Left alone with the child, she found that life soon improved. If you’d seen them together, said Lucas, you would never have guessed that the start of the girl’s life had been such an ordeal. Mother and child had moved to a different town, and were happy in their man-free household, in the same street as Lucas. Not perfectly happy, however, because the daughter, in her sixteenth year, had become ‘obsessed’ with the missing father. What had begun as curiosity became a need. She talked of having a ‘phantom pain’, the mother told Lucas. So often did the girl dream of her father – whose face she knew only from a single photo – that she had become convinced that he was trying to reach her. ‘But I really don’t want to see him,’ her mother said. ‘He might be dead, for all I know. And I wouldn’t care.’ She wanted to know what Lucas would do in her situation.
The man was not dead, Lucas knew. Sitting beside the woman, on a bench in the small park near where they lived, he could sense that the girl’s father was alive. ‘Wait a while longer,’ was what he advised. If the girl felt the same way when she passed sixteen, the mother could then take steps to find the man; she would not have to meet him, if he were to be found, as Lucas was sure he would be. The woman did what Lucas had counselled.
A few months later, walking through the park, Lucas saw, ahead of him on the path, the woman and her daughter, with a man of the woman’s age. Only the woman was talking; the man, at her side, nodded as he listened; the posture was penitential. This, Lucas understood at once, was the errant father; he had been forgiven, albeit not absolutely. For some time he had been living with another woman, but the love of his daughter and of her mother – a love that he had done his utmost to deny – had been doing its work in secret, as Lucas put it. Of course, Lucas had an image for it: the man’s new life had been a shoddy house, raised on land through which water had been flowing constantly, deep underground, undermining the foundations. And suddenly the house had collapsed, and the man had found himself standing in the light.
Such things happen sometimes, Lucas concluded. It could happen for me. But if my father did not come back, that wouldn’t necessarily be a worse outcome; sometimes one parent is better than two. My father had not been at all like the man in the story, as went without saying, he added.
•
A woman in Guildford confessed her sins to Lucas, at length. This was before he had set to work on making contact with her sinned-against husband. No sooner had Lucas taken his place at the table than the adulteress began to disburden herself; she seemed to think that the self-purging was a necessary preparation for exposure to supernatural scrutiny. She had been repeatedly unfaithful. Her work had taken her to trade fairs in distant cities, regularly, and she had availed herself of the opportunities for illicit pleasure that these gatherings always present to the participants. None of these liaisons had been of any significance beyond the immediately sexual, she insisted. After the birth of their second child, her husband had come to find her body unappetising. Eventually they had consulted a counsellor, but their physical intimacy remained desultory, then became non-existent. Her body’s appetites, however, had not dwindled; if anything, the opposite was the case. This was an inadequate excuse, she knew. She had despised herself after each encounter, and now she despised herself even more, even though her husband had never suspected anything, she was absolutely sure. From looking at her, said Lucas, nobody would have thought her sluttish. It was hard to describe her effectively, so bland and proper was the appearance. She had summoned him because, having never believed in ghosts ‘or anything of that sort’, she had recently come to feel that the house was inhabited by a presence that could only be the presence of her husband. It wasn’t that she had seen him or heard him – no, what she was talking about was a presence like that of a person who has just that moment left the room. ‘An invisible shadow’ was how she put it.
It was ridiculous, she knew, but she had come to feel that her husband might now know of things that had been unknown to him when he was alive. She needed to submit to his judgement, to confess to him as she should have confessed years ago.
Lucas asked her: ‘Are you certain that he never suspected?’
She was as certain as it was possible to be. Had he suspected, he would have confronted her, she said. He had not been a secretive man, she told Lucas, unaware that the statement made no sense. Her husband would not have believed that she could have been capable of such behaviour, she said. At times she herself found it hard to believe. But in certain situations she had become a different woman – someone she barely recognised and did not like.
