Mad Hatter

CHAPTER 3

Admission to the aquarium was a shilling. Half a crown spent in two minutes! Indulging one’s curiosity was an expensive pastime. He hoped the information he had bought at the bicycle-stand was reliable. Even if it were, the finding of the youth would not be easy. The forecourt at the foot of the granite steps he was descending was like an hotel foyer, thick with visitors noisily debating whether they would first take lunch, see the exhibits or listen to the conservatory orchestra. He paused midway down, scrutinising the shaded areas under the red-brick arches and behind the terracotta columns. The only red coats in view belonged to members of the militia. He moved on and down and crossed the pavement to the entrance-hall.

This too was crowded, but less noisy. It was furnished as a reading-room, with long tables. Visitors had come there in dozens and gone to the London newspapers like men overboard to lifebelts. However well a landlady prepared breakfast, it was not the same without The Morning Post.

The current editions of Brighton’s seventeen daily and weekly papers, liberally arranged along the eighty-foot length of the hall, were not much in demand. The single exception was The Fashionable Visitors’ List. For every one studying that journal, three or four waited to replace him. Suitably, it was mounted under glass on an elongated lectern. At another table, the latest telegrams were dissected by a small colony of holiday-makers from the London Stock Exchange.

Moscrop stood in uncertainty, trying to make the same decision that provoked such discussion outside. Should he turn left and enter the restaurant or go forward into the main aquarium? He was already satisfied that the boy was not in the reading-room. It was fair to presume that if he was in the building at all he had come there to meet someone. Perhaps he had already met them outside and gone into the restaurant. If he had, he should be there for a considerable while; long enough to make it safe to search the corridors housing the tanks. He stepped forward decisively.

He was unprepared for the next experience. After the babble outside, the clublike concentration in the reading-room had presented a contrast, but it was at least recognisable as another aspect of modern life. The aquarium was not. It was other-worldly. Dimly-lit aisles extended before him like cloisters in a Fra Angelico fresco. Pillars of deeply coloured serpentine marble, Bath stone and red Edinburgh granite supported a groined roof stretching ahead for more than two hundred feet. It was formed of variegated bricks, crossed by finely moulded Gothic vaulting. The impression on Moscrop was profound; he would not have blinked an eye if an organ had started to play and a clerical procession walked past. He was ready to accept that a patch of light on the pavement to his left was filtered through a stained-glass window. It seemed sacreligious to discover that it came from a gas-lit tank of lobsters.

He paced the corridor uneasily, peering ahead for a glimpse of the boy, but feeling obliged to simulate some interest in the tanks, rather as one casts an eye over tombstones on a cathedral tour. A skate came close to the glass of one and hovered there, a grotesque parody of a human face, with wicked twinkling eyes and mocking mouth. Mackerel and herrings played among the rising bubbles. Bass dived repeatedly into the fine grit at the bottom of their tank, rolling themselves in it with evident relish. In the main tank, over a hundred feet long, porpoises darted easily from end to end. A line of visitors watched in hushed amazement at such quicksilver velocity contained within a foot of their faces.

Halfway along the corridor there was still no glimpse of red in the line of shuffling visitors. He kept towards the centre, near the small tanks of tropical fish mounted on pedestals. He smiled wryly at one labelled Shanghai Telescope Fish. Newtonian or Cassegrainian? Whichever they were, they would find it a challenge to produce any image at all in this dim underworld. No telescope he knew could retain sufficient light to be of any use here.

To his right he noticed a passage leading to a separate exhibit. The New Alligator and Crocodile Cavern is now completed and Open to the Public announced a board beside it. He hesitated. Might such a curiosity interest a boy of fifteen? He supposed it would. As a meeting-place, however, it was a singularly unlikely choice. She of the fluttering white hat was impossible to imagine making a rendezvous in a reptile-house.

He reviewed the line of visitors filing past the tanks. Several straw boaters were prominent. Not a single red blazer. There was nothing for it but to try the Crocodile Cavern.

