But then the curtains were drawn back. Mrs. Mason, looking decidedly the worse for wear, announced she would give a few individual messages. The audience leaned forward: this was the moment they’d been waiting for. Their turn.
It was the usual trite, banal rubbish. At one point she looked directly at Paul, and he tensed, afraid she was going to give him one of her messages, afraid, irrationally afraid, of what the message might be. At that moment he realized this visit of his was not curiosity about Mrs. Mason, or a trip down memory lane, but something more driven, less rationaclass="underline" part of the endless, exhausting search for Kenny, which still went on even though he knew there was no hope of finding him. He wasn’t detached from this: he was just like all the other people here.
He was afraid of her. It was a relief when she turned her attention to the back row, to yet another middle-aged woman with a missing son. A voice began to speak, every bit as convincing as Albert, but offering no banal message of comfort: no reassuring platitudes. The beach at Dunkirk, dunes being sprayed with bullets, sand kicked up into the air, cracked lips, no water, his friend dead in the sand beside him — not a British plane in sight. Where were they? Where were the British planes? The words dwindled to an angry mutter before finally winding down into silence. Seconds later, along came Shirley Temple and “The Good Ship Lollipop.”
But now, suddenly, a commotion broke out near the back of the room. People started turning round, trying to peer into the darkness, one or two of them even stood on their chairs. A tall woman, wearing mannish tweeds, strode down the aisle, shining a forbidden torch on the stage — and not a blackout torch either: a proper prewar flashlight. Mrs. Mason ran back into the cabinet and, with a rattle of brass rings, pulled the curtains across. No sooner had she disappeared than the tall woman leapt onto the platform, pulled the curtains apart and revealed an empty chair. Mrs. Mason was on her knees, waving a doll with some kind of vest or camisole attached, and still prattling away in that awful cutesy-pie voice as if unable to grasp what was happening.
The tall woman grabbed the doll, Mrs. Mason refused to let go, and an ugly tug of war ensued in which the doll’s head came off. Everybody was on their feet now, riveted by the squalid battle. At last, Mrs. Mason managed to wrench herself free and again ran back into the cabinet, where she could be seen trying to stuff the doll’s head up her skirt. At that moment the overhead lights came on, dazzling everybody. Transfixed by the sudden glare, Mrs. Mason was still for a moment, then leapt out of the cabinet, roaring with anger.
The tall woman took a step back, but persisted. “Come on, give it to me, I know you’ve got it. Come on, I want to see what you’ve got up there.”
“What, and show everybody me knickers? I will not. There’s men in here, case you haven’t noticed.”
The tall woman had been joined on the platform by three men, who crowded round Mrs. Mason, demanding to see the doll. Turning swiftly, she picked up the chair and began wielding it as a battering ram. “I’ll brain the whole bloody lot of you, bloody buggering bastards!” And then she simply yelled, a great battle cry that seemed to require neither words nor intake of breath.
Paul was pushing his way up the steps onto the platform. Perhaps he should have been pleased to see such cynical fraud exposed, but three men jostling one woman was altogether too much like bullying for his taste. Surprising himself, he fought his way to her side. “Mrs. Mason.” Her eyes stared at him without recognition. So she had been in a trance — there was no other way she could have forgotten that encounter downstairs. “Calm down, now. Deep breaths.” He turned. “And you lot, back off. Can’t you see the state she’s in?”
After a while, she seemed to grow calmer. She would get undressed, she said, but only if the men left the room.
The three men who’d been crowding her looked at each other, but made no move. A few others, Paul included, retreated a few paces, though nobody moved very far. Mrs. Mason squatted down and pulled her dress and petticoat over her head. Tangled up in the folds was the doll’s head, which fell and rolled across the floor, its china-blue eyes startling in the bristling light. Mrs. Mason tried to kick it behind the cabinet, but was too slow. The tall woman pounced, scooped up the doll’s head and held it up for all to see. “There.”
The sight seemed to enrage Mrs. Mason, who began tearing at her clothes. One enormous breast, the size of a savoy cabbage, escaped her camisole and, despite swearing no man on earth should ever see her knickers, she was now whirling them about above her head, looking, Paul thought, like a corpulent version of Liberty leading the people.
“I’m keeping this.” The tall woman waved the doll’s head at her. “It’s evidence.”
“You give that here, it’s mine.” And, seizing the chair again, Mrs. Mason launched another attack.
Paul tried to restrain her, but she was so beside herself he was beginning to think the whole farcical episode might end in murder.
A short, stocky man with a military mustache said: “Why doesn’t somebody ring the police?”
“No,” Mrs. Mason said. “There’s no need for that.”
Slowly, she put down the chair and, after a minute or so, began to get dressed. Her lips were blue. Then, just as everybody started to relax, she charged again, seized the doll’s head and ran out of the room.
Paul followed her and found her in the downstairs room, with a group of supporters gathered round her, like drones round a termite queen. One woman pressed a cup of tea into her hands; another fanned her with a copy of Spiritualist News, while the randomly chosen one held out a dress for her to put on.
There was a stir in the shop. The forces of law and order had arrived in the form of one bewildered police constable with a fresh, young, freckly face. There wasn’t a great deal he could do. Nobody wanted to press charges, though the one man she’d caught a glancing blow with the chair was still bleeding. The tall woman introduced herself as Miss Pole, which amused Paul, though no one else seemed to think it was funny. Fraud was mentioned. Mrs. Mason turned her eyes to the ceiling. “As God is my witness, I know nothing about it.”
“What do you mean, you know nothing about it?” Miss Pole demanded. “You had a doll’s head in your knickers.”
Wisely, Mrs. Mason burst into tears. One of the attendant women touched Paul’s arm. “Eh, dear God, that poor woman, she’s a martyr, she is. She’s been to prison, you know.”
Paul could quite believe it.
People were starting to leave. Nobody asked for their money back, perhaps feeling that one way or another they’d had a good show. The policeman left. Somehow, in all the turmoil, the doll’s head had vanished, no doubt safely ensconced in somebody else’s knickers. And not only the doll; cheesecloth, broomsticks, papier-mâché heads: all spirited away. Miss Pole glared at Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Mason smirked. She’d got away with it, not for the first time, nor probably the last.
Paul looked around for Angela and Sandra, but they’d gone, so he set off to walk alone. A raid had started, so there was no question of going back to the studio just yet. He was alternately amused and nauseated by the events of the evening, or so at first he told himself, but then as he walked, he realized he was once more separating himself from the experience, which at times he’d found deeply disturbing. Albert’s voice, the young man dying on the beach at Dunkirk, stood out from what would otherwise have been blatant fraud, and nothing else but fraud. Papier-mâché heads on broomsticks, fishy cheesecloth — fishy in every sense of the word — but was that the whole truth? He didn’t think so. He thought she’d been doing something else, though he didn’t believe the something else had much to do with contacting the dead.