Lucas understood her remorse, but confession, he advised her, was not necessarily a good thing. He deployed a metaphor: life as a vast lake, across which we are constantly moving, in the small vessel of the self. Think of our secrets as stones; the guilty secrets are heavy stones. They slow the vessel down; they increase the risk of foundering. In confessing, we drop these heavy stones overboard. The impulse to do this is especially strong as we approach the far shore, at the end of the voyage; the boat, made lighter, is more easily brought to land. Sometimes it is best to jettison the stones, but sometimes it is not, Lucas advised his client. In offloading the unwanted cargo, we might unsettle the boat, or even capsize it; when the stones strike the silt of the lake-bed, the water becomes muddied. It was an elaborate metaphor. Lucas, evidently, was pleased with it. And it seemed to have worked for the Guildford sinner; she was comforted; her guilt was made less burdensome.
Neither should she be fearful of the judgement of her husband, Lucas reassured her. Forgiveness was more likely than condemnation, because the perspective of the dead is so much wider and wiser than that of the living. Their vision partakes of the eternal, whereas ours is merely local. The dead rarely reproach, he told her. And indeed he detected no anger in the spirit of the husband. There was some sorrow; Lucas could not pretend otherwise. But sorrow was a thing of the flesh, and would soon fall away. He understood the temptation that had overcome his wife. The lapses were not even affairs; they were not of the essence.
The woman cried when Lucas and the husband were finished. People often cry when the contact comes to an end, but this woman’s weeping was operatic, said Lucas. She couldn’t tell Lucas how grateful she was. She insisted on making a meal for him – she was an excellent cook, she promised. Having been granted absolution, she seemed to give no further thought to the husband. A ‘terrible woman’ said Lucas, but he pronounced that adjective as if trying to put into words an unusual taste, a taste that might have been both pleasant and not. There might have been a slight smile. This was before Erin.
•
‘One can easily imagine a religion in which there are no doctrines, so that nothing is spoken,’ said Lucas one afternoon. ‘As Wittgenstein said,’ he added, though he knew, I’m sure, less of Wittgenstein than I do, which is not much. ‘The essence of religion can have nothing to do with what can be said,’ he pronounced.
•
When in her trance or dream state, Geraldine Cummins would transcribe the dictation of the dead at an extraordinary speed – on one occasion she wrote two thousand words in just seventy-five minutes. It was taken to be proof of the authenticity of her mediumship that Geraldine ordinarily wrote very slowly – it could take her as long as seven or eight hours to compose a mere thousand words.
•
In the depths of her trances, Catherine-Elise Müller – more widely known as Hélène Smith, the Surrealists’ ‘muse of automatic writing’ – received visions of life on Mars, and messages in the language of that planet, which she transcribed into her Martian script. This script was in fact a coded form of French, her native language. Each letter of the Martian alphabet corresponded to a French equivalent; the Martian syntax was the syntax of French. Hélène/Catherine-Elise maintained that she was the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette; her current low-level life was a punishment for misdemeanours committed when she had been the wife of Louis XVI. In y
et another existence she had been an Indian princess named Simandini. Why, Lucas wondered, did nobody ever claim to recall a previous life as a disease-ridden peasant in some benighted one-donkey village in the middle of nowhere, circa 1300?
•
The state of high sensitivity that was necessary to receive a signal often lasted for many hours after the conclusion of the session, Lucas informed me. It was an uncomfortable condition: the nerves had been exposed by a kind of wound, and it took time for the skin to thicken again. He had come back from Hereford, where a consultation had turned out to be especially arduous. Contact had been achieved, but this was one of those instances in which Lucas would, in retrospect, have preferred to fail. The client was another widow. It seemed that fear was primarily what had compelled her to ask for Lucas’s help. This woman, he knew within moments, had lived a life of complete subservience to her husband, a subservience in which violence had been involved. Every day, since the day of her husband’s death, she had been aware that he had not left, she told Lucas. She had not seen anything. Rather, she was the one who was being seen, as if there was always a camera hidden somewhere, she explained. Now that her husband had been raised to the heights of the spiritual world, she was being subjected to his constant scrutiny; she needed to know, via Lucas, that her continuing obedience was being recognised and approved.