The interior was darker than the main aquarium. Hissing gas-jets situated at floor-level threw a yellowish light over indeterminate areas of mud and vegetation. He waited at the entrance, accustoming his eyes to the conditions. Reassured that there was actually a four-foot barrier of iron and glass between the human and reptilian occupants of the cavern, he stepped forward. It was as crowded as the bar in a music hall. Instead of shouting for drinks, the customers passed the time peering downwards, telling crocodiles from logs of wood. Saturday afternoon zoologists. He had no desire to join in, but to see anything at all he needed to gain a place at the glass. And getting there was certainly harder than ordering drinks at the Alhambra. Those at the front refused to move on before observing some sign of life in the tank, and the reptiles were not disposed to co-operate.

At length he wedged himself between a clergyman and a large woman in a plush hat. To establish his interest in crocodiles, he tossed a penny over the glass on to the back of an unblinking twelve-footer. Then he looked along the barrier at the line of human faces to his right. The light directed upwards from the tank caught the undersides of their features. Chins, lips, noses and eyebrows were illuminated in the manner of murderers’ effigies in Madame Tussaud’s. He sighed. In these conditions you would be hard put to it to recognise your own mother.

There was a small stir at the far end of the barrier. A child was being held up for a better view, a boy of two or three in a white cotton sailor-suit. Tiny, fat fingers gripped the edge of the glass above the heads of the onlookers. A shock of flaxen curls appeared behind them and was helped above the glass, to project over the top, giving the child a bird’s-eye view of the crocodiles. He was supported at the ankles. From where Moscrop was, it looked an uncomfortable vantage point. And so it appeared to someone else, for a young woman was protesting actively, trying to haul the child down to a safer height. ‘No, Master Guy, he don’t like it. He don’t like it at all. Can’t you see he don’t like it? Put him down, for pity’s sake.’ From her dress and manner, she was the child’s nursemaid, quite properly demonstrating her concern for its safety. Master Guy was unimpressed, though. He edged the ankles higher, beyond her reach. The weight of the child’s head began to draw it downwards. One of the reptiles in the tank moved. The girl screamed. Several sets of hands at once combined to pull the child to safety. It seemed quite unharmed. Probably it had never been at risk. There is nothing like a scream in a reptile-house to lead people to hasty conclusions. Certainly the young man named Guy was treating the matter lightly, laughingly ruffling the curls that were now drawn implacably to the nursemaid’s bosom.

Moscrop watched him with increasing interest, not because the incident was of any importance, but because now that the child was reunited with its nurse, he could see for the first time what Master Guy was wearing: a blazer, flattened against the glass by a sudden concentration of pressure from the crowd and caught in the gaslight as red as a signal-flag. What luck! He backed away from the barrier at once to the back of the crowd and moved as near as he could.

‘Be reasonable, Bridget, dammit,’ he heard from in front. ‘Anyone would think from your behaviour I was trying to get rid of the child, like someone in the police reports.’ The voice was pitched high and carried well. Whatever Bridget thought, the crowd would be left in no doubt about the young man’s good intentions. ‘The boy wanted to see the brutes for himself. Part of his education. You’ll have to keep a check on yourself, my girl, or you’ll get us into no end of trouble, won’t she, young Jason?’ If it was the youth Moscrop had followed from the bathing-station, he spoke with a self-assurance beyond his years.

A shifting of positions among the crowd settled the issue. The wearer of the blazer emerged within a yard of Moscrop, girl and child in tow. His hand lingered automatically among young Jason’s curls, but his eyes, what was visible of them in the shadows, glinted in a most unrepentant way. The Awakening Conscience! Beyond any doubt it was the boy from the beach. Moscrop stepped in behind, resolved not to lose him again.

In the main aquarium, the light that had seemed poor before was as good as daylight now. They crossed a central vestibule and entered the second part of the main aisle, Moscrop keeping within twenty yards of them. Their step was business-like. Tank after tank was passed without the inmates receiving even the compliment of a glance.

He presently became aware of a sound from the end of the building, a persistent throbbing, soon detectable as the percussionist’s contribution to a waltz-tune. It sounded curiously unsuited to the surroundings, even when the full orchestra was audible. To their credit, the aquarium managers had provided a small forest of palm trees in tubs, to make a distinction between the musicians and the specimens of marine life. Members of the public were making their way there with the resolute tread of Sunday morning church-goers. They were passing straight through into a further room, towards which Guy strode, with the girl a step or two behind, the child now dormant in her arms.

