Alma said that she had no memory of going to George’s room. Anyway, she had given her red dressing gown to her mother.
The next Saturday, Alma told Fodor, a shower of violets fell on her as she leant over her bed to wake Les from a nap. They were ‘big as pansies’, said Alma, ‘fresh and wet’. She had carried a bouquet of violets on her wedding day, exactly seventeen years earlier. Later on Saturday afternoon, she noticed a nasty smell in the house, like decomposing meat or fish. Les smelt it too. The clean, sweet scent of the violets had given way to a rotten stench. Alma and Les searched but could find no source.
Don, who had moved back in to the family home, told his parents on Sunday morning that the light in his room had been switching itself on and off all night. Though frightened, he had not called out but instead buried his head under the bedclothes to escape the flaring of the electric bulb.
The haunting at Beverstone Road had started with a bulb removing itself from the lamp in Les and Alma’s bedroom. Now the light in George’s room had switched on in the middle of the night, and Don’s light had flashed on and off, as if in warning. On Sunday, George said, he saw the sideboard in the dining room tip forward. When he reached out to stop it crashing down on the table, the dresser pulled back into place against the wall.
Fodor wondered whether the poltergeist was drawing on Alma’s feelings for her lodger, much as Mr Gilmore’s poltergeist had drawn on his illicit longing for Mrs Bradley, or as the ghost at Ash Manor had drawn on Maurice Kelly’s secret attraction to men. At Beverstone Road, the poltergeist’s antics often brought George to Alma’s bedroom door, even across the threshold. In George’s dream or vision, Alma had approached him like a predator.
Alma seemed to be haunting herself, too. While lying in bed one evening, she told Fodor, she looked over at the fireplace and saw her face in the mirror above the mantel. It was impossible, she knew, that she should see her own reflection from this angle.
‘What are you staring at?’ said Les.
The face vanished.
Fodor and the Countess discussed how to proceed. The Countess was worried about the effect that the investigation was having on Alma, and Fodor agreed that they should be careful not to exhaust or alarm her. They decided to suspend the physical searches and instead set up a ‘development circle’, a series of relaxed, undemanding seances at which a spirit – or, as Fodor believed, an unconscious, poltergeist self – might speak through her. The Countess suggested that Fodor sit out the seances for now, since his pragmatic manner might be alienating the spirits. He accepted the suggestion. He needed to retain the support of the Countess and the rest of the council, and a circle led by spiritualists might in any case get better results. He could continue to experiment with Alma outside the seance room.
Fodor drew up a contract to guarantee that Alma would attend the Institute exclusively for the next two months. ‘The Institute will call upon her services twice a week,’ read the document, ‘for periods not exceeding 3 hours and will pay a retaining fee of £2 per week.’ He told Alma about the plan to hold smaller, private sessions, led by the Countess, to stabilise and develop her phenomena, and he informed the readers of his column in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research that he was taking steps ‘to prevent too much drain on Mrs Fielding’s delicate organism’.
Countess Wydenbruck felt attuned to Alma, and hoped that she could help her. She too had undergone dislocating episodes, snaps in consciousness that were like a stepping between worlds.
Nora Wydenbruck was born in London in 1894, the daughter of an Austrian diplomat who had been posted to the city.
‘What a big nose she has,’ said her father.
‘She has indeed,’ said her mother, Marie Fugger von Babenhausen. ‘She’s as ugly as a monkey.’
Her parents had hoped for a boy. They already had a daughter, a pretty one.
Nora grew up in a baroque schloss in an Austrian valley, her mother’s ancestral estate. The house was pale pink and gold. Vines and roses climbed its frescoed walls, and firs darkened the encircling mountains. As Nora lay in bed in this fairy-tale castle, she had nightmares: her papa, or his friend the English aristocrat Baron Rothschild, would transform into a huge orangutan and bear down on her with a smile, opening a yellow-toothed maw to devour her. In other dreams Nora’s bedroom door would swing open and fill with a dense black shadow that pressed towards her, a vast darkness with a gaping mouth of fire.
Walter von Rothschild liked to take photographs of Nora, for which he insisted, to her distress, that she remove her shoes and socks.
Nora’s older sister and her mother were inseparable. They would dress up together for the high-society parties and soirées that they attended in Vienna each winter. But Nora was a gawky child. Her mother persuaded her that she was too plain to be coquettish, so she adopted a grave demeanour.
Nora’s parents became estranged, and her father spent most of his time abroad. He was moody and bitter, and drank a lot. When Nora was ten she went on holiday with him to the Alps. As they took the narrow road up the mountains, Nora felt suddenly terrified, as if she were losing her identity and turning into an unreal being in a raw and menacing universe. The moment passed.
When Nora was thirteen her father visited the hotel in Vienna where she was spending the winter with her mother, her sister, and an English governess who had become her closest friend. He said that he was going to dismiss the governess and send Nora to boarding school. They were standing at the top of the hotel staircase. Nora thought: ‘I must do everything in my power to prevent this.’ She screamed as loud as she could. She made to throw herself over the banisters. Her father grabbed her, tried to gag her and stifle her cries. They struggled. Nora sobbed and foamed at the mouth. The outburst, which had begun as a performance of suffering, now engulfed her. Her mind seemed to have split. One part of herself was watching from a great distance. The other was convulsing like a mad creature.
Nora’s father sent her to a sanatorium. The governess went with her but after three weeks was taken aside and told to leave. She ran screaming back to Nora and threw her arms around her, refusing to let go. The director of the sanatorium dragged the Englishwoman away by force.
In the absence of her beloved governess, Nora refused to eat; she refused to speak; she tried to strangle herself with her long, heavy pigtail. She was a lanky girl: only fourteen years old and five feet eight inches tall. Food was pushed into her through a tube in her nose. Eventually she was treated by a psychotherapist who was versed in Freudian theory. Nora mentioned to him that she could not remember the face of the man who had torn the governess from her. ‘That shows how right Freud is,’ the therapist remarked. ‘Unpleasant memories are pushed away and vanish!’ He persuaded Nora to eat, encouraged her to write and to draw.
Nora was discharged from the sanatorium and sent to boarding school. Her mother warned her never to speak about her spell of madness.
In 1919, against her mother’s wishes, Nora married a handsome artist called Alfons Purtscher, who specialised in making portraits of animals. She came close to another breakdown a year later when she gave birth to their first child. Bearing a baby, she said, was an experience ‘so extraordinary and terrifying that it is one of the great marvels of nature that millions of women survive it year by year without suffering a fatal dissociation of personality’. She and Alfons called their daughter Nina, after a dog of which they had been fond. Nora hoped that nursing the baby would be a mystical joy. Instead it made her feel like a cow. They had a son, Christopher, two years later.