The Prestige (12 page)

Another minor aspect of the mystery was that none of the compound had rubbed off on me
during our brawl. His hands had definitely gripped my wrists, and I had distinctly felt
the slimy sensation, but no trace was left. I even recall sitting on the train returning
to London, holding my arm up to the light to discover if I could “see through” myself!

There was enough doubt, though, for feelings of guilt and contrition to dominate my
reaction to the news. In fact, confronted with the awfulness of the event I felt I could
not rest until I had been able to make some kind of amends.

Unfortunately, the newspaper obituaries had not been published until several days after
Angier had died, when the funeral had already been held. This event would have been an
ideal place for me to start the process of belated reconciliation with his family and
associates. A wreath, a simple note of condolence, would have paved the way for me, but it
was not to be.

After much thought I decided to approach his widow directly, and wrote her a sincere and
sympathetic letter.

In it I explained who I was, and how I, when much younger, had to my eternal regret fallen
out with her husband. I said that the news of his premature death had shocked and saddened
me and that I knew the whole magical community would feel the loss. I paid tribute to his
skills as a performer, and as an
ingénieur
of marvellous illusions.

I then moved on to what was for me the main thrust of the letter, but which I hoped would
seem to the widow to be an afterthought. I said that when a magician died it was customary
in the world of magic for his colleagues to offer to purchase whatever pieces of apparatus
there were for which the family might no longer have a use. I added that in view of my
long and troubled relationship with Rupert during his lifetime I saw it as a duty and a
pleasure to make such an offer now that he had died, and that I had considerable means at
my disposal.

With the letter sent, and presciently supposing that I could not necessarily count on the
widow's cooperation, I made enquiries through my contacts in the business. This was an
approach I also had to judge sensitively, because I had no idea how many of my colleagues
were as interested in getting their hands on Angier's equipment as I was. I assumed many
of them would be; I could not have been the only professional magician to have seen the
stunning performance. I therefore let it be known that if any of Angier's pieces were to
come on to the market I would not be uninterested.

Two weeks after I wrote to Angier's widow I received a reply, in the form of a letter from
a firm of solicitors in Chancery Lane. It said, and I transcribe it exactly:

My Dear Sir,

Estate of Rupert David Angier Esquire, Dec'd

Pursuant to your recent enquiry to our client, I am instructed to advise you that all
necessary arrangements for the disposal of the late Rupert David Angier's major chattels
and appurtenances have been made, and that you need not embark on further enquiries as to
their destination or enjoyment.

We anticipate instruction from our former client's estate as to the disposal of various
minor pieces of property, and these shall be made available through public auction, whose
date and place shall be announced in the usual gazettes.

In this we remain, Sir, yr. obedient servants, Kendal, Kendal & Owen

(Solicitors & Commissioners for Oaths)

I step forward to the footlights, and in the full glare of their light face you directly.

I say, “Look at my hands. There is nothing concealed within them.”

I hold them up, raising my palms for you to see, spreading my fingers so as to prove
nothing is gripped secretly between them. I now perform my last trick, and produce a bunch
of faded paper flowers from the hands you know to be empty.

It is 1st September 1903, and I say that to all intents and purposes my own career ended
with Angier's death. Although I was reasonably wealthy, I was a married man with children
and had an expensive and complicated way of life to sustain. I could not walk away from my
responsibilities, and so I was obliged to accept bookings so long as they were offered to
me. In this way I did not fully retire, but the ambition that had driven me in the early
years, the wish to amaze or baffle, the sheer delight of dreaming up the impossible, all
these left me. I still had the technical ability to perform magic, my hands remained
dexterous, and with Angier absent I was once again the only performer of The New
Transported Man, but none of this was enough.

A great loneliness had descended on me, one the Pact yet prevents me from describing in
full, except to say that I was the only friend I craved for myself. Yet I, of course, was
the only friend I could not meet.

I touch on this as delicately as I can.

My life is full of secrets and contradictions I can never explain.

Whom did Sarah marry? Was it me, or was it me? I have two children, whom I adore. But are
they mine to adore, really mine alone… or are they actually mine? How will I ever know,
except by the cravings of instinct? Come to that, with which of me did Olive fall in love,
and with whom did she move into the flat in Hornsey? It was not I who first made love to
her, nor was it I who invited her to the flat, yet I took advantage of her presence,
knowing that I too was doing the same.

Which of me was it who tried to expose Angier? Which of me first devised The New
Transported Man, and which of me was the first to be transported?

