Mad Hatter sc-4 Read online

  Then with that happy facility optical instruments have for chancing on the unexpected, the glasses isolated a young woman of riveting attractiveness. She was three-quarters turned away from the lens and wearing a hat of fine, white straw with an outrageously wide brim which dipped and obscured her face at each step she took. She was making her way up the steep shelf of pebbles towards the bathing-machines. Difficult as this should have been, her movements were a delight to the eye, arms gently see-sawing and hips buoyantly triumphing over the unstable footing. Moscrop could not claim many sights of the fair sex negotiating banks of shingle, but the ascent into a hansom was a not dissimilar exercise which he had observed quite regularly. Never in all his life had he seen the female form move so becomingly as this. She was fractionally out of focus-or was it his breath on the object-glass? — but he was quite incapable of making any adjustment.

  She wore one of the white muslin shawls currently in fashion, over a lilac-coloured gown. And she was carrying something white, with pink stripes. A bath towel. Was she going to bathe? He hoped not. It would be too much, all at once. No, she was walking towards the men’s machines, by Heaven, and going up to the blue-uniformed attendant! The fellow spoke with her for a moment and she put something in his hand. He touched his cap and accepted the towel from her. Now she was walking away, down the beach, and Moscrop had to keep her in view and miss seeing what the attendant did with the towel.

  The hat still flounced distractingly, but from this direction more of her face was visible, framed by black hair cut square over her brow and loosely knotted behind. She was not conventionally good-looking. Too wide in the mouth and high in the cheek-bone. And she was no child. Thirty, he guessed. Perhaps he was already bewitched, because it seemed to him at that moment that a wide mouth and high cheek-bones were exactly what every young woman should have and that thirty was the perfect age to be.

  And then the spell broke. There was a most appalling crash, as if the pier itself had collapsed. The shock jolted the glasses from Moscrop’s hands. They were saved only by the retaining-strap about his neck. He turned in a frenzy of indignation. One of the two sleepers across the deck was calling to him.

  ‘The cannon, y’know. The pier cannon. The sun’s rays fire it at the meridian. It’s twelve, you can depend upon it. I propose to synchronise my watch.’

  Moscrop had already turned and clamped the binoculars to his eyes, all caution abandoned now. The tragedy was that when he had followed the young woman down the beach he had neglected his bearings altogether. As he cast about with the glasses in an agony of frustration, he knew already that he had lost her and might as well never have fixed his lens upon her.

  CHAPTER 2

  Presently he stowed the glasses in his bag and rejoined the promenade along the deck. He needed to compose himself. Public promenading was the best remedy he knew for a mind in turmoil. He took a position behind a taller, more conspicuous man in a top hat and gave all his attention to achieving a similar stride-length while maintaining the proper, erect posture. He was at once incorporated in the general movement towards the pier-head.

  Confound it, a man of his age and experience didn’t fall for the first handsome female to cross the face of his lens. Unthinkable. Could ruin his holiday from the start. No harm in using her to check his alignment, but that should be the end of it, and no regrets when the image changed. If he was honest with himself, she was not even worth using as a range-finder. Damn it, you couldn’t do anything with a moving focal object. He had acted in a most unprofessional manner. He rubbed his moustache with the full vigour of a penitent.

  It was not even arguable that she was beautiful. Hers were not the cast of features one saw engraved in the Tatler. She wouldn’t turn many heads, with a complexion as dark as that and lips so prominent that already he was forgetting the rest of her face. Besides, she was definitely several inches too short for a woman. It wouldn’t do at all for a man of his stature to take an interest in under-sized women. That was where binoculars let you down, unless you made a point of checking proportions. You couldn’t be too careful. He preened the moustache with his fingertips, more reconciled now. It had been a salutary experience.

  The smell of powder lingered round the cannon as he passed it, his thoughts firmly on optical techniques.

  She was almost certainly married. Single women of thirty didn’t gad about public beaches unaccompanied.

