‘My mummy,’ repeated the voice, beseechingly.
‘Can you tell us your mummy’s name?’
‘She is not come?’ said the child. ‘She said she will come.’
Alma gulped and her head fell forward. Then she spoke in her normal voice.
‘I have not been anywhere,’ she said. ‘I have an empty feeling.’
During Alma’s seance of Friday 17 June, everyone smelt violets: waves of scent, coming and going, in the seance room and the hall, near Alma and far from her.
Fodor noticed a scar on Alma’s upper lip, and asked how she had acquired it. She said that when she was seven years old a man – the older brother of a friend of her sister – had picked her up, thrown her into the air and kissed her as he caught her. It was a very hot day. The man’s dog, seized with jealous rage, flew at Alma’s face and bit her lip. The dog then foamed at the mouth, ran into the street and was killed by a passing car. The man took Alma to a hospital. ‘I always remember the needle ready to cauterise the wound,’ she said. ‘I was scared. I got out of the man’s arm and ran, the doctor running after me. Blood was everywhere.’
There was something heightened, hysterical, condensed about Alma’s story, a peculiar symmetry: the dog and then the girl in flight, their mouths spurting blood and spittle; the man who came at the girl with a kiss and the man who came at her with a needle. Maybe Fodor was both men to Alma, the seducer and the sadist, an admirer who put her in danger, a doctor who attacked her.
Fodor discussed Alma’s case with the American psychoanalyst Elizabeth Severn, with whom he had started to undergo a course of analysis himself.
Elizabeth Severn believed that psychic breakdown was often caused by a traumatic event. She had herself suffered a breakdown as a young woman in the American Midwest, and in the 1920s had travelled to Budapest to be treated by Sándor Ferenczi, a member of Freud’s circle. In their sessions, she and Ferenczi uncovered a horrific series of events in her past, so hideous as to be barely believable. It seemed that her father had sexually assaulted her, pimped her out to other men, drugged her, and forced her to shoot a man dead. Ferenczi speculated that the girl had survived these horrors by splitting herself into separate personalities: a hurt child self, a caretaker self, and a soulless, mechanical body.
As a medic in the Great War, Ferenczi had seen the effects of violent shock on soldiers. As a psychoanalyst in Hungary, he found very similar symptoms in patients who had been sexually assaulted as children. ‘Sexual trauma as the pathogenic factor cannot be valued highly enough,’ he wrote in 1932. ‘Even children of very respectable, sincerely puritanical families, fall victim to real violence or rape much more often than one had dared to suppose. The immediate explanation – that these are only sexual phantasies of the child, a kind of hysterical lying – is unfortunately made invalid by the number of such confessions, e.g. of assaults upon children, committed by patients actually in analysis.’
Ferenczi died in 1933, his pioneering work on trauma and sexual abuse unpublished in English. Elizabeth Severn had by then moved to London, where she outlined his findings in her book The Discovery of Self. ‘The importance of trauma as a specific and almost universal cause of Neurosis,’ she wrote, ‘was first impressed on me by Ferenczi, who, probing deeply, had found it present in nearly all his cases. He thus resurrected and gave new value to an idea which had once, much earlier, been entertained by Freud, but which was discarded by him in favour of “phantasy”, as the explanation of the strange tales or manifestations given by his patients.’ Freud held that the psyche was shaped by childhood sexual fantasies, which should not be mistaken for facts.
In her book, Severn explained the theory of trauma that Ferenczi had formulated in his sessions with her. After a severe emotional shock, she said, ‘The psyche breaks, is fragmented into bits too small for any one of them to retain anything more than its own tiny portion of the total catastrophe. There is no memory of the event because the shock is too great.’ Ferenczi speculated that those patients who had experienced the ‘little death’ of trauma acquired a kind of psychic sensitivity, as if they had become revenants from another sphere. Severn adopted this idea, arguing that the splintering of the self created the gaps and elisions that made it possible to move between planes. She explained to Fodor that Alma’s reported losses of memory, vision, mobility – the ambulatory amnesias, the blindness, the paralyses, the sense that her soul had left her body – might reflect a blank in her psyche, an erasure caused by shock.
‘All dreams are true,’ said Mrs Severn, ‘and but the ghosts of our pasts.’
‘Was your childhood happy?’ Fodor asked Alma on Tuesday afternoon.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘except that I was blamed for everything. My mother blamed me, but my father used to stick up for me. Doris, my sister, who is three years older, was preferred by my mother. Her suggestions were always taken in place of mine. If I bought anything for Mother for her birthday and my sister also did, she would turn to me to say, “Isn’t Doris a good girl – look what she bought for me.” She would not say to my sister, “Look what Alma bought for me.” It hurt me very much.’ Alma had this in common with the Countess: a mother and older sister so close that they shut her out.
Alma gave Fodor three sketches that she had made over the weekend. She had drawn them while in trance, she said. One depicted a church south of Croydon, near a pub that she had visited on Sunday. Another showed a woman holding a child. The third was of a dark, bearded man in a hat, with closed eyes, whose leering face she said that she had seen in a vision while sitting with Rose by the church.
Fodor asked Alma about her dreams. In one recurrent dream, she told him, she had to enter a cave alone. She would scrape the sand from the cave mouth and inside find a message in a foreign language on a piece of crumbling yellow parchment. ‘I must find someone to understand this,’ she would think. The air in the cave was thick with the smell of fungus.
Fodor asked about her sexual experiences. She told him that she had cried hysterically and fainted when Les first tried to have intercourse with her. She said that she had often longed to be a nun: when she was a young child; then at the age of fifteen or sixteen; and again when she was twenty-three, when her son died. ‘I just wanted to get away from everything.’ She told him that though George was in love with her, and very jealous of other men, he had always been a ‘gentleman’ – in other words, they had not slept together. Alma, Les and George were effectively frozen in their love triangle, each of them separate and alone.
Only four sitters convened for that day’s seance: Fodor, Mrs Kelly (the Institute’s treasurer), Mrs Taylor (the librarian) and the Countess, who had just returned to London from Florence.
Soon after four o’clock, Alma spoke in the voice of Bremba. ‘I would like to tell you,’ he said, ‘that the vision she saw on Sunday was a gentleman belonging to the church she was near on that day. He was hung for interfering with small children. She was probably sitting on the spot where one of the outrages took place. Tell her he will not harm her.’
Alma’s head drooped, lifting as she returned to consciousness.
‘Do you remember anything?’ asked Fodor.