I seem, even to myself, to be rambling, but every word here is coherent and precise. It is
the essential dilemma of my existence.

Yesterday I was playing at a theatre in Balham, in south-west London. I performed the
matinée, then had two hours to wait before the evening show. As I often did at such times
I went to my dressing room, pulled the curtains to and dimmed the lights, closed and
locked the door, and went to sleep on the couch.

I awoke—

Did I wake at all? Was it a vision? A dream?

I awoke to find the spectral figure of Rupert Angier standing in my dressing room, and he
was holding a long-bladed knife in both hands. Before I could move or call out he leapt at
me, landing on the side of the couch and crawling quickly on top of me so that he was
astride my chest and stomach. He raised the knife, and held it with the point of the blade
resting above my heart.

“Prepare to die, Borden!” he said in his harsh and horrid whisper.

In this hellish vision it seemed to me that he barely weighed anything at all, that I
could easily flip him away from me, but fear was weakening me. I brought my hands up and
gripped his forearms, to try to stop him thrusting the knife fatally into me, but to my
amazement I found that he was still wearing the greasy compound that prevented my getting
a strong hold on him. The harder I tried, the more quickly my fingers slipped around his
disgusting flesh. I was breathing his foul stink, the rank smell of the grave, of the
boneyard.

I gasped in horror, because I felt the pointed blade pressing painfully against my breast.

“Now! Tell me, Borden! Which one are you? Which one?”

I could scarcely breathe, such was my fear, such was the terror that at any second the
blade would thrust through my ribcage and puncture my heart.

“Tell me and I spare you!” The pressure of the knife increased.

“I don't know, Angier! I no longer know myself!”

And somehow that ended it, almost as soon as it had begun. His face was inches away from
mine, and I saw him snarl with rage. His rancid breath flowed over me. The knife was
starting to pierce my skin! Fear galvanized me into valour. I swung at him once, twice,
fists across his face, battering him back from me. The deadly pressure on my heart
softened. I sensed an advantage, and swung both my arms at his body, clenching my fists
together. He yelled, swaying back from me. The knife lifted away. He was still on me, so I
hit him again, then thrust up the side of my body to unseat him. To my immense relief he
toppled away, releasing the knife as he fell to the floor. The deadly blade clattered
against the wall and landed on the floor, as the spectral figure rolled across the
floorboards.

He was quickly on his feet, looking chastened and wary, watching me in case I attacked
again. I sat up on the couch, braced against another assault. He was the phantasm of
ultimate terror, the spectre in death of my worst enemy in life.

I could see the lamp glinting through his semi-transparent body.

“Leave me alone,” I croaked. “You are dead! You have no business with me!”

“Nor I with you, Borden. Killing you is no revenge. It should never have happened. Never!”

The ghost of Rupert Angier turned away from me, walked to the locked door, then passed
bodily through it. Nothing of him remained, except a persistent trace of his hideous
carrion stench.

The haunting had paralysed me with fear, and I was still sitting immobile on the couch
when I heard beginners called. A few minutes later my dresser came to the room and tried
to get in, and it was his insistent knocking that at last roused me from the couch.

I found Angier's knife on the floor of the dressing room, and I have it with me now. It is
real. It was carried by a ghost.

Nothing makes sense. It hurts to breathe, to move; I still feel that pressing point of the
knife against my heart. I am in the Hornsey flat, and I do not know what to do or who I
really am.

Every word I have written here is true, and each one describes the reality of my life. My
hands are empty, and I fix you with an honest look. This is how I have lived, and yet it
reveals nothing.

I will go alone to the end.

I was only five at the time, but there's no doubt in my mind that it all really happened.
I know that memory can play tricks, especially at night, on a shocked and terrified child,
and I know that people patch together memories from what they think happened, or what they
wish had happened, or what other people later tell them had happened. All of this went on,
and it has taken many years for me to piece together the reality.

It was cruel, violent, unexplained and almost certainly illegal. It wrecked the lives of
most of the people involved. It has blighted my own life.

Now I can tell the story as I saw it take place, but tell it as an adult.

#############

My father is Lord Colderdale, the sixteenth of that name. Our family name is Angier, and
my father's given names were Victor Edmund; my father is the son of Rupert Angier's only
son Edward. Rupert Angier, The Great Danton, was therefore my great-grandfather, and the
14th Earl of Colderdale.

My mother's name was Jennifer, though my father always called her Jenny at home. They met
when my father was working for the Foreign Office, where he had been throughout the Second
World War. He was not a career diplomat, but for health reasons