  Next time he would use the Zeiss. For all its clarity, the Prussian instrument had a smaller objective lens. There were undoubted advantages in a wider field of view.

  For a small woman, she had made quick progress up the pebbles. The banking was steep for a short pair of understandings to negotiate, yet she had managed it quite easily, and with such grace! Could he conceivably have underestimated her height?

  An interesting technical problem. If the alignment were even fractionally wrong in the Prussian Officer’s field glasses, there was likely to have been distortion. At that range, and allowing for the moment of the image. . What wouldn’t he give for a sighting with the Zeiss! Yet even if he devoted the rest of the afternoon to scanning the beach there was small chance of pinpointing her again. One didn’t even have the pink-striped towel to focus on.

  Moscrop stopped. The towel! Why the devil hadn’t he thought of it? He did have the towel to focus on. It was down there somewhere among the bathing-machines. She had given it to the attendant. Find the towel and he had a positive link with the woman!

  In seconds he was back at the side of the pier, skimming the glasses over the facade of the Grand to locate the right machines. One attendant usually had a dozen to patrol, no more. If he could identify the man. . Ah! Splendid! There was the fellow, bless his blue uniform, standing by his chalked list of prices. If sixpence bought half an hour’s hire there was a good chance that the bather in need of the pink-striped towel was not far away. In fact, to Moscrop’s profound satisfaction, a flash of pink and white appeared in his field of view as he moved the glasses on to the fourth machine. The towel was hanging over the open door like an ensign. The bather, apparently, had still to return from his swim.

  Moscrop surveyed the strip of beach between the machines and the water’s edge. The lens defined a number of seated groups, but the only standing figures were small children and a group of itinerant musicians. The expected form in bathing-drawers stumbling over the stones was nowhere in evidence. However, several heads were bobbing in the water. No doubt the owner of the towel was so enjoying his dip that he was prepared to pay another sixpence.

  He put down his glasses and made a calculation. At a rough and ready estimate the distance from where he was standing to the point on the esplanade nearest to the bathing-machine was not more than a quarter of a mile. If he stepped out briskly he could be there, in a matchless viewing position, before the bather got back to his machine. Even if his judgement were wrong, the fellow could hardly have towelled himself, changed and left before he reached there.

  He set off along the pier at a purposeful step, zigzagging for faster progress, his bag swinging outwards towards hapless promenaders as he went by. At the toll-gate he was approached by a photographer and almost bowled the man over. Photographs! A Permanent Memento of Your Visit to Brighton. Heavens! He had no intention of being exposed to a photographer’s lens at any time, least of all now. At the King’s Road he steered through the crowd gathered round a French string band and almost ran along the Esplanade to the front of the Grand.

  He had, of course, glanced frequently to his right as he came, to check whether a bather emerged from the water. He had seen none, but there were points on the route where his view was obstructed. In a situation such as this, he told himself, an element of risk was inevitable. It was a relief to reach the section of Esplanade overlooking the machine in question, and it was in the nature of a personal triumph when he observed through a gap that the towel still hung unclaimed on the open door.

  Nonchalantly propping his right foot on the lowest cross-
piece of the Esplanade railing, he took out his Zeiss and focused it on the sea. There was no need now to feel self-conscious about using binoculars. He simply joined the ranks of telescopists at intervals along the sea-wall from Cliftonville to Kemp Town, observing everything that disturbed the surface of the water. Peering out to sea was becoming as fashionable as bicycling along the front. Now he understood why his sales of optical instruments that summer had been the highest for years.

  A murmur of pleasure escaped him at the quality of image the Zeiss produced. Every detail of a distant excursion-yacht was defined with diamond sharpness. Unhappily, though, the water nearer the shore where the waves were breaking was hidden from view by the steep bank of shingle. The bathers were invisible unless they ventured beyond the shallows. He put down the glasses and trusted natural vision to give him the first sighting of whoever came to claim the towel. On the beach, scores of small groups basked in the noon sun, read novels or studied the horizon, oblivious of the vigil being kept from behind.

