At Alma’s request, Fodor fetched the X-ray scans from the library and showed them to her. The apports were black against her pale ribs. They looked more solid than the bones in her body.
SEVENTEEN
All dreams are true
‘Les is cross with you,’ Alma told Fodor the next Thursday, 2 June. ‘He says you have been giving me the suggestion that I bite him.’
Fodor expressed astonishment: ‘Why should I suggest such a thing?’
‘Oh, I’m only teasing. But every time he comes near me I want to bite his neck. The other night I was sitting on his knee and Jean was on his other knee and I could hardly stop myself from biting him. I can’t think why.’ Jean, George’s niece and Rose’s daughter, was now fifteen.
Alma said that, as she was preparing for bed, a coat hanger had flown out of the wardrobe and just missed Les’s head.
Fodor took Alma’s warnings seriously. In his notes he observed: ‘A woman who can deliberately burn her neck can deliberately bite her husband’s neck at night and suck his blood. I predict that this will, eventually, come to pass.’ He was afraid that the vampire fantasy might even be a prelude to murder.
At Walton House a few days later Alma told Fodor that she often stayed awake at night, waiting for the bat or the incubus. One afternoon she had been overcome by a sudden longing, and had been unable to resist biting George’s neck. She seemed to be turning vampiric: hostile, sexualised, thirsty for blood. She showed Fodor her arms. There were tiny red points on the skin, in groups of three.
The poltergeist action in Beverstone Road picked up again. A jug hopped off a pedestal in the hall, a wine decanter smashed in the dining room, a cup and saucer leapt from Alma’s hand. While lying in the bath one Sunday morning, Les heard a deep voice calling him – ‘Les!’ – from outside the door.
Alma’s eyesight had started to fail, she informed Fodor as she arrived at the Institute on Friday 10 June, squinting. She could hardly see him or his colleagues. Everything was going dark.
While Alma was under hypnosis on the sofa, Fodor told her that her loss of sight was a repetition of her last episode of blindness, in 1929. She hated the sight of somebody or something, and because she couldn’t expel this person or thing from her life she made herself blind so as not to see it. If she would only admit the cause to herself, her eyes would begin to improve. He urged her to remember on waking what had happened nine years ago to trigger her loss of sight. Fodor was drawing on Freud’s argument that a disowned memory could return as a physical symptom: if the memory was put into words, the symptom might disappear.
When Alma came round, he asked her whether her vision was any better.
‘Worse,’ she replied.
He asked if anything significant had happened before she last went blind. All Alma could think of, she said, was the death of her baby. But that was twelve years ago. On Sunday she visited his grave, she added; it made her very sad. She had started to visit the cemetery in secret. ‘I never tell my husband when I go to graveyards,’ Alma said. ‘I don’t know why I conceal the fact. He only said the other day: you never go now to baby’s grave. I did not tell him that I always go up there.’
Fodor asked her what was going on at home. Alma said that she and Les had argued about money. The man who was subletting the café that she used to run in Thornton Heath had failed to pay the rent, and the landlord was claiming the arrears from the Fieldings. Les was angry.
Fodor told her that she hated the sight of her husband and as she could not blot him out, she blotted out her own vision. Alma went pale. She protested that she loved Les.
Over the phone on Saturday, Fodor told Alma, ‘You would be better off by hating a little more and loving a little less.’ He explained: ‘By repressing hatred, we bottle it up. Instead of being spent in a burst of temper, it causes an inward pressure.’
The next time that she visited Walton House, Alma had recovered her sight. Fodor was relieved that at least one of his interventions had worked. He wrote to Eileen Garrett, who was on holiday in the south of France, to tell her of his success: ‘I think I have saved her from getting a renewed outbreak of the hysterical blindness which she had 9 years ago.’ Eileen, who had donated money to the Institute to research Alma’s case, replied: ‘I am glad you are taking care of her.’
Fodor solved some of the mysteries of Alma’s other phenomena. He learnt that the magically rising marks on her arms and back were characteristic of dermatographic urticaria, a disorder in which light scrapes on the skin produced temporary weals. The scratches sometimes rose and reddened after a delay of a few seconds or minutes, creating the illusion that they appeared spontaneously. As for her inflating belly, a Hungarian friend – a professor of medicine at Harvard University – told Fodor that Alma might, consciously or unconsciously, be swallowing air and using muscular contractions to push up her diaphragm, a condition known as aerophagia.
The immediate crisis in Europe had passed by June – it emerged that there was no significant build-up of German troops on the Czech border – but anti-Semitic feeling continued to spread across the continent. In Budapest the government imposed stringent racial classifications, barring Jews from the civil service and restricting their economic rights. In Berlin, civilians attacked Jews in the streets. In London, fighting broke out when fascists paraded through a Jewish neighbourhood in the East End.
On 11 June the former foreign secretary Anthony Eden repeated his warnings to the prime minister. ‘Retreat is not always the path to peace,’ he told Chamberlain. ‘The world is saying we’re yellow. There must always be a point at which we must make a stand.’
Fodor realised that Alma was still in a fragile state, perhaps on the edge of a breakdown. Since the Countess was on holiday, he let Helen Russell Scott take the lead in the next seances. Miss Scott was so suggestible, or sensitive, that even after the revelations of the X-ray she saw spirits around Alma.
‘Come along,’ said Miss Scott, discerning a female figure next to Alma at the seance of 14 June, ‘take better hold of her. Can you talk to us?’
Alma tried to speak but Fodor and Miss Scott could hear only a low murmur.
‘Come along, friend. Try again,’ said Miss Scott. She put her fingers to Alma’s pulse.
‘Greeting, my brother,’ said Alma.
‘Greeting,’ said Fodor. ‘Who is it?’
‘Mevanwe. I cannot get near my brother.’
It was the Indian girl whom Bremba had described. She told the sitters that she had died five years earlier, aged sixteen. She said that she was frightened.
‘Why have you been attracted to the medium?’ asked Fodor.
‘Because her soul is dead.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘She cast her own soul out.’
Miss Scott felt the girl fade. Alma’s face and body relaxed. Miss Scott sensed another presence. ‘Something else here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is.’ She stared at Alma. ‘Yes, come along. You are with friends. You are all right.’
A thin, high voice came from Alma: ‘Mummy.’
‘You want your mummy,’ said Miss Scott. ‘You are all right. Don’t be frightened.’