‘How can you account for the things which have happened?’ Laurie asked him.
‘I cannot account for them. I saw an unseen force at work. As regards spirits or ghosts, you can talk to me until Christmas.’
‘I like a good honest sceptic,’ said Eileen Garrett. ‘I am myself not sure where I am.’
Fodor asked Eileen if they could consult Uvani.
Mrs Garrett leant back in her chair, yawned, shook and quivered until finally the voice of Uvani emerged from her. Fodor explained the domestic situation to him.
‘I am an Oriental,’ said Uvani grandly, ‘and must bring an Oriental consciousness to bear on the problem.’
‘Do not let anybody believe you are a weak character,’ Uvani told Alma. ‘Don’t you any of you believe that you are dealing with a very weak, quiet little lady who is going to be put here or there. Stronger than Madame Fielding there is a subconscious point of view that will take her willy-nilly, that will not let her be happy unless she does follow it.’
Uvani told Les, ‘You are dealing unfortunately with a very strong submerged personality. There are times when Madame can be quite vicious and cruel.’ He asked: ‘Do you feel your wife loves you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Madame, do you feel sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Above all else?’
‘Yes,’ Alma repeated and then, more equivocally: ‘I have always respected my husband.’
Uvani assured Les that Alma’s psychic development need not threaten his authority. ‘She must not feel that she is an important and extraordinary person, too good to be her husband’s wife,’ the spirit guide recommended. ‘She is a wife, a companion, and a helpmate.’ Just that week in the divorce courts, the judge who dissolved the marriage of the clairvoyant Estelle Roberts observed that her husband had been jealous of her career. As a celebrated medium, Estelle had been lifted into a social sphere in which he had no part. Uvani was advising Les and Alma how to avoid such a fate.
He reminded Les that much of his power was illusory. ‘If you do not give her love, sympathy, I tell you she will take it. I do not tell you something you don’t know. You will find her using the cunning of ten thousand little kittens and you will find yourself deceived. What she will have done she will have completely forgotten.’
‘You are an agreeable man, my son,’ Uvani told Les, ‘generous, kind, you are a man with a very big heart. Why should she not love, respect and admire you, and want to do exactly what you want done?’
‘Madame,’ Uvani added, ‘what you do not know is that the things you have been hinting at can be really true. That is where the laugh is a little at you. This is a very serious moment.’ Uvani warned Alma that she might think that she was using ‘mischief’ to impersonate the supernatural, while in fact she had opened herself to a genuine possession. ‘What you do not know is that things are more serious than you think. You actually have a control.’
Uvani blessed the household and withdrew from Eileen’s body.
Eileen’s spirit guide had pulled off a spectacular act of negotiation, himself showing considerable cunning in his bid to hold together the Institute’s experiments and the Fieldings’ marriage. Uvani had warned Alma of the dangers of fraudulence while reassuring her that she was talented and powerful. He had tried to win over Les by appealing to his kindness and assuring him – man to man – that his authority could survive her adoption of a career.
Fodor was harsher with Alma when they were alone in the kitchen. He asked if she understood what Uvani had meant when he referred to her ‘mischief’. Alma said, ‘Not quite.’ Fodor told her that she ought to know – during the past week the researchers could have asked her some very embarrassing questions. There were punishments as well as rewards for following a psychic path, he said, and her ghastly night experiences were probably brought about by what she had done. If she didn’t keep away from mischief, he told Alma, there was no telling what would happen. She might think that she was riding the Devil, but it was possible that the Devil was riding her.
Alma was silent, and then said that she understood.
George, meanwhile, confided to Eileen that he was sleeping in Alma and Les’s room, at the foot of their bed. Les was so scared of being alone with Alma that he had overcome his jealousy and asked George to join them at night.
The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, a member of Freud’s inner circle, argued that the vampires, incubi and succubi of nightmares were projections of incestuous wishes. Dreams of vampires in particular, said Jones, indicated a longing to copulate with or consume the dead, a necrophiliac impulse often accompanied by the smell of rotting flesh. The dreamer, by attributing lust to rapacious spirits, was disavowing his or her own desires. By this theory, Alma’s night-time attacks revealed her suppressed feelings for someone in her past.
‘Dreams are disguised desires,’ explained Jones in On the Nightmare. ‘But when the distortion of the wish-fulfilment is insufficient to disguise from consciousness the nature of the repressed desire, then the sleep is broken and the subject wakes to his danger. Conflict of this fierce intensity never arises except over matters of sexuality. The panic-stricken terror stems from the dimly realised possibility that the forbidden desire is overmastering the rest of the self.’ In nightmares of this type, said Jones, the dreamer had just the experiences that Alma described: a sense of overwhelming dread, a feeling of weight on the chest, and helpless paralysis.
In ‘The Face’, one of E. F. Benson’s Spook Stories, a married woman dreams of a leering young stranger. ‘I shall soon come for you now,’ he warns. She tries to run from him and to scream for help, but finds herself paralysed and mute, with ‘the breath of that terrible mouth upon her’. She wakes screaming. On a visit to an art gallery soon afterwards she sees a seventeenth-century portrait of her assailant. She wonders whether she saw this painting when she was a child, and retained the image in ‘the mysterious unconsciousness, which flows eternally, like some dark underground river, beneath the surface of human life’. Early impressions could ‘fester or poison the mind like some hidden abscess’, she observes. ‘That might account for this dread of one, nameless no longer, who waited for her.’ She stops short of suggesting that the memory of a real assailant might have lodged in her mind.
Two days later, in the morning of Tuesday 24 May, Alma phoned Fodor to tell him that they had received an anonymous call. George had answered the telephone to a woman who informed him that Alma was a fraud, though probably an unconscious one. Alma said that it was terrible that George had taken the call: he was upset and angry.
She said to Fodor: ‘I feel there was something on the X-ray plate, wasn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ said Fodor. ‘When you come in we’ll talk about it.’
Fodor did not know who had telephoned the Fieldings’ house. Perhaps it was the Countess, who was about to travel to the Continent and would not return to the Institute until late June. She had objected in the past to Fodor’s attempts to hoodwink Alma, and might have wanted to warn her about his discoveries.
At Walton House, Fodor told Alma what they had found on the X-ray and on the dropped piece of cloth. She protested – weakly – that internally she was so small that it would be impossible for her to hide anything and that she never used linen as a ‘stopper’ except during her period. She asked what the caller had meant by ‘unconscious fraud’. Fodor explained that a second self, or alternate personality, could perpetrate a hoax without the knowledge of the conscious self.