For his first concentrated survey he chose the area of beach below the Grand Hotel. The building’s height made it the obvious point of reference. If you did not use some kind of landmark you would lose yourself on the beach just as surely as if you were tramping aimlessly through the shingle. He brought the glasses into sharp focus on one of the Italianate balconies and moved the field of view slowly down the edge of the building that adjoined Hobden’s Royal Tepid Swimming Baths for Gentlemen. A landau passed across the image; he had reached the level of the King’s Road. He dipped the binoculars lower, down the Esplanade wall to the top tier of white-painted bathing-machines. He continued the movement without pausing. Whatever else he may have been, he was no Peeping Tom. The sight of a shapely ankle or a foam-drenched petticoat-hem exposed to the sun to dry was a side-benefit of his researches, but he drew the line at peering into bathing-machines. That was a misapplication of science.
Pebbles monopolised the scene now, more blue than brown when he saw them closely, and as clean as if every one had been scrubbed that day. Farther down was an upturned fishing-boat on trestles, with children scrambling over it. They were the first live figures the lens had caught and he was pleased at the definition. Some loss of colour was inevitable, but the features were sharp and there was no spectral fringe around them. The Zeiss itself could not have produced a clearer image.
He discovered a courting couple sitting against a rowing-boat, the girl in a white serge and navy-blue yachting dress with silver anchor buttons (could he really see that well or was his imagination supplying the details?) and a pill-box hat, and the man in ducks, sharing her parasol. The chaperone, heavily veiled and knitting assiduously, sat with her back against the stern. To their right was a poorer family who seemed to have missed the exodus. They were eating shrimps or whelks and passing round a stone bottle, presumably of beer. A fruit-seller approached and just as quickly moved on.
The band to Moscrop’s rear stopped playing. All that was audible now was the thud of footfalls on the planking and the lapping of the tide. It made an odd accompaniment to the animated scene he was observing. With one faculty increasingly involved in the life below him, the others had become dissociated from what was happening on the pier. The music had blended pleasingly with the images, but now that it had stopped he was straining to hear the crunch of pebbles as someone walked by and the shrill cries of the children playing on the boat. It was like being afflicted suddenly with deafness. His concentration was going.
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.