Two sisters and two daughters were also in attendance; the fearfulness encompassed them as well. As soon as he started, Lucas was in the presence of a spirit of unusual malignity. What he detected was a fulmination of ill-will aimed at one of the wife’s sisters, and – even stronger – a despotic rapaciousness directed towards one of the daughters. ‘It was foul,’ said Lucas. For the wife, there was almost nothing – just a virtual wave of the hand, as she disappeared from his sight. It was difficult to find anything to say that would do the client any good. ‘He is glad that you are thinking of him,’ he reported. ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said to the widow – which she could choose to take as a message from the husband. What he wanted to say to them all was: ‘You’re finally off the hook.’
To recover, he went for a walk. By the river he found a bench to sit on. It already had an occupant – an elderly woman who said ‘Hello’ as he sat down, and then resumed her watching of the water. Smiling slightly, she watched the river as if seeing a procession in the distance, and Lucas, still ‘raw’, then felt himself to be struck by a ‘deluge of love’, in the centre of which sat the woman, who was thinking, he knew, of her son. Simple proximity to a grieving person sometimes was enough to make him conscious of a signal, albeit rarely one of such strength. It was an effort to remain silent, but he did not speak. One should never impose. Once, when he was young, he had been in a similar situation. In a park in London, he had found himself standing close to a woman who was weeping. So powerful had been the words that he had heard, and so powerful the impulse of compassion, that he had said something to her. The woman looked at him as if she had been poisoned, and screamed at him, and ran. At the time, he had only recently come to make use of his gift, but his trust in it was not yet robust. And so, suddenly presented with a message, he had immediately passed it on, without thought, in order to console, yes, but also to put his gift to the proof. ‘Inexcusable selfishness on my part,’ said Lucas.
•
Some half a million people expire in this country every year. And Lucas maintained that the dead typically remain within range for twelve months or so; the figure varied. Yet whenever Lucas tuned in, he did not hear a pandemonium of the dead. He heard – when he succeeded – only the voice, or the words, that he had been commissioned to hear. He never mentioned any problem of interference. One voice came through clearly. How did this work? It would appear that the spirit with whom contact was sought emanated a signal that was directed at the person or persons who had issued the summons to Lucas. We might think of the signal as being carried by a cable of some sort. The cable can be connected only to certain categories of people: spouses; lovers; close friends; relatives; occasionally, colleagues. We must surmise, however, that the voltage of the spiritual cable is so low that the communication arrives at its destination with insufficient power to be understood by the recipient. This is where Lucas and other such adepts give assistance. Positioning himself near the terminal, Lucas absorbed the signal and boosted it. He was a step-up transformer of the psychic network.
•
In 1918, Arthur Findlay, a stockbroker and justice of the peace, and recipient of the OBE in recognition of his work for the Red Cross during the war, attended a séance given by John Campbell Sloan in Glasgow. After participating in many more of Sloan’s séances, Findlay became convinced of the reality of spirit voices. In his book, On the Edge of the Etheric, or Survival After Death Scientifically Explained, which was published in 1931 and reprinted thirty times in the year that followed, and is still in print, Findlay proposed that recent advances in subatomic physics gave support to the claims of spiritualism. The universe is an immense complex of vibrations. Individual consciousness consists of the interaction of the vibrations of the mind and the vibrations of the body. At death, the vibrations of the mind enter a different environment, in which ‘etheric vibrations’ provide the matrix. The reviewer for Nature magazine was not persuaded by Findlay’s proposition, writing that Findlay ‘seems to have no appreciation of the implications underlying many of his remarks; no desire to see the phenomena described in accurate and scientific terminology.’ In addition to his books on spiritualism, Arthur Findlay also wrote a two-volume History of Mankind, and a survey of human development, The Curse of Ignorance, also in two volumes. As for John Campbell Sloan, he claimed that the voice in which he spoke during his trances was that of an American Indian named White Feather, who for some reason preferred to be addressed as ‘Whitey’. In discussing the uncanny accuracy of some of the things that Whitey relayed to him, Findlay assured his readers that an ‘eminent mathematician’ had calculated the probability of Whitey’s answers being the result of mere guesswork, and had arrived at odds of ‘5,000,000,000,000 to 1 against’.
