Some months after the duckling incident a hunting party passed through the farm. A huntsman in a bright jacket noticed Eileen and snatched her up to his saddle. She was handed from man to laughing man. ‘Their crude caresses frightened me,’ she wrote later, ‘and I resisted in the only way I knew – fighting with tooth and nail against rough petting – until at last they let me go.’ Afterwards she lay on her bed and breathed so slowly and deeply that she felt herself move past her fingertips, above her head. She managed to numb herself, projecting her mind to a place outside her body. She felt at one with blades of grass; she inhabited the song of birds.
Eileen married young and moved to England. She had two sons, who contracted meningitis in infancy and died within five months of one another. Eileen saw the grey smoke rise, curling, from the bodies of her babies. She then had a daughter, who lived, and a third son who survived for only a few hours. After his death she found that she could see things through her bones. Her feet, her knees, the nape of her neck were weirdly wired. She heard through her skin instead of her ears. It was as if her senses had multiplied, or spread, as if her whole body was attuned to new frequencies and she could perceive beings unknown to others. Her husband, who was having an affair, was dismissive. He said that Eileen’s ‘visioning’ was a sickness inherited from her mad parents. She left him, taking their surviving child with her, and embarked on a career as a psychic. She was able to transform the electric agony of the third bereavement, in which all her nerves seemed to see and hear, into a source of power.
Eileen had discovered – when the huntsmen groped her, when her husband betrayed her, when her sons died – that she could banish pain by forgetting and floating free. She could enter trances in which she lost herself and became a channel for other voices. On returning to consciousness she did not know what the voices had used her body to say, but she felt that this ‘mechanism for diversity’ liberated her from an inner life so intense that it threatened to break her apart.
Alma had managed to produce apports without visiting the ladies’ room in the tea break, just as Fodor had requested, and she had impressed Sir Ernest Bennett, Mercy Phillimore and, to an extent, Eileen Garrett. She had now materialised a total of almost fifty objects at the Institute. But C. V. C. Herbert of the SPR was dubious. ‘On one occasion she fell over backwards,’ he told Fodor, ‘which I have never seen except on the stage.’ Herbert pointed out that the tiger scratches were all on parts of the body that Alma could reach with her hands, and that the investigators had not carried out an ‘internal examination’ before the sitting.
Fodor knew that he needed to prove that Alma was not hiding objects inside her body, but he dared not ask her to submit to a vaginal inspection. ‘We had reason to think that Mrs Fielding would revolt at the idea,’ he said, ‘that her husband would put his foot down, and our experiments would come to an end before we had settled anything.’ The women on the investigative team refused to countenance an internal exam. ‘For reasons of delicacy, all my lady associates fought against this test. They argued that the size, shape and number of apports militated against genital concealment. They were afraid it would be the last straw to break the camel’s back.’ But he had an idea: with a machine that could see through solid flesh, he might obtain an image that would satisfy the spiritualists and the psychical researchers alike.
FOURTEEN
The fastest invisible rays
Rain fell on London on Friday 13 May for the first time since February. In Two Worlds, Horace Leaf published a rapturous piece about Alma’s ‘undoubtedly supernormal’ phenomena and Fodor’s achievement in developing her powers from the ‘cruder’ poltergeist phase:
Dr Nandor Fodor is to be congratulated on the excellent way in which he deals with his mediums. He is unpretentious, sympathetic, and has a natural enthusiasm that is contagious. He shows a thorough appreciation of the intensely sensitive nature of mediumship, and the disposition and temperament of the medium. He puts everybody at ease without infringing the watchfulness demanded by science.
Leaf’s article, the first detailed report of Alma’s case, hailed Fodor as the mentor of a remarkable materialisation medium. The article was illustrated with a picture of Alma (‘Mrs X’) sitting rigid in her resplendent, many-chained silver necklace, like a warrior chief.
It was Fodor’s forty-third birthday, and he had secretly arranged for two men to set up a portable X-ray machine in the small seance room adjoining the upstairs studio. Today he would learn whether Alma had played them all for fools.
Alma walked up and down naked after undressing in the library. She was handed a pair of pink woollen tights to wear in place of the usual loose knickers and silk stockings. Once dressed, she followed Fodor and Laurie to the small seance room, but she drew back when she saw the two X-ray operatives and their machine. X-rays reminded her of hospital, she said; they gave her the jitters, and left her nervous and upset for days. One of the technicians assured her that the scan was much less ‘enduring’ than a medical X-ray. Alma said that Les would not like it, and she must speak to him about it. Laurie suggested that he or Fodor could talk to Les, but she said no, she must discuss it with him herself.
Fodor pointed out to Alma how bad it would look to the sitters waiting for her in the next room if she refused to be X-rayed. The procedure was not designed to catch her out, he said, but to establish whether the apports were already hovering round her, as Eileen Garrett had suggested. ‘It would mean a tremendous feather in your cap if a photograph by the fastest invisible rays could prove something of this sort,’ said Fodor. ‘You are always a sport, and you must keep up your past standard.’
By presenting the X-ray as an exploration of supernormal mechanisms rather than a test of her honesty, Fodor made it hard for Alma to refuse. She agreed to have her pelvis scanned, and lay down on a couch while the operator made an exposure. Fodor had hoped for a second X-ray, of her chest, but was afraid of agitating her too much. The technicians took the plate downstairs to be developed in a van that they had parked outside Walton House.
A large group had again convened in the main seance room, among them Eileen Garrett and the magicians Will Goldston and Maurice Goldin. Alma produced one apport before tea: a fossilised ammonite shell.
At four, while tea was being served, Fodor was told that the X-ray operators had bungled the job. He informed Alma that the men had failed to expose the film, adding that they were terribly upset about their blunder and likely to lose their jobs. To his relief, she volunteered to have another X-ray taken. Fodor ushered her into the small room and this time signalled to the scanners to make two exposures: one of her pelvic region and one of her chest.
When Alma returned to the studio, Fodor intensified the surveillance. He sat at one end of the room and posted Laurie at the other. As Alma walked towards Fodor, he saw her glance at him several times. At another point she seemed conscious of Laurie’s eyes upon her. She changed direction, only to be faced by Dr Wills sitting on a small platform, watching.
One of the operatives beckoned to Fodor and Laurie, and told them that the chest X-ray had revealed two objects at Alma’s left breast, shaped like a heart and a pin.
While Alma walked up and down, Fodor and Laurie noticed her clasped hands creep slowly up from her chest to her throat. She fiddled with the neck of the suit. Fodor whispered to Laurie, ‘She’s got it now.’ They asked her to spread her hands. Alma showed them her palms, which were empty, then turned her back on Fodor and resumed her pacing. Fodor and Laurie saw tugs at the suit fabric which suggested that her hands were up at the neck again.