‘Maybe she is frightened to know something,’ said Bremba. ‘Some vague memory must hold her.’
Fodor tried to impress on Bremba how important it was for Alma to retrieve her memories.
The Countess ignored this. ‘What I really want to know is, are you only there when you are talking to us?’ she asked Bremba. ‘What happens when the medium wakes? Where are you then?’
‘I pass beyond,’ said Bremba.
‘Where to? To sleep?’
Bremba did not reply. The Countess tried another tack: ‘Tell me, are you a spirit?’
‘You call us spirits,’ said Bremba.
‘But what do you call yourselves?’
‘We are body.’
Bremba brought the session to an end. ‘I am going,’ he said, and then, ‘I think the medium remembers…’ Alma screamed again, first covering her face with her hands and then, screaming still, flinging herself across the chair.
On coming round, Alma said that she remembered nothing at all.
In the library afterwards Alma mentioned that she had asked her mother whether anything bad had happened to her in childhood. Her mother had replied that Alma twice came home late from school, at 8 p.m., saying that a man had given her sweets. Perhaps Alma’s mother was pointing away from the house with this story, admitting to the possibility of an attack while denying any responsibility for it.
It had been Bremba who introduced the idea of a childhood assault, with his account of the hanged man, and Alma had gestured towards confirming it with her screams and half-memories, the swelling in her throat. But Fodor could not be sure. Hoping to obtain proof that his theory was accurate, he asked Alma if she would agree to an injection of scopolamine, a drug used as a truth serum. Alma said that she would have to discuss it with Les.
At home that night, she said, she woke up screaming.
The Countess had had enough: of Fodor’s theories and of Alma’s suffering. Appalled by the proposal that they inject Alma with a serum, she told Fodor that he must suspend the seances. The Countess was stepping in to shield her friend as well as the Institute, calling a halt to a dangerous game.
Fodor reluctantly conceded that Alma could do with a rest. He needed one too. At Walton House on Tuesday 5 July he suggested to Alma that she take a break until September, reminding her that the Institute would in any case be closed in August. She became very anxious. Fodor noticed a ‘slight wildness’ in her behaviour, and she told him that she had a swelling under her arm that might be cancer. She let him feel it. Fodor, afraid that her feelings might be manifesting as a tumour, urged her to visit the hospital.
At 6 p.m., half an hour after she left, Alma called Fodor from a public telephone box in great distress. She said that she had ‘mentally’ listened to him and the Countess talking about her. She had heard him say that just because one phenomenon was genuine, it did not follow that they all were. She said that he had spoken of an incident in which he held her hands, and that she had heard them discussing the Institute’s money problems. Why had Fodor not told her, she asked, that he thought it was all a fake? And why hadn’t he told her about the financial difficulties? She would willingly have kept coming for free.
Fodor was unsettled by the accuracy of Alma’s account. After she left the building (or after he believed that she had left the building), he and his colleagues had sat in the office talking about the Institute’s hardship and Alma’s phenomena, much as she described.
Fodor told her that she had imagined the conversation because she was upset about the enforced holiday. Alma replied that she had plainly heard the discussion in her mind.
Fodor rang Alma the next day, telling her that she could come to the Institute to talk any time. She had had an awful evening, she said. All the dirty crockery piled on the kitchen table smashed itself to pieces. She went to watch Les play in a darts match, but people kept getting up and moving away from her, saying that someone had pinched them. Glasses kept smashing. She did not dare stay.
At the Institute the following week, the council convened without Fodor to discuss Alma Fielding’s case. The Countess spoke out against Fodor, criticising his bizarre theories, his desire to inject Alma with drugs, and his unregulated use of psychoanalytic techniques. She said that he had even wanted the investigators to take Alma to the Tower of London and encourage her psychically to steal the Crown Jewels. The council, which included Wilfred Becker, Gerald Wills, Helen Russell Scott, Eric Cuddon and Shaw Desmond, decided to terminate the investigation.
When Fodor was informed of the decision, he was furious. He blamed the council’s fear of the ‘prim, elderly’ lady members, who found his psychoanalytic approach ‘indecent’. Defiantly, he began writing up a report of the Fielding case, aware that the other investigators would not approve of his conclusions. ‘Findings such as these were highly distasteful to my colleagues and superiors in the II,’ he said, ‘as they would weaken the spiritist hypothesis and also brought in elements that offended the high moral tone of the members of the board.’
Fodor wrote to Eileen Garrett, who was on holiday on the Côte d’Azur, telling her that the Fielding case was closed and offering to return the money that she had donated. He was bullish about his findings. ‘I have now written nearly 5,000 words of the Fielding report,’ he told Eileen. ‘It is the most fascinating investigation of our days.’ He said that he wished that he and his family could join her in Juan-les-Pins, as she had suggested, but they could not afford to travel so far south.
Fodor’s libel suit would not be heard now before October, as the courts were soon to break for the summer. At the end of July he left London with Irene and Andrea for a holiday in Brittany, on the northern coast of France.
Fodor’s theory rested on his belief that Alma had been sexually assaulted as a child. It was possible, he knew, that she had not suffered such an assault at all. She may simply have played along with him, responding to his need for a psychoanalytic solution to her story as nimbly as she had responded to his need for supernatural adventures. Alma was reactive, metamorphic, wildly adaptive; throughout the investigation she had become whatever others suggested or required. And yet this very fluidity might point to the truth of Fodor’s hypothesis.
Sándor Ferenczi, after his analysis of Elizabeth Severn, had concluded that the victims of childhood assault were unusually compliant. An early sexual trauma created a fractured personality with no centre, unmoored and suggestible. When a child was abused, explained Ferenczi in 1932, ‘he feels enormously confused, in fact, split – innocent and culpable at the same time – and his confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken.’ Such children were compelled ‘to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these’. In later life they responded to figures of authority in a similar way. They developed a hypersensitive, porous, almost clairvoyant capacity to anticipate, interpret and fulfil the desires of others. They had a remarkable power to assess their environment and calculate the best way to survive. Even their memories were malleable.
By this theory, Alma’s capacity to manipulate herself and others was a product of the same history that left her susceptible to liminal experience. Her vigilance, developed because she had lived in circumstances of danger, made her an expert deceiver. Her compulsive lies were symptoms of her assault, and the confusion of her memories its curse. All the apparent obstacles to believing her were, in Ferenczi’s formulation, recast as marks of abuse.