He followed them into a spacious conservatory, well-provided with bentwood and bamboo chairs distributed at random among tall sub-tropical shrubs. Most were turned in the direction of the Aquarium Orchestra, a dozen instrumentalists mounted on a small platform behind a fernery, but a number of the audience elected to promenade around the extremities. There was much to charm the eye: cascades and fountains and miniature Alpine scenery.

Which way had they gone? Heavens, these were practically jungle conditions, with fronds and ferns making it quite impossible to see more than a dozen yards in any direction. ‘There is ample seating on the far side, sir,’ a bored voice advised him.

‘I was-er-with the people ahead. Young fellow in a red blazer.’

A limp hand waved him forward. ‘Dr. Prothero’s party? To the left of the podium, sir, behind the Chinese magnolia.’

A doctor. Who on earth next? At this rate he would soon be pursuing half the population of Brighton. He took in a long, deep breath. It was time to pause, to consider the implications of what he was doing. Spying out the land through the end of a telescope was one thing; running a strange woman to earth quite another. Not at all a healthy way to start a holiday.

Manfully he made an effort to call to mind worthier ways of spending time at Brighton: lunch at Mutton’s, bathing at Brill’s, concerts at the Dome. None displaced the memory of a large white hat dancing elegantly to the motion of unseen limbs over the shingle. He shrugged, released the breath upwards through the bristles of his moustache and submitted himself to the palms and the Aquarium Orchestra.

And there it was when he rounded the magnolia-the hat in all its magnificence, quite still now, without the suggestion of a tremor during the orchestra’s performance.

She was seated in a cane chair, as if for a studio photograph, her face in profile, sharply defined against the dark green of the ferns. Guy and the nursemaid and child had positioned themselves behind and someone else was seated alongside. Moscrop concentrated on her alone. Good Lord, what imperfect instruments binoculars were! The image his lens had produced from the pier conveyed nothing of the texture of that complexion.

He decided to promenade. If he picked a careful route, he would be able to observe her from different angles. He was not the class of man who contrived a clumsy introduction at the first opportunity. Nonchalantly, he set off along a small path that took him behind her. He made a show of examining plants as he walked, but he need not have bothered; she was totally absorbed in the music.

There was a small pond ahead, with a fountain in the centre. It was a perfectly natural action to pause there to look at the goldfish lurking under the lily-pads. Through a gap in the foliage to the left of the jet, he watched the boy Guy stoop to speak something under the hat-brim. She would not like her concentration broken, Moscrop was sure. Confounded bad form to talk during a concert: it confirmed his earlier impression of the boy. How gratifying to see that she silenced the young pup with a single small movement of the right hand. The hat, if he were not mistaken, quivered with the force of her reproof.

He moved on to the next break in the foliage, a promising position, almost directly opposite the point from which he had first seen her. Unfortunately the view was entirely obstructed by her companion, who was now forced on Moscrop’s attention for the first time. He was a man of slight build, in his fifties, almost bald. He sat elegantly in a chair which was the twin of hers, his elbows on the arms and the point of his chin resting on a bridge formed by the tips of his index fingers. A well-proportioned physique; posture relaxed, yet entirely under control, down to the crossed ankles and dipped toes. There was no doubting his identity. This was Dr. Prothero: the badge of his profession, his silk hat, lay on his lap ready for all emergencies.

Moscrop sniffed, took a turn round an oleander, strolled back to the pond and looked again at the two seated figures. He was reluctant to consider what relationship they had to each other. He noted merely that there was twenty years’ difference in their ages-oh, even twenty-five. Yes, the doctor was assuredly nearly twice her age.