  Minutes later, a head and shoulders appeared above the ridge of shingle, moving upwards and forwards. By degrees, the figure emerged in full, slimly built, narrow-shouldered and wrapped in a beach-robe extending to the ankles. Had he not noticed that the female bathing-machines were situated many yards to the right, Moscrop would have doubted whether he was watching a man at all. He put the Zeiss to his eyes again.

  The brilliance of the noon sun refracted by the waves made observation uncertain until the background was entirely of pebbles. Then there was no difficulty in identifying the bather as a youth of fourteen or fifteen. He put down the glasses. He was not looking for a boy. No connection was conceivable between a lad of that age and a married woman of thirty. His eyes travelled back across the stones to the line that divided land and water.

  Yet there was something that fretted his concentration. What the devil was it? He glanced down again. The boy was approaching the machines, sidling between parasols clustered about the beach like monstrous fungi spawned by the morning sun. Such colours! The most garish combinations seemed acceptable in this light and setting. People never seen in anything but dark suits and white shirts could sport utterly outlandish stripes on a beach and appear perfectly at ease. Why, just to look at the robe the boy was wearing. . s›. . !s›. . !s›.

  Moscrop looked. The robe had pink and white stripes. It was made of the same stuff as the towel.

  He gripped the binoculars, half-lifted them to his eyes and put them down again. He was too near for that. He watched in dazed incomprehension as the boy walked to the bathing-machine, flicked the towel clear of the door and began rubbing his hair. Deuced extraordinary: the youth was too old to be the woman’s son and certainly too young. . Moscrop closed his eyes and shook his head in a quivering movement, expelling an unacceptable thought from his mind.

  He occupied himself winding the strap around the glasses, clapping them into their case and fastening the buckles, performing each movement crisply, as if reacting to orders. Sometimes simple actions were a spur to decision. If he could summon the strength of purpose, this was the moment to pick up his bag and walk away along the promenade. No woman was worth the indignity of waiting for a fifteen-year-old boy to put on his clothes and following him along a public beach. He had never done such a thing in his life.

  The picture of her picking her way up the pebbles flashed into his mind’s eye again. Perhaps, after all, he would spend a few more minutes standing here. There was an incomparable view of the pier. Was it possible, he wondered, to identify each of the flags between the toll-towers and the pier-head? Now it chanced that the standard of India was directly above the bathing-machine in his line of view, and that when his eyes reached it, his attention was deflected by the youth standing quite still on the steps, enjoying the sensation of the sun on his limbs before retreating inside. He seemed to be indulging in some youthful fantasy, striking the pose of an athlete or pugilist, the towel loosely draped about his neck, the robe drawn back from his chest. His face was in profile, chin jutting forward. It occurred to Moscrop that this was a face he could not bring himself to like. It was not the self-satisfaction in the boy’s expression; that went with the pose and was forgivable. No, it was the cut of the features that repelled him. They were neat enough, to be sure. Handsome even. A broad, high forehead, well-formed eyebrows, fine, tapered nose, manly chin. The hair straight and strikingly blond. The mouth, too, balanced the other features, but Moscrop descried a hint of coarseness in the lower lip, the merest superfluity of flesh betraying (to a trained observer) intimations of sensuousness. Where had he seen a mouth of that cast before? — in some disagreeable context, he was certain. While he considered the point, the youth turned his head slightly, following the flight of a seabird. The movement afforded Moscrop a view of the boy’s eyes. They were large and heavy-lidded and protruding, giving the face an unseemly, almost wanton aspect. He placed them at once: they were the eyes of the young man in The Awakening Conscience, a painting of Holman Hunt’s, depicting a girl resisting a lover’s invitation to seat herself on his lap. If one mentally stripped away the young man’s whiskers, the likeness to the boy in the bathing-robe was disturbingly apparent. Child as he was, his eyes and mouth, those twin betrayers of the darkest instincts, conveyed the same callousness the artist had expressed in his portrait of the seducer.

