At least Bremba seemed to be on Fodor’s side. A few days after his emergence, Alma told Fodor that though Les and her mother opposed her trips to Walton House, her new guide was in favour of the investigation. ‘I am right behind U,’ Bremba spelt out at a table-turning session at Beverstone Road on 11 April. ‘Go to Institute, do not give in.’
ELEVEN
A push, a punch, a kiss
Fodor suggested that Alma attempt another astral projection from a cinema on Tuesday 12 April, in the company of Dr Wills’s wife Hilda. Seven weeks into the inquiry, he was getting impatient for verifiable phenomena or evidence of dissociation. If Alma was observed in the picture house and the Institute at the same time, he would have proof that she could project herself. If she tried any tricks or left the cinema in a trance, Mrs Wills would let him know.
In the afternoon, during the Countess’s seance, Fodor asked Miss Tufnell to go through Alma’s bag and make a list of the contents. She found just under twenty shillings (£1) in cash, as well as a green handkerchief, a Betty Lou disposable velour powder puff, a tube of Tattoo lipstick (‘for glamorous, amorous, transparent redness’), and a pair of brown kid gloves.
After the sitting Alma went to the library with Mrs Taylor, the librarian, while the others convened in Fodor’s office. As Alma sat down, Mrs Taylor saw a heavy wooden armchair on the other side of the room topple onto its back. The investigators heard the bang and hurried in. They could smell violets. Mrs Taylor insisted that Alma had been nine feet from the chair as it fell.
When Alma left for the cinema, Dr Wills told her that he would put out a pencil and a piece of paper for her in the seance room in case she could write a message during her astral return. He and Fodor would be working late at Walton House, hosting a table-turning seance with Clive and Eileen Richardson.
Hilda Wills and Alma had tea at a café in South Kensington, then took the Tube two stops to Victoria. Directly opposite the station was the New Victoria, a 2,000-seat ‘super cinema’ built in 1930 with a stark, Germanic art deco façade. A woman was selling roses near the entrance. ‘I do love roses,’ said Alma.
At 7.45 p.m. Hilda Wills bought two half-crown tickets and took Alma in to find seats in the stalls. The auditorium of the New Victoria was styled as a fantastical underwater world, a luscious mermaid’s grotto in pale blues and sea greens. Rays of ruby light washed over the silvery dolphins carved on the walls, and shone up sculpted columns that burst like fountains against the scallop-fringed ceiling. Long lamps spiralled down from the dome.
Alma went to find the ladies’ cloakroom, telling Hilda Wills that she thought that her period was coming on. She was back five minutes later. She had needed some sanitary napkins, she told Mrs Wills, and since there were none in the cinema she had gone out to the street to buy some. She was still in time for the start of Second Honeymoon, a romantic comedy starring Tyrone Power and Loretta Young.
At 8.30 p.m., Alma said that she felt sick. Mrs Wills looked over and saw a bunch of roses in Alma’s lap, fresh and wet.
‘Did you feel them come?’ she asked in amazement.
‘I only felt a slight touch on my hand,’ Alma replied.
At 9.25 p.m., while the feature was still playing, Alma seemed to go into trance for a few minutes, and on returning to consciousness told Mrs Wills that she had tried to visit the Institute astrally, as planned. ‘I had great difficulty in knocking,’ she said, ‘but I managed to knock very gently and Dr Fodor looked up.’
Clive and Eileen Richardson, the couple at whose house Fodor had taken the magic table ride, arrived at the International Institute at 8.15 p.m. Fodor invited them to join him at a three-legged table in the big seance room, along with Dr Wills and Helen Russell Scott. Florence Hall made notes. When the light was turned off, the sitters placed their hands flat on the table, and it started to tilt. One of the table legs pressed on Eileen’s shoe. ‘Get off, Douglas!’ said Eileen, apparently addressing her dead fiancé. Clive jovially remarked that he wouldn’t stand for such rudeness if he were a spirit, at which the table thumped three times.
For the next half-hour the table continued to tremble and tip, directing itself at Eileen. The sitters could see its shape in the darkness. Each time Eileen changed her place, the table changed the direction of its tilts. Fodor was sure that he saw it move twice when everyone removed their hands, and soon after nine o’clock it pushed so fiercely at Eileen that she shrieked. Florence Hall switched on the electric light. When Eileen was calmer the seance resumed, but at 9.55 p.m. she started screaming as the table banged frantically at her. Florence Hall rushed to the light switch. Eileen was found on the floor with the capsized table. It had flown at her, she said, and wrapped its legs around her neck.
Alma and Hilda Wills arrived at Walton House twenty minutes later. While they were sitting on the first-floor landing, waiting for Clive and Eileen to leave, Alma ‘went off’ again, reported Mrs Wills. As she came round, she said that she had just been handed a ticket at the cinema. She rummaged in her bag and found a stub, numbered 85425.
When Fodor and Dr Wills joined them, Alma showed them the roses and the ticket stub. Mrs Wills produced the stubs of the two that she had bought – 85383 and 85384 – and recounted the events of the evening. Alma confirmed that she had tried to project herself to Walton House.
‘You didn’t put out the paper and pencil for me?’ she asked Dr Wills. He admitted that he had forgotten.
Fodor thought that he might have been faintly aware of Alma’s presence during the sitting with the Richardsons. ‘I definitely heard a knock on the door some time after 9,’ he recorded in his notes. ‘The thought came to my mind that it might be Mrs Fielding but then it seemed so preposterous that I put the thought away.’ For a moment, still wanting to believe, he wondered whether she really had been hovering at the door while the researchers were distracted by Douglas.
Alma telephoned Fodor the next morning, very miserable. Les had met her off the train the previous night, she said, having waited at Thornton Heath station for an hour. He told her that he didn’t like her visits to the Institute: the experiments were damaging her health and he wanted her back home. They argued again that morning, she said, and she agreed to withdraw from the investigation. Straight away, a plate in the dining room fell on the fender and broke. A rolling pin flew at her. Les gave in.
Fodor asked Alma how much money she had in her bag. She counted: ten shillings, half a crown and three or four sixpences, she said. Fodor calculated that the difference between this and the twenty shillings that Miss Tufnell had found would almost exactly cover the cost of a bunch of roses and a cinema ticket. It seemed very likely that Alma had pretended to be shopping for sanitary napkins near the New Victoria while she was in fact buying roses outside the entrance. When Dr Wills telephoned the cinema, the manager confirmed that the ticket in Alma’s bag was issued within five minutes of the two that Mrs Wills had bought.
Fodor realised that the New Victoria episode had been a stunt, but he refused to dismiss all of Alma’s stories. The question of her authenticity had become a question of his own credibility. Besides, he feared that any discussion of fraud would be dangerous to her health. When Alma first visited the Institute, he had recorded her weight at 9 stone 5 lbs. She now weighed 7 stone 12 lbs, a loss of 21 lbs in seven weeks, and she seemed to be in a reckless state of mind. He could not risk distressing her. For his own sake and for hers, he dared not let the case fail.