The boy Guy, frustrated in his attempt to speak during the recital, withdrew a pouch from his pocket. Tobacco, at his age? No, by George, it was snuff he was taking, putting it to his nostril as openly as if he were inhaling camphor! Boys were boys and it was unrealistic to imagine that they did not secretly indulge from time to time in smoking-room practices, but this was in a public place, in the company of a lady. The doctor, for his part, seemed quite indifferent to what was going on behind him. In fact, it was now apparent from this angle of observation that he was taking more than a passing interest in one member of the orchestra, a lady harpist in a black gown of d. . #142›collet. . #142› design. She may well have been a conspicuously talented musician, of course, but that did not account for Dr. Prothero’s present preoccupation, because the piece the orchestra were playing had no part at all for a harp.

The waltz finished with a flourish. The performers acknowledged a ripple of applause with nods and smiles and began rearranging their music-sheets. It was the opportunity for any of the seated contingent of the audience who were becoming restless to move discreetly away. Dr. Prothero already had his hat on and was making towards the door, unconcerned, apparently, whether the rest of his party were following. When he did look briefly back, it was merely in the direction of the orchestra. His companion, for her part, turned to make some remark to Guy and then rose, rearranged the folds of her skirt and followed, the others going with her.

Moscrop made his way out by a less direct path. Even so, he reached the door almost as Guy did, penetrating the conservatory foliage like Stanley within sight of Ujiji. In the main aisle outside, it was more difficult to conceal his pursuit, for there was no cover except the central row of pillars, and anyone darting between them would seem quite as curious and exceptional as the fish themselves. He had no choice but to step out at the same brisk rate as Dr. Prothero and his party, and take the chance that if any of them looked round they would think nothing odd about a visitor who followed so hard on their heels.

Not that he need feel guilty in any sense; there was nothing unlawful in what he was doing. He had taken an observer’s interest in his fellow-beings for years; wasn’t that his hobby, after all? Where was the harm in making oneself anonymous, a face in a crowd or a dot on the landscape, but having the power to pinpoint others, focus a lens on them and study them at will without their ever realising it? The only difference now was that he was putting his anonymity at risk. He was not content to join the crowds shuffling in front of the tanks to right and left. And if he needed any reassurance that the risk was worth taking, it was there in front of him; she was as exquisite at walking pace as she was clambering up the beach. The hat-brim and the folds of her parasol rippled in concert with her quick steps.

The doctor did not pause until he was through the reading-room and at the door of the restaurant. There, a short discussion ensued. Obviously the nursemaid and child could not be taken in for lunch; Bridget was receiving her instructions. Sure enough, Guy was sent to retrieve a small perambulator from behind a potted fern, a chair-like contrivance with three wooden wheels, and the child was fastened into it.

What should he do next-follow them into lunch, hopeful of securing an adjoining table, or wait outside with the nursemaid and child? Were they likely to wait there, for that matter? No, the child would need to be fed. Bridget was already wheeling the pram across the reading-room.

On an impulse he did the thing which seemed the least logical: abandoned the subject of his fascination and followed the servant. It was decided so spontaneously that his movement to the door was executed with complete naturalness. He caught up with Bridget at the foot of the granite steps.

‘Allow me, young lady.’

She had no choice. He already had the pram in his hands.

‘Oh thank you.’ She gave him a coy smile. ‘Let me take your bag then, at least.’

‘It’s heavy.’

‘Not so heavy as Jason and his pram. I’m obliged to you, sir.’

‘Not at all. He’s a bonny child. That was his mother at the restaurant entrance, was it?’ Said with the casual air of someone making polite conversation. The girl would know nothing of the significance he attached to the answer.

‘Mrs. Prothero? Yes. She’s Jason’s Mamma.’

‘And the older boy? He’s not Jason’s brother, surely?’

‘Ah, but he is. His half-brother, anyway. That’s Master Guy. He’s fifteen now, and a trying age that is, if he’s typical of it.’

‘He would be Dr. Prothero’s son by a previous wife?’

‘Yes. Don’t ask me which one. The present Mrs. Prothero’s the third. The doctor don’t keep his wives long, does he? There we are, then. You’re a gentleman, sir, and I’m deeply obliged.’

‘No trouble,’ said Moscrop. ‘No trouble at all.’ But as he took back his bag and walked across to the promenade railing, his expression was more than troubled. He wore the look of a man whose worst intimations had been confirmed.