•
‘But to talk of these things is like trying to play Bach while wearing oven gloves,’ proclaimed Lucas. His repertoire of similes and metaphors was extensive. They were presented to me like jewels on cushions. ‘Words pass through these mysteries like bullets through fog,’ he told me. ‘When I try to explain these things, I misrepresent them, necessarily. They require a language that none of us could speak.’ Or: ‘This is like trying to draw a diagram of the universe.’ Or: ‘I am not transposing these ideas into words – the ideas are the creation of words. The truth lies above the words, outside them.’ Cradling the infant Kit, he talked about the inadequacy of talk, and gazed into the eyes of the blissful speech-free baby. ‘We are slaves to words and the reason that proceeds from them,’ he said.
•
Much has been made of the Attwater case.
Having reason to believe that her husband, deceased eighteen months previously, was making attempts to contact her, Mrs Attwater, seventy-four, decided to avail herself of the services of Lucas Judd, whose name she had discovered in the course of an hour’s research at her local library. Various disturbances at home could be explained only, she had come to think, as incomplete transmissions from the Beyond. In the morning, certain objects were found in places other than where they had been left the night before; nothing major (a cup, a book, et cetera), but objects do not move themselves, do they? At night, and sometimes during the day, whispering could be heard, as if from the other side of a thin wall. The whispering became more frequent; the movement of the small domestic items was now occurring every two or three days. She was unable to make sense of what was happening; a professional was needed.
With Mrs Attwater’s husband, the signal was as powerful as any he had experienced, Lucas told me. Such was to be expected, when the marriage in question had been so long and so strong. Muriel’s cottage w
as a dilapidated old place, but of a decent size and with a fine view of St Michael’s Mount; she and Jack had lived there for more than half a century. They had few friends, she cheerfully told Lucas; the company of each other was all they needed. ‘We were always happy,’ she told him, serving tea in a burrow-like room that was as warm as a bakery; she would be even happier if Lucas were to confirm that Jack lived on in spirit, and was not suffering. This was what caused her such anxiety – that the disturbances might be a sign of some kind of torment. Her anxiety was erased within hours: the spirit of Jack was in torment only in so far as he was impatient for their separation to end, as it would, before long.
Once every two or three months, for more than two years, Lucas would drive to the cottage, and there, for an hour or more, through him, Muriel would commune with Jack. Such was the strength of their love, he had remained within range somewhat longer than was usual. Those afternoons, Lucas told me, were among the most rewarding experiences of his life.
Material reward ensued, but with consequent trouble. The happiness of Jack and Muriel was exclusive; neither had felt inclined to introduce any children, having observed too many fractious or imperfect families. So, there were no children, and no close friends, and a family of limited extension: one unmarried brother for Jack, resident in Germany with a male companion, and rarely seen; and a nephew – Melvin Dodd, property developer, father of Matthew and Rachel – for Muriel.
Melvin, on being informed, after the death of his aunt, that almost the entirety of her estate was to pass to this Lucas Judd character, and none of it to himself and his family, as he claimed he had been led to believe it would, decided to take action. His aunt, he maintained, being of fragile health and fluctuating mental capacity, had been coerced by this conman into disinheriting her natural beneficiary. The chief instruments of this coercion, he alleged, were the ‘séances’ that Mr Judd had conducted in the home of Mrs Attwater. In the final week of her life, Melvin Dodd submitted, his aunt had revealed to him that many of the ‘messages’ from Jack Attwater that Lucas Judd had supposedly intercepted were extremely critical of her nephew. It was Melvin Dodd’s contention that these supposedly posthumous utterances had been invented by Mr Judd in order to enrich himself by forcing his aunt – who would never, as Mr Judd had quickly ascertained, have done anything contrary to the will of her husband – to remove her family from her will and replace them with Judd himself. On her deathbed she had promised her nephew that she would do the right thing and pass everything on to her family. The concept of donatio mortis causa was invoked.
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