Fodor resolved to manage Alma’s behaviour more closely. He persuaded the Countess to let him join the development circle, and he took advice from Eric Cuddon, a barrister and amateur magician on the Institute’s council who had written a guide to hypnosis.
In the seance room on 14 April Alma lay back in the armchair. Fodor faced her, held both her hands, and in a quiet monotone directed her to look into his eyes and do just as he told her. A hypnotic trance was almost identical to a mediumistic trance, but placed the subject under the hypnotist’s control.
‘You are asleep,’ he said. ‘Do you know that you are asleep? Answer me.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are going away for a holiday for the Easter,’ he told her. The Fieldings were planning a trip to the coast. ‘It will be a glorious holiday. You will leave all care and worry behind. Nothing will disturb you. Nothing will upset your happiness. You will eat plenty. You will be hungry. You will have a tremendous appetite and you are going to gain weight… Nothing will fly at you. No apports will come. You will not wander… Your body will not be in two places at the same time. Repeat after me: “I shall eat plenty. I shall have a tremendous appetite. I shall put on weight. I shall not have any psychic experiences during the holidays. I shall not have any phenomena except at the Institute.”’
Alma repeated his words sentence by sentence.
‘You will wake up when I count ten,’ Fodor told her. ‘One, two, three…’
The Fieldings took regular seaside holidays, often cycling to the coast overnight and sending their luggage ahead to a guesthouse by train. The family photograph albums were filled with pictures of these jaunts: an infant Don digging in the wet, rippled sand at Ramsgate; Les larking about on Canvey Island in a one-piece costume and a rubber ring; Alma reclining on the pebbled beach at Shoreham in a white-belted swimsuit, her skin tanned and her hair wild.
This bank holiday weekend the family visited Whitstable, a fishing village in Kent known for its weatherboard houses, its shingle beach and its oysters. The weather was mild and the international situation stable. ‘No bad news – official!’ announced the Pictorial, which in the absence of any momentous world events ran a picture of a topless ‘spring nymph’, an Eve-like figure plucking an apple from a tree, and a piece about the Duchess of Kent’s visit to a branch of Woolworth’s in Slough (she bought a toy windmill, a card of hair curlers, several chocolate Easter eggs, a packet of cheese, a set of cooking tins and a green salt shaker).
Alma returned to Walton House on Wednesday. She, Les and Don had stayed in a hotel in Whitstable, she told Fodor. She had eaten voraciously. Fodor weighed her and found that she had gained one and a half pounds. She seemed ‘puckish’, he noted, full of devilry.
Fodor checked Alma’s armchair before she sat down for the afternoon seance, putting his hands down the sides of the seat and shaking out each cushion. He hypnotised her again. ‘Your eyelids are heavy,’ he intoned, ‘very heavy…’
Fodor repeated his instructions to Alma about looking after herself, and then – supposedly to test the effectiveness of the hypnotic trance – took a needle from Dr Wills.
‘I am taking a cigarette,’ he said. ‘It is burning. I will touch your hand with it. It will burn you, but very slightly. It won’t hurt you but will discolour your skin.’ He pressed the needle into the back of her hand. ‘I am now touching the skin. Tell me what do you feel?’
‘Nothing,’ said Alma. She did not flinch.
‘Here is the cigarette,’ said Fodor, pressing again, ‘a red-hot cigarette.’
Still she claimed to feel nothing. This was confusing: if she was genuinely hypnotised, she should have felt the burn of a cigarette and if not, the prick of a needle.
Alma reported that she could see Bremba standing beside her, that he was placing something next to her, near her elbow. Fodor reached behind her and found a piece of pottery on the chair, with a small, weathered label marked ‘Carthage’.
Alma returned slowly to consciousness. She said that she had a vague memory of being at the East End docks with Bremba, next to a cargo boat, with a lot of ‘coloured gentlemen’ walking about.
There was a knock at the door and Dr Wills crossed the room to unlock it. As he admitted Eric Cuddon, the young barrister who had written a guide to hypnosis, Alma cried out, ‘What’s this?’ and lifted something to the light. It was a small mushroom-shaped object apparently covered with tiger skin; to Fodor, it looked like an African drumstick, or gong-beater. Alma unscrewed the shaft from the head and tipped out some fine black powder. The Countess was alarmed. It might be poisonous, she said. She and Miss Scott took Alma to the ladies’ cloakroom to wash her hands.
As they were coming back up the stairs to the studio, Alma asked the other women if they could smell something. They could: a horrible, animal-like smell, said the Countess; the smell of bear, said Miss Scott. ‘Tiger!’ cried Alma, and rolled up her right sleeve to reveal three long marks like the scratches of a giant claw.
In conversation with Fodor after the seance, Alma mentioned that she came from a family of performers. In 1902, she said, a year before her birth, her mother took part in the ‘Paris in London’ fair at Earl’s Court, appearing both as the Half Lady Alive (the lower part of her body concealed by a black curtain) and as the Mermaid at the Bottom of the Sea (reclining between two glass tanks in the Palais des Illusions). According to Alma, her mother also wrote a number of short plays, including one – Rolling Passion – about a group of people who abducted a wealthy woman. ‘They got her into this house,’ explained Alma, ‘tied her up and whipped her into submission and made her leave her money to someone else.’ It was a kind of revenge drama, in which the poor tortured the rich.
As a girl, Alma told Fodor, she had herself been trained by her uncle George to be a tightrope walker, trapeze artist, acrobat and dancer. She hoped to become an actress, and had a set of professional photographs taken to this end. Her training was interrupted first by a bad fall from the tightrope, then by her bicycle accident. Soon afterwards pregnancy and marriage put paid to her ambitions altogether. Instead of joining the rackety, shimmery world of the circus or the stage, she submitted to life as a housewife.
Fodor had thought that Alma’s circumstances were workaday: she was the daughter of a plumber, the wife of a builder, and had briefly run a snack bar in Croydon. But she had now – voluntarily – revealed that the wish to tease, alarm and delight an audience was part of her inheritance. She was trained in dexterity. It seemed suddenly more likely that the whole supernatural adventure had been an act.
And yet the next evening Alma reported an incident that revived Fodor’s curiosity and concern. ‘I hardly know how to tell you,’ she said, ‘but I feel I must tell you that I had a very frightening experience last night.’
She had felt herself pressed hard to her bed, she told him, unable to move or speak. Les was asleep by her side. A cold weight began to push against her. She described her helplessness and the heft of her phantom assailant.
‘Did this man come to you as a husband?’ asked Fodor.
‘Yes. I struggled, but I was quite powerless. I could not shake him off.’ The ghost had forced himself on her, she said, yet she remembered not just her fear but her physical pleasure: a feeling of ecstasy. ‘I hope it cannot lead to trouble,’ said Alma.