Woodward produced no further phenomena that year, but in September 1936 he was roused to action after reading an interview that Fodor gave to Psychic News. ‘At present, in England,’ Fodor told the magazine, ‘there is no contemporary scientific evidence for the reality of materialisation.’ Woodward told Fodor that he would prove him wrong by producing just such evidence. He made Fodor promise him dinner at the Hungaria – a top-notch Hungarian restaurant in Regent Street – if he got him photographic proof of flower levitation.
At the first attempt, in the Fodors’ flat, Woodward consumed a large quantity of whisky. Fodor heard him hiss and pant, and saw the green and white carnations tremble violently. But none of the photos registered any movement among the flowers.
They tried again a week later. Fodor got in supplies of alcohol for Woodward, who turned up at 10.45 p.m. He already seemed to have had more whisky than was ideal for psychic experiments, said Fodor. ‘Nevertheless, he fell greedily on what I had for him.’ In the Fodors’ living room, Woodward put his carnations in a vase, which he placed in front of a bookcase on a carpet on the parquet floor. Woodward was soon very drunk. By midnight he was dancing alone to gramophone records while muttering what sounded like: ‘I am afraid you will catch me in what I do. I want to talk. Whisky is darkness itself.’ At 1.10 a.m. he succeeded in creating a shudder among the flowers, but then Fodor noticed the glint of a safety pin on the carpet, and a cluster of black threads stretching from the pin to the carnations.
‘So,’ Fodor asked, pointing to the thread, ‘is this how the flowers moved?’
‘Yes,’ replied Woodward carelessly. ‘What else did you think?’
‘That is why you needed the background of the books. It was so the thread would not be visible.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Woodward had moved the flowers by pulling on threads that he had looped round their stems. Fodor told him that he found his conduct despicable. He could not trust him again. Woodward said that he had only been trying to help him by providing physical phenomena. ‘I showed him the door,’ wrote Fodor, ‘and he left.’
A few days later, Woodward begged for a reprieve. He said that his phenomena were genuine, and that he had pretended to be a fraud in order to test Fodor: many people on the block said that the ‘spooky’ business was a racket, and he wanted to see whether Fodor was sincere in his belief in the supernatural. He said that he would try again to lift flowers, under any conditions that Fodor imposed. He agreed to be filmed at the Institute by infrared light.
At the International Institute on 11 December, Woodward drank a bottle of cheap whisky, provided by Fodor. He stood on a platform in a dark suit and red shirt, his features twisted in a diabolic grimace, and waved his fingers at a bunch of white carnations until they shook in their vase. The session broke up at 9 p.m. so that the sitters could tune in to Edward VIII’s radio broadcast: the king announced that he was giving up the throne in order to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson.
The filming resumed the next evening, by which time George VI was King of England, and at Woodward’s bidding one white carnation leapt from the vase, rising eleven inches into the air. Afterwards, Fodor examined stills from the film. Woodward’s palms, wrists, fingers vibrated and blurred as the stalk of the flower bent and spun away from him, its head a shining haze. With the help of a floor plan, Fodor made calculations about the speed and trajectory of the carnation and how it corresponded to the quivering of Woodward’s hands. He magnified the images to check for thread.
But back in Chiswick, Fodor heard that Woodward was boasting about how he had duped him. When confronted, Woodward denied fraud but was then defiant: ‘Why shouldn’t I go about pulling threads?’ Fodor denounced him as a scoundrel and a liar.
Fodor had been humiliated in front of his neighbours as well as his colleagues. To have given Woodward a second chance after the original discovery of the thread now seemed helplessly gullible. And there were rumours that Dick Woodward had betrayed him more intimately, by having an affair with Irene. Soon afterwards, Fodor left Chiswick with his family. He would not be so credulous again.
The Fodors moved to Park West, a new complex on the Edgware Road within walking distance of Marble Arch and Hyde Park. The block was decked out in marble, wood and brass, and fitted with elevators, a gymnasium, squash courts, a swimming pool and a solarium; each flat had gas central heating, a refrigerator and a telephone. The rent, at £250 a year, accounted for much of Fodor’s salary, while Irene’s expensive clothes, Andrea’s schooling and the maid Magda’s pay used up most of the rest. Fodor’s anxiety about money brought his relationship with Irene under further strain. The fourteen-year-old Andrea, now at ballet school, worried about their marriage. ‘Is Daddy going to divorce us?’ she asked Irene.
After two years as a ghost hunter, Fodor was also losing his faith in spiritualism. He no longer believed that the dead communicated with the living or infested old houses, and he knew that most self-professed mediums were fakes. But he still believed that some individuals had supernatural powers. He guessed that a few people suffered from mental abnormalities that allowed them to detach from their conscious selves and tune in to others’ moods and thoughts, and that a very few were so dissociated that they radiated kinetic energy. He wondered whether this energy might stem from suppressed feelings. If unconscious desires found ways to reveal themselves in slips of the tongue, dreams, jokes and tics, as Freud described, perhaps they could manifest themselves beyond the body too.
Freud’s work had been published in English in the 1920s, and the press now referred regularly (if satirically) to neuroses and fixations, inhibitions and inferior- ity complexes, sublimation and repression, the ego, the id, the libido, the talking cure and the unconscious mind. Fodor was entranced by the idea that individuals contained secret worlds, hidden from themselves, and that supernatural events might be stories to interpret, symbols to decode. He talked about his new psychological theories with friends such as Eileen Garrett, one of the most famous clairvoyants in England. Eileen agreed that her gifts might be psychological rather than spiritual and that her spirit guides – Uvani, an Arab warrior, and Abdul Latif, a Persian physician – might not be mystic revenants but parts of her subconscious self.
An imposing woman with sleek, cropped hair, Eileen started to assist Fodor on ghost hunts. When he was invited to investigate a haunting at Ash Manor in Surrey in the summer of 1936, he asked the owners if he could bring Eileen with him. ‘Mrs Garrett is an extremely intelligent and vivacious woman,’ he assured Maurice and Katherine Kelly. ‘You will love her. She has more sense than all other mediums lumped together. And, curiously, she is still a sceptic. She does not believe in spirits.’
The Kellys had been disturbed by bangs, raps and ghostly footsteps ever since they bought Ash Manor in 1934, and they had both seen the figure of a small man at their bedroom doors. He wore a smock, leggings and a cloth hat, they said, and his eyes glittered malevolently in a round, red face. He would tip back his head to show his throat, which had been slashed from ear to ear. The couple had turned to the International Institute only when a Church of England priest failed to drive out the ghost.
On arrival at Ash Manor, Eileen sensed discord. She went into trance and addressed the Kellys in the voice of her Arab control, Uvani. ‘Haven’t you discovered that these things only happen to you when you are in a bad emotional state?’ asked Uvani. ‘Don’t you realise that you yourself vivify this memory?’ Uvani told the family that their unhappiness was animating the phantom: it was a ‘spectral automaton’, he said, ‘living on life borrowed from human wrecks’.