowded pavements, and overbalancing waiters with over-laden trays. Such was what stood now at the top of the gangway.

Between the built-up shoes and the oversized hat, the man now taking his place in the miraculously vacant passageway barely cleared five feet, but by his attitude, he towered over all he surveyed. The sun seemed briefly to emerge from the gloom, although that could have been the effect of the newcomer’s brilliant white fur coat, his equally brilliant teeth, and the enormous diamond on his right pinkie finger, which had been expertly mounted so as to adorn a finger considerably narrower than the stone itself.

Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte, founder and sole director of Fflytte Films, the man on whose boyish shoulders the future of the British film industry sat, Hollywood’s coming rival, whose five generations of family fortune were riding on the surviving heir’s keen understanding of the taste of the common man.

From all I had seen of him on the voyage from England, which was rather a lot, the wager was close to being a sure thing. Fflytte had spent his youth embracing the taste of the masses; now he had more in common with his young would-be actors than with the likes of Barrymore and the generation trained by stage.

Fflytte had made his name (“Fflyttes of Freshness!”) with three pictures that cumulatively did for pirates what Valentino had done for rajahs and desert sheiks. As the girls had said, Valentino had even been mooted for the current project, when it was being thought of as a modern version of
The Pirates of Penzance
but without the songs (this being cinema and therefore, in 1924, blessedly without sound—although I had no doubt technology would catch up with us before long, inflicting audiences with a flood of opera-movies and driving tin-ears like me out of cinema houses forever). However, when Fflytte managed to smuggle Valentino into an elaborately negotiated secret meeting (secret due to the draconian contracts tying actors to their studios) the two men ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension, Valentino not understanding Fflytte’s English accent and the Englishman unable to decipher whatever language it was that Valentino spoke. The meeting was not a success.

Instead, Fflytte would make his own star. His eye had lit upon a rather stupid young man with symmetrical features and luscious hair whose chief ability was an imitation Valentino intensity, a gaze that struck me as dyspeptic although the average film-goer reacted with the breathlessness of a blow to the solar plexus. Daniel Marks (“Making his Marks!” “Hitting the Marks!” et cetera) had a more important knack: He never, ever, made Fflytte feel short.

Even now, the actor automatically took up a position well behind his director at the gangway’s head, so that any photographs from below would place them on an equal plane: famous director, dashing young man in fashionable soft cap, beautiful girl in flapper clothes and drooping spit-curls furiously chewing her chronic wad of Doublemint. One would have thought them Americans, although all three were British; but for the weather, the trio might have been getting off a train in Los Angeles.

However, there were no photographers, to the irritation of the man in the white coat. And far from the sun coming out, the rain gathered its petulance and threw itself at the fur and the hat.

Fflytte, Marks, and Bibi, the leading lady—just Bibi, no surname—slid down the boards and dove into the first of the waiting motorcars.

Marks might be Fflytte’s invention, but Bibi was the most prominent of several near-stars stolen outright from Valentino’s own Famous Players-Lasky company earlier that year. It was a coup that had shaken the California studios and dubbed Fflytte with his current (and appropriate)
nom de cinéma:
The Pirate.

I watched the car take away my blueblood piratical employer and his two prized possessions, and turned to Mr Pessoa. Both of us reached up to wipe the rain from our spectacles. He, and his coat, looked sodden through.

“I’ll introduce you when we meet them at the hotel,” I told him. “First, we have to see to the rest of the lunatic asylum.”

Mr Pessoa looked startled, clearly wondering if his English had failed him, but I just waved him at the motley crew gathered on the decks before committing themselves to foreign territory, and we got to work.