Believing that she had projected herself from Walton House, George said, he pulled the compass off his watch chain and gave it to her, saying: ‘Take this little thing.’ He then went to the front room to telephone the Institute while Alma wrote out the recipe on the sideboard. George tried to get Alma to speak to Laurie, but the call was cut off. When Laurie rang back, George grasped Alma by the left elbow, holding the telephone’s mouthpiece towards her. The phone was one of the older, candlestick models, with a mouthpiece at the top of the stand and a rotary dial in the base. Alma ignored George, he said.
‘Did she seem quite solid?’ asked Fodor.
‘She looked slightly dazed,’ said George, ‘but her normal self.’ He let go of her arm, Dr Wills having warned him that a person could be injured if forcibly detained while in a projected state, and she headed out of the front door.
Fodor asked him what he made of Alma’s visit.
‘I was flabbergasted,’ said George.
George and Alma must have rehearsed all the details of this episode, thought Fodor: what he would say that he was doing when she arrived, how he held her, the choice of apport. Though Alma was not wearing a watch during the seance, she had timed her account to match George’s live telephonic description of her movements. George had posted the recipe before Alma got home (the postmark was 6.15 p.m., and Alma left the Institute at six). Fodor spotted only one inconsistency. On Friday, George had said that Alma wrote the recipe on the dining table in the back room; today he said that she had written it on the sideboard in the front room. And there were the differences in the lists of ingredients.
Alma rolled up the arm of her sweater to show her guests the claw marks from the previous day. The scratches had broken the skin and formed scabs, as if the tiger was becoming rougher and more demanding.
Once the interviews were over, Alma’s son Don took Eric up to the loft to see his train set. Mischievously, Alma suggested to Fodor that they remove the ladder and let Don and Eric think that the poltergeist had done it. Fodor helped Alma shift the steps away from the trapdoor. He and she had ‘a good laugh’, he said, at her dark and complicated joke.
Supernatural episodes were diversions from more concrete fears, but sometimes stagings of them, too. The unease in the International Institute seance room mimicked wider anxieties about the dissolving borders in Europe, the alien forces within Britain, the dangers of sedition, infiltration and invasion. On Sunday 1 May thousands of young fascists gathered outside the Houses of Parliament for a May Day march to south-east London, while tens of thousands of members of the labour movement assembled for a procession to Hyde Park. The left-wing marchers raised their clenched fists in solidarity as they set off from Westminster; Oswald Mosley’s followers gave the fascist salute, their right arms extended and raised, palms down, fingers closed. In Bermondsey, where the fascist march ended, Mosley addressed his followers. He praised Chamberlain’s decision to appease Mussolini, and urged a similar accommodation with Hitler. Britain had no reason to fear a fascist dictatorship, he said after all, the country was already in thrall to ‘the alien Jewish money power’. In Hyde Park the leftist speakers decried the concessions that the prime minister had made to Hitler and Mussolini, and his refusal to support the republicans against General Franco in Spain. ‘Down with the fascists’, read their placards; ‘Arms for Spain’; ‘Chamberlain must go’.
THIRTEEN
I want to be nasty
Fodor was unnerved by Alma’s hint that he was in on her poltergeist pranks. Perhaps, like his flower-lifting neighbour Dick Woodward, she was pandering to him, or testing him, or both. He knew that the Institute bore some responsibility for her confabulations. ‘We have been encouraging the development of abnormal tendencies,’ he admitted. ‘We have been rearing a strange plant.’ He described Alma’s phenomena as ‘hybrid flowers’, rooted in her unconscious but nourished by the investigators’ hopes and wishes. Fearing that he was becoming complicit in her inventions, he determined to crack down on her opportunities for fraud.
Fodor wondered whether Alma might be managing during the tea break to retrieve small objects from inside her underwear or her body. Perhaps Miss Scott sometimes neglected her surveillance duties in the lavatory cubicle. At the preliminary session of 3 May he asked Bremba to help Alma produce apports before she visited the ladies’ room, and to try to curb Jimmy’s practical jokes.
Bremba replied that his first responsibility was to his medium rather than to them. He told Fodor that Alma felt under great pressure at the Institute, and did not like so many people staring at her. She was also under strain at home, he said, as Les objected to her visiting Walton House at all.
‘Yes,’ said Fodor, ‘what is the particular reason for that?’
‘He doesn’t like the idea of her being searched because he says if you are not convinced now, you never will be.’
‘It is because we are bringing in people who will not accept our word,’ said Fodor.
‘Then he would say stop trying to tell them.’
‘Well, then science would make no progress.’
‘He is not interested in science.’
The Countess intervened: ‘Couldn’t you do something about Mr Fielding to make him interested?’
‘Nothing.’
Fodor was annoyed with Les. ‘The medium only comes two afternoons a week, when he is working,’ he pointed out.
‘He is a very stubborn man,’ lamented Bremba.
Fodor was now having to battle both Alma’s husband and her spirit guide over the right to inspect her body. To try to placate Les, Fodor improved the terms of Alma’s arrangement with the Institute, doubling her fee to £2 per session. This amounted to £4 a week, almost as much as Les earned as a decorator and only £2 less than Fodor’s own weekly pay. The retainer would be a significant drain on the Institute’s resources but Fodor was determined to see the case through. He urged Alma to save her psychic power for the experiments and to take better care of herself.
On the telephone on Thursday, Alma told Fodor that she felt something feeding on her – ‘When I eat, it does not seem to go into me’ – and she kept being seized by urges to hurt her pets. ‘Also, I want to be nasty with people. I have the awful feeling that I must do them harm. My husband said yesterday as I was talking to him on the landing that it was not at all me talking to him.’ On Wednesday she had felt a whip strike her back, and weals had risen on her shoulders. Alma’s surge of paranoia and anger may have stemmed from her feelings about Fodor. She sensed his suspicion.
On Friday 6 May Dr Wills collected Alma from Victoria station at half past two as usual. About three minutes into their car journey to South Kensington, she lifted her bag from her lap and cried out, ‘What’s this?’ Dr Wills looked over: an inch-long terrapin was sitting on her skirt. ‘Don’t let it touch me!’ shrieked Alma, recoiling, much as Mrs Taylor had recoiled from an invisible presence in the seance room the previous week. Dr Wills moved the tiny turtle to the back seat. Alma kept turning to look at it as they continued to Walton House: the dense, scaly flesh of the creature’s head, feet and tail pushing out from the shell.
Alma told Fodor that while waiting to be served in Woolworth’s the previous morning, she had the peculiar feeling of something crawling on her back. ‘I said to myself that I will not turn round and tried to think what it was. Suddenly I knew. It was a tortoise. I turned around. There was a counter behind me full of live tortoises.’