  The boy turned and let himself into the bathing-machine. Moscrop produced a silk handkerchief and wiped his brow. Good Lord! What a lather he was getting himself into! It was utterly ridiculous. What did it matter whom the boy looked like? He was no more than a link in the present chain of circumstances. He could resemble anyone from Charles Peace to Mr. Gladstone himself and it would not matter a jot. Once he had made contact with the fair provider of the towel he ceased to be of any importance.

  But when some ten minutes later the youth descended from the machine, carrying his roll of bathing garments, paid the attendant and crunched away across the stones, it was not to rendezvous with anyone on the beach. Instead he mounted the nearest steps to the Esplanade and headed away in the direction of the West Pier. There was nothing for it but to set off in pursuit. Laden as he was with his bag of optical instruments and scarcely recovered from his exertions in covering the same route from the reverse direction, Moscrop found the pace damnably fast. The boy was short of stature-though probably not for his age-and would soon have been indistinguishable in the press of promenaders ahead, were it not for the red blazer he wore, matched by a brilliant silk boater-ribbon.

  By the pier entrance, where the crowd was thickest, he lost him. At another time it would have given him boundless pleasure to edge his way into the throng, regardless of whether he were joining a group buying brandy-balls or those trying to listen to the band. Today he skirted the crowd, anxiously seeking his quarry. Then-what relief! — he spotted the strip of red across the road. But-consternation! — the boy was paying for the hire of a bicycle. Moscrop had not used the two-wheel mode of transport in the whole of his life.

  He did the only thing possible: crossed the King’s Road and ran to the cab-stand. Already the boy was aloft and in process of achieving sufficient momentum, with the assistant’s support, to sustain his own balance. The bathing things were in a convenient basket attached to the saddle. He passed the cab-stand at a wobble, but in independent motion. Moscrop took off his bowler and beat it against his thigh in exasperation. There was not a cab within hail.

  It was five minutes at least before a growler drew up and disgorged its passenger. Five minutes! A bicyclist could be halfway to Kemp Town in that time. He mounted the carriage steps before he was aware that a second passenger, a Pekinese dog, had still to descend. He almost threw it into its owner’s arms and ordered the cabman to drive away.

  Progress along the King’s Road was desperately slow. Nobody wanted to hurry; the drive along the front was an opportunity to be seen, not to raise dust. So the cab went at little faster than the pace of the goat-chaises carrying parties of
small children between the piers. There was nothing to be gained from urging the cabman to go faster; the volume of traffic made that impossible unless you had your own horse or bicycle.

  The quite charming views to left and right, the elegant Regency facades and the splendidly green sea, were lost on Moscrop. He was craning to look past the cabman at any snatch of red in prospect and being deceived by parasols and toy balloons all the way to the Chain Pier. There he ordered the cab to halt. He had seen a rack with some half-dozen bicycles against the wall of a building adjoining the pier entrance. One machine was being pushed into position there by a boy no taller than the front wheel. There was a basket attached to the saddle. Moscrop gave the cabman his shilling and cut across the road.

  ‘This bicycle,’ he demanded of the boy. ‘Who returned it to you?’

  ‘It’s from up the West Pier, guv. This ‘ere’s as far as you can go for a tanner. Gent ‘ired it up there and brought it in ‘ere. I just collect ’em and stable ’em. Quite a few geezers ride up ‘ere regular for lunch at Mutton’s or the Aquarium. Some of ’em try riding back after. Rare sight that is, if they’ve had a jug or two of four-ale.’

  ‘The person who hired it,’ persisted Moscrop. ‘Would you recall whether he was a young man not much older than yourself and wearing a red blazer?’

  The boy scratched his chin. ‘Can’t say as I can recall anything.’