Seances were all the rage in Austria, as in England, and Nora and Alfons started to dabble in the supernormal. ‘We were like children at a party when a magician is performing,’ recalled Nora, ‘expecting magic and hardly surprised when the most incredible things took place before our very eyes – as when, by the light of the street-lamp outside the uncurtained window, which was intensified by the snow, we saw a pair of snow-boots that had been left in the hall climb up, one after the other, on to the table.’
In the economic crisis of the early 1920s, Nora parted with her pearls and her diamonds for next to nothing. She sold her father’s fine silver dishes by weight, for melting. Few people in Austria had horses any more, let alone the funds to commission Alfons to paint their animals. In 1926 he went to England to find work. Nora missed him desperately, and as soon as she could she followed him there. The children were dispatched, separately, to relatives. Nora’s mother berated her for abandoning Nina and Christopher. ‘If one brings children into the world,’ she said, ‘it is one’s duty to look after them.’ Nora could not see that she had any choice.
In a down-at-heel hotel in Bayswater, west London, Alfons and Nora scratched a living by decorating silk lampshades (each took three days, and was sold for a guinea) until he received a few orders for paintings of dogs and cats. They graduated to a furnished room where, since neither of them knew how to cook, they lived on bread and cheese. Nora took a job as a waitress at a Lyons tea shop and pawned all her remaining jewellery, including her wedding ring. Gradually they made money – she as a writer, he as a painter – and moved to Holland Park, west Kensington. Alfons decorated the drawing room in bruised greens, browns and greys, the colours of an Austrian forest at twilight.
In the seances and experiments at Walton House, as in her writing, the Countess found expression for the rebellious, passionate self that had briefly broken out when she was a girl. At the Institute she hoped to experience moments as intense and transcendent as those that she once shared with her English governess.
NINE
Knocks in the cupboard
Alma arrived at Walton House half an hour late on Friday 25 March, the day assigned for the first sitting with the Countess’s circle, claiming that she had no recollection of anything that happened between 1.35 p.m. and 2.15 p.m. She had recovered consciousness in a railway carriage on the train to Victoria, she said, to hear a woman exclaim, ‘Fancy, bringing white mice into a train!’ She felt something on her arm and glanced down to see a white mouse creeping towards her hand. She snatched it up and put it in her bag.
In Fodor’s office at 3.30 p.m., Alma lifted the mouse out of her handbag. The creature scampered about in excitement. Helen Russell Scott fetched it some morsels of biscuit and Fodor found a cardboard box in which to house it. He punched a few holes in the lid. Very rarely, mediums did materialise living creatures – the Australian psychic Charles Bailey was said to have produced an eighteen-inch shark – but Fodor thought it more likely that Alma had purchased the mouse during the lost forty minutes, whether on purpose or in a state of trance. In an ‘ambulatory amnesia’, as in a spell of sickness, a person could undergo time warps, in which seconds seemed to last for hours and minutes to go in a flash.
Alma showed Fodor and the Countess a cross scratched on her forehead. George had noticed it the previous morning, she said, when he came into the dining room as she was sweeping the hearth. ‘What’s that on your forehead?’ he asked. She went to the mirror, pushed back her hair and saw the mark. She recalled having a vision of her father in the dining-room armchair. His ghost must have scratched her head, she supposed, just as it had once scratched her breast.
Fodor took a picture of Alma with her hair pinned back so that the scratches were visible. She lowered her eyelids as he clicked the shutter.
Alma headed downstairs with the Countess, leaving Fodor in his office, and took her place in an armchair at a small, four-legged table with the other sitters in the development circle: the Countess, her husband Alfons, Dr Wills and Helen Russell Scott. Florence Hall sat to the side in an armchair, making notes for Fodor.
Alma’s poltergeist guide ‘Jimmy’, as Fodor had named him, began to communicate with the sitters by tilts of the table. The Countess slowly recited the alphabet and the guide rapped for her to stop at individual letters. By this method, he informed them that Alma’s father had scratched the cross on her forehead so that she would know that he was near. Dr Wills and the Countess put in requests for supernormal phenomena. ‘I have a black elephant on my mantelpiece,’ said the doctor. ‘Will you try to take it away?’ Jimmy rapped once, for ‘yes’. ‘I want a bullfinch,’ said the Countess. ‘Will you try to bring one?’ The poltergeist rapped on the table again.
Fodor was sitting out the sessions, as agreed, and following the proceedings in Mrs Hall’s notes, but Alma seemed keen to keep him involved. First she had turned up with the mouse and the scratch, and then, on Wednesday 30 March, she telephoned him at the Institute to report her most startling feat yet.
Just before eight o’clock on Tuesday evening, Alma said, she had been to the Picture Palace in Thornton Heath to watch a Hollywood movie about an aviator, starring Joan Fontaine and John Beal. She referred to the film as The Man Who Lost Himself, though it was in fact The Man Who Found Himself – a meaningful slip, Fodor thought, in the light of what happened that night.
In the cinema Alma was wearing her fur-trimmed coat and a hat with orange ribbons. An old lady was sitting to one side of her, and the seat to the other side was empty. At about 9.15 p.m., she said, she lost consciousness and found herself standing in Walton Street near the blue lamp of the police station opposite Walton House. All nine members of the council were due to attend the Institute’s fourth Annual General Meeting that night, among them the Countess, Miss Scott, Mrs Dundas, Dr Wills, Shaw Desmond and Mr and Mrs Becker. Fodor planned to address the council about the previous year’s work. Alma, being a research subject, had not been invited to the meeting.
Alma saw a chauffeur in a dark blue uniform and cap outside Walton House, looking at her. She saw two saloon cars near him in the mews, one of them a blue sedan. She was surprised, she said, that there was no sign of Dr Wills’s car. She wanted to cross the road to the Institute, so that she could knock on the door and check that she was really there, but something stopped her. She was wondering how she would get to Victoria station when she suddenly found herself back in her seat in the cinema in Croydon.
Fodor checked out Alma’s story. She had been right to say that Dr Wills’s car had not been in the mews: it had developed engine trouble at Putney Bridge, and the doctor had missed the meeting. By making enquiries of the other Institute members, Fodor learnt that a chauffeur had been waiting outside Walton House on Tuesday night. He invited him to the Institute.
At Walton House on Friday, the chauffeur confirmed that during the AGM he had noticed a ‘Spanish-looking’ lady with very dark hair and a small round hat on the other side of the road, staring at him intently. The hat, he said, was decorated with something red or orange. He saw the lady walk towards the police station, turn, walk back, cross at the red pillar box and turn into Pont Street. He thought that she was acting strangely. Then a policeman stopped to chat to him and he paid her no further attention. The car he drove, he said, was a cream Rolls-Royce. Also in the mews, Fodor learnt, were Mrs Becker’s black-and-cream Hillman and a smaller, blue Austin, one behind the other. It was possible that a passer-by might have seen only two of the three cars.