It was without question the most civilised pier he had promenaded.
He moved on towards the pier-head, enjoying the drumming of hundreds of sets of shoe-leather on the wooden flooring, more musical to him than the strains of the band ahead. Last August Bank Holiday, according to the newspapers, seventeen thousand visitors had passed through the turnstiles. He had spent the day at London Bridge Station and he was prepared to believe the figure.
Seventeen thousand were not on the pier at one time, of course, exquisite as that might have been. But the ability of the structure to support large numbers was beyond question. From his position there was a comforting view of massive iron piles and girders supporting the projecting sides of the pier-head. They were black as Hades and barnacle-encrusted and the sea bristled with them, thrusting upwards from their concrete foundations. After he had watched them for a minute while the water lapped fitfully at their base, the pier’s white superstructure, all domes and bunting, seemed ridiculously slight.
The pier-head, the goal of promenaders, rewarded them with a choice of distractions. As a professional salesman, Moscrop admired the enterprise behind the amusements, even if they were not much to his taste. Beyond the bandstand were four ornamented houses: Snelling’s Bazaar; Cheesman’s Reading Room and Lending Library; a shell and fossil shop; and Mr. Swaysland’s Natural History Museum. The last was particularly popular; besides the stuffed bird exhibition, billed as including a golden eagle and The Death and Burial of Cock Robin Ornithologically Illustrated, there was an aviary below the level of the pier-head with thirty live owls which you visited by descending an iron staircase. Moscrop was one of the few who forewent that experience.
Instead he took a rapid turn round the perimeter, learned from notices that the sun’s rays would be concentrated on the touch-hole of the pier cannon at noon and that the Diver would descend at 3.30 p.m., and then started back along the east side, from which he had come. The deck was divided by a wood and glass weather-screen, admirable protection against unexpected gusts, but a barrier to movement between the sides. The prospect of Hove and Cliftonville from the pier-head interested him less than Brighton and Kemp Town, so it was logical to return by the same side.
This time he stopped a few yards along, as if to study the serpentine decoration on one of the lamp-standards. Then he placed his bag on the seat and sat beside it in the sunshine, facing inwards towards the weather-screen. Two elderly men reposed in bath-chairs in its shadow. He observed them steadily for several minutes, undistracted by the promenaders crossing his line of vision. Satisfied that they were deep in slumber, he turned towards the sea.
It was so dazzling after the shaded scene opposite that his eyes contracted at once. Turning his face from the myriad glittering specks below the horizon, he scanned the browner water inshore and the waves languidly breaking below the pier, producing a marbling effect as the foam dispersed. There were other sights to interest a pier-goer: excursion-yachts, fishing-boats, the pleasure steamer twenty minutes out from the head and passing the old Chain Pier. Moscrop took them in with one sweep of the head and moved his gaze to the shore.
It was not architecture that caught his attention now, not the endless facade of white-fronted hotels and Georgian houses, nor the stately sweep of the King’s Road and the Marine Parade. It was the beach. More precisely it was the people on the beach.
His position afforded an outstanding view of the shingle and its occupants as far as the Chain Pier, almost a mile distant. There were none of the obstructions one encountered from other viewpoints. The stone groynes hid nothing from this height and the bathing-machines were like rows of match-boxes. The sunshine and the approach of noon had brought numbers of visitors on to the beach. The pebbles, as brown as the Gobi when you saw them en masse, were studded with the brilliant colours of shawls and parasols. There must have been four or five hundred people within view. He flushed with exhilaration.
He turned away, his tongue moistening his upper lip. His two neighbours slept on and the parade along the deck continued, unheeding. He reached for the Gladstone bag.
It was going to be so much easier than it had ever been before. The conditions were perfect: range, light, elevation. He hesitated only to select the best instrument for his purpose. The sporting model by Burrows of Malvern was the least conspicuous and the new Carl Zeiss was the most powerful, but he settled for his Prussian Officer’s field-instrument with a magnification of eight diameters. He could not be sure that his hand was steady enough this morning for the strongest lenses. Where was the profit in ten diameters if every tremor were magnified ten times?
He withdrew a small square of velvet from his pocket. There was no need to hurry. Now that he was seated, nobody looked his way. He was accepted as a lounger, and like the bandsmen and the anglers on the pier-head he had merged with the scenery. He breathed on each eye-piece and polished it methodically with the velvet.
When the cleaning was finished, he folded the velvet and replaced it in his pocket. Then he turned, rested his elbows on the rail, trained the glasses on the pleasure-steamer in the middle distance and stroked the image expertly into perfect focus. He watched a gull fly across the wording S.S. Brighton on the bow. By Jove! Those Prussians knew how to grind a lens. Small wonder the French had lost the war.
But he had not brought out the binoculars to study shipping. He moved his field of view across the flexuous lines of the Chain Pier and on to the beach below the Marine Parade. Without adjusting the focus, he continued the movement slowly left, scanning the steep banks of shingle. His eyes received only a blurred impression of shapes and colours, with a figure once or twice stealing into the picture when its movement momentarily matched the sweep of the glass.
That was incidental. He was not concerned with individuals yet. He swung the glass over everything contained in the entire length of beach within his purview: upturned fishing-boats, blackened breakwaters, nets spread to dry, garish bathing-machines, seaweed in heaps, fluttering pennants and hundreds of reclining people, all merging in an optical effect as dazzling and devoid of form as Turner’s last landscapes.
The binoculars reached the limit of their sweep, the pier itself, close to hand and out of focus. The image went blank and Moscrop shifted the instrument away from his eyes and rested his chin upon it contentedly. He had achieved nothing in the way of observation-the movement along the shore-line was far too quick for that-but his purpose was otherwise. It was the gesture that had mattered, a little piece of ritual, quite personal in significance. He had measured the area within his sights and staked a claim, so to speak. A mile or so of Brighton beach was subject to the scrutiny of his lens. The glasses had passed, however briefly, over every man, woman and child who chanced to be there this morning. Encouraged by this, he took out his piece of velvet and set to work again, humming an accompaniment to the brass band behind him.
For no very clear reason, he thought about the young woman who had sat opposite him in the carriage on the way down, a pretty, fair-haired creature in a white muslin dress and straw hat trimmed with crimson. Yet it was more about himself that he thought. How he had covertly stolen glimpses of the girl, not wishing to give offence, peering into the window to catch her reflection in the glass each time the train passed through a cutting. He was not shy-the proprietor of a shop could not afford to be-but the enforced intimacy of a First Class carriage was different altogether from the business-like exchanges in his Oxford Street emporium. When the train had approached Clayton tunnel, he had got up to fasten the window and she had nodded her appreciation of the courtesy. In the darkness he had set his eyes firmly in her direction, hopeful that a chink of light might illuminate her features for an instant. He had even strained forward to catch the fragrance she wore. But when the light returned he was stiffly back against the headrest with his eyes trained on the procession of telegraph poles past the window. How odd it was that if the same young woman were now seated on the beach he could observe her minutely without embarrassment on either side!