Fodor was still baffled by Alma’s motive. The most obvious explanation for the fraud was that she had been in it for the money. The Institute had paid her about £18 to date, which, even with apport and travel expenses of a few shillings a week, was a tidy sum. But the Fieldings were not hard up. And besides, Alma’s psychic phenomena had started in destruction and expense – all the cracked crockery, the broken ornaments, the dented furniture hardly spoke of a woman trying to use her gifts for gain. Even her psychic shoplifting was more anarchic than avaricious: she acquired items only to give them away. There were emotional benefits to her trickery – the warmth and admiration she found at Walton House, the escape from domestic drudgery and marital tension – but they did not adequately explain why Alma subjected herself to so much risk, and inflicted harm on herself, her belongings, her family.
Fodor noticed that Alma had often undercut her cleverness with exhibitionism. She seemed to flirt with revelation, performing a dance of confession and concealment, a restless shuffle between exposing and hiding the truth. Her attempt to bamboozle the psychical researchers had been silly, childish, a lark, a wheeze; but also serious, compulsive, unstoppable. The possibility of being caught – the erotic thrill of the chase – may have been intrinsic to her motivation. Fodor’s neighbour Dick Woodward had also seemed to dally with disclosure. ‘I am afraid you will catch me in what I do,’ he muttered to himself as he danced around Fodor’s flat in a haze of whisky: ‘I want to talk.’ Perhaps Alma’s hoaxing, like his, was an enactment of something else: a secret that wanted to be told.
Fodor asked the others to let him persist a little longer, not just to delay making his failure public but to get a clearer sense of Alma’s method and motive. They agreed to continue as if nothing had happened. The investigators would pretend that the X-ray scans had not been developed. Everyone was dissembling now.
Part Three
The Ghost
‘The “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919)
Alma (standing) with her grandmother, Jessie, her sister, Doris, and her mother, Alice, circa 1912
Alma’s father and brother, Charles and Charlie, 1925
Les in uniform, circa 1916
FIFTEEN
Who is this little child?
On arrival at Walton House on Tuesday 17 May, Alma told Fodor that her belly had been ticking like a clock all morning. She and a friend were on a tram in Croydon when it started, she said. The friend searched Alma’s bag and clothes but found nothing: the sound came from somewhere inside her, below the waist.
In the preliminary hypnosis session, Alma sank back in the armchair with her head against the cushion, her eyes shut and her face blank. She was wearing a pleated skirt and a thick cardigan over a striped shirt with huge triangular lapels. Seated around her were the Countess, Helen Russell Scott, Florence Hall, Dr Wills, Laurie Evans and Fodor. Laurie and the Countess held Alma’s hands as she went into trance. Then a child came through.
‘My mummy, my mummy!’ cried Alma in the tiny, high-pitched voice of a ghost girl.
‘Who are you?’ asked the Countess.
‘My mummy. Me Pam.’
‘Who is your mummy? Is Mrs Fielding your mummy?’
‘No.’
‘Who are you coming to?’
‘My mummy come to see me.’
Alma started to breathe very fast and to roll her head from side to side.
‘Is Bremba there?’ asked the Countess. ‘Can you speak to us?’
‘Good afternoon,’ intoned Bremba.
‘Who is this little child?’ the Countess asked him.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘It is not Mrs Fielding’s?’
‘Oh no.’
When asked about the spirit tiger, Bremba assured them that it was very fond of Alma, and clawed her only in play. It sounded like an outsize version of a witch’s familiar; or like the pet leopard in Bringing Up Baby, a screwball romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant that had recently opened in London.
‘I would rather like it to scratch me,’ said the Countess. ‘Do you think that would be possible?’
Dr Wills agreed: ‘And I wouldn’t mind being scratched either, in the interests of science!’ The doctor was getting flippant, now that he knew about the fraud.
‘All the time you say you do not mind,’ said Bremba, reprovingly, ‘there is a secret fear in your heart.’
‘Is it still Jimmy that is concerned in the apports?’ asked Fodor.
‘Jimmy is just looking on,’ said Bremba. ‘Jimmy wishes to apologise for Sunday night.’
‘We know nothing about it,’ said Fodor. ‘What happened?’
‘Ask her.’
When Alma emerged from trance, Fodor asked what Jimmy had been up to. On Sunday, she said, she and her family went to see Dolores Smith give clairvoyance at Queen’s Hall. Afterwards, at Rose’s house in Haslemere Road, George and his brother William had been laughing about something that happened at the seance. Jimmy, as if in protest at their mockery, threw a cup and saucer across the room and smashed one of Rose’s dinner plates.
Fodor noted the return of Jimmy’s aggression: ‘As a scapegoat, Jimmy was still very useful. The incident spoke eloquently of Mrs Fielding’s instinct for retaliation which was, perhaps, the basic motive of all Poltergeist phenomena.’ It was obvious to him that Alma had herself thrown the plate, the cup, the saucer. But it was strange that she was angry with George, her accomplice, for laughing at the supernormal. She seemed confused and defensive. Perhaps she sensed that she had been found out.
To prove where Alma stowed the apports as she was being searched, Fodor considered instructing the female investigators to feel for hidden objects under her labia while she was undressing, but he guessed that they would not go along with this. Instead, he asked them to make Alma’s manoeuvres more difficult by holding her hands as they pulled on her tights in the library. She would then be obliged to massage the apports up from her underwear while she was in the seance room, with everyone watching. Fodor speculated about the ‘quite unusual muscular agility’ with which she must be manipulating the objects. His curiosity was acquiring a sexually inquisitive edge, edging further into voyeurism.
While naked in the library with the female searchers that afternoon, Alma swung a leg into the air – so high that she was almost doing the splits – and rested her outstretched limb on a chair so that Mrs Kelly, the Institute’s treasurer, could see into the hollow at the top of her thigh. It was a defiant self-exposure, an angry answer to the investigators’ suspicions. Mrs Kelly and the Countess dressed Alma, pulling a pair of tights on to her, tucking in her vest and adjusting her suspenders – it had been agreed that she must not be allowed to touch herself in any way. Dr Wills came in to the library to fasten the customary bandages.
In the large seance room at 4 p.m., Alma complained of discomfort. The tights were too small, she said, and were cutting into her. She tugged at them irritably as she sat down. She remarked that the atmosphere in the room was strange. ‘She fairly well suggested that we are thinking of her vagina as a hiding place,’ said Fodor. ‘She said that she feels a pain down below. She rather seemed to suspect my mind.’