Back at the Institute, Fodor searched Alma. ‘She allowed me to feel all over her body,’ he noted. ‘I went right over. I felt her corset under which nothing bulked. I went down her legs. She took off her hat and allowed us to go through her hair.’ These acts of surveillance could be exciting. Intense observation, close physical checks, even suspicion could feel like desire.
Upstairs in the library, Alma sat down on the leather Chesterfield sofa and let out a cry of surprise: on her lap was an ancient terracotta oil lamp, delicate in shape and rough in texture. Fodor took the lamp to be weighed and measured. He could swear that it had not been concealed in her clothes.
On Saturday morning, George telephoned Fodor at home, highly agitated, to say that a burning-hot necklace had appeared on Alma’s neck. She thought that it came from the museum. She had collapsed in an armchair, George said, her heart beating wildly.
Fodor asked Dr Wills to drive him down to Thornton Heath, along with Eileen Richardson, the young opera singer whose table he had ridden in Putney, and Irene and Andrea, who were also eager to see Alma’s latest apport. When Alma had visited the Fodors’ flat in Park West, Irene and Andrea had both seen a jar jump off a windowsill in the bathroom, five feet behind her.
At Beverstone Road, Alma showed her guests the necklace, a choker hung with five long chains, six shorter chains, fifteen silver coins and a Byzantine cross. Fodor, Dr Wills, Eileen, Irene and Andrea saw the weals and blisters where the hot metal collar had touched her neck.
Alma said that she had developed marks on her skin even before the object arrived. She and George had been having tea and biscuits in the kitchen – the two of them were, as usual, alone at home while Les and Don were out at work – when she suddenly felt something tighten around her throat. George saw two red bands slowly appear. ‘I took no notice,’ Alma said, ‘covered them up and went out to the butcher.’ As she walked along Thornton Heath high street, she saw an Indian chief walking by her side. ‘He had a shawl thrown across the shoulder and lots of beads. His headdress was falling back.’ All the time he was with her, Alma said, she could hear a jingling sound. She got home about an hour later and went upstairs. ‘As I was coming out of the bathroom something hot was clasped around my neck. It was tight and heavy. I shouted: “George! George!” and ran down.’
Some of Alma’s marvels resembled the bizarre juxtapositions of the surrealist artists, who, like Fodor, were fascinated by Freudian ideas. The Belgian painter René Magritte explained in 1938 that he aimed ‘to show everyday objects in situations in which we never encounter them’, ‘to make them shriek aloud’. His daft, unsettling inversions crossed the comic with the creepy, the familiar with the weird. Alma conjured up similar images. An Indian chieftain jingled along beside her as she made her way to the butcher’s shop; a stick of rhubarb perched on her dog; a mouse issued from her arm; a soap dish chased her down the stairs. Her apports were not only mysterious in their means of production, observed Fodor, but in their meaning and intent. They seemed senseless. ‘They are not capable of normal explanation,’ he told the spiritualist journal Light. ‘Perhaps that is their main purpose.’ Fodor had started by attributing her poltergeist’s actions to frustration, but this did not seem enough to explain their extravagance and peculiarity.
Surrealist art was condemned by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’, but it was popular in London. Magritte’s first solo British show had opened in Mayfair at midnight on 1 April. The guests were greeted by a man in a pith helmet, scarlet gloves and huge mirrored spectacles, holding a sign that read ‘Totally Blind’. He declared the show ‘an exhibition of people’ rather than art: the pictures in the gallery, he said, were anxiously awaiting their first view of the humans now arriving. In Portrait, one of the forty-six paintings on display, an eye stared out from a slice of ham. In Reproduction Forbidden a man stood before a mirror that instead of his face showed the back of his head. In The Black Flag a window and a coat hook flew like bomber aircraft through a darkening sky. In The Rape a female torso was rendered as a terrorised face: the breasts were staring eyes, the navel a nose, the triangle of pubic hair a muffled mouth.
TEN
Mrs Fielding’s mouth was a round O
On Tuesday 5 April Fodor photographed Alma in the necklace. She wore a black tunic, so that the chains and coins lay bright against her body, and the thick metal band circled her neck like a yoke. She gazed into the distance, composed and aloof. Fodor compared the necklace to a ‘slave ring’. The branching chains seemed to imprison Alma, as well as to shield and exalt her.
Nearly all the sitters in the Countess’s circle detected cold breezes that day: the Countess herself, Alma, Helen Russell Scott, Alfons, Florence Hall. Only Dr Wills seemed immune. After the seance Fodor was developing photographs in the darkroom, with Alma and the Countess, when a bottle fell from the shelf to the floor with a ‘ping’. Alma shivered and the Countess took hold of her hands in the dark. Fodor felt a rush of cold air. In case Alma was blowing on him, he pulled her head onto his shoulder and covered her mouth with his hands. The three of them held still. The breezes stopped.
In the library a little later, Fodor saw Alma turn towards Florence Hall, who was sitting next to her on the settee, and blow on her neck. He caught Alma’s eye. She knew that he had seen her. ‘Mrs Fielding’s mouth,’ he noted, ‘was a round O.’
Fodor kept quiet. He reflected that Alma might, mischievously, have been checking whether her investigators could distinguish between natural and supernatural wafts of air. ‘It is very difficult to suppress the urge of experimenting in blowing when breezes are claimed,’ he wrote. ‘The fact that she blew need not necessarily rule out a psychic breeze or mean that she tried to deceive us.’ He and Wilfred Becker had fooled each other with puffs of air during one of Harry Brown’s sittings. But Fodor knew that he was struggling to excuse Alma’s trick. He instructed Florence Hall to watch Alma for suspicious movements when she was next at the Institute.
Until recently, reflected the Evening Standard, everyone had thought that war was about to engulf England – such was the ‘panic-stricken refrain’ in ‘the mad March days’. Now it was April, and there was no war. On the contrary, said the paper, the country was enjoying a ‘summer-in-spring’, an unusual and welcome warmth. The daffodils had come early, and so had the birds: the chiffchaffs, the sand martins and the willow warblers.
To some readers, this sort of chirpy editorialising only confirmed how bad things really were. ‘Funny how we keep thinking about bombs,’ says the narrator in Orwell’s Coming Up For Air. ‘Of course there’s no question that it’s coming soon. You can tell how close it is by the cheer-up stuff they’re talking in the newspapers.’
At Walton House on Friday 8 April, Alma took off her coat and hat in the ladies’ room, as usual, then went up to the library in a thin frock and a brown woollen cardigan to join Fodor, Mrs Taylor and Florence Hall while she waited for the Countess’s table sitting. Mrs Hall kept a close eye on her hands.
Alma said that her head hurt and she could hear a chirping sound again. As she rose from her seat, Fodor felt a movement at his right trouser leg; he looked down and saw a bird flutter up from Alma’s skirt, fly across the room and alight on a pot of flowers on the bookcase. Mrs Taylor, the librarian, also saw the bird in flight. It was a small creature with blue-grey wings, a pink bill and pink skin around the eyes, legs and feet. Jimmy had not produced a bullfinch, as the Countess requested, but something very similar; the bird was afterwards identified as a waxbill finch, a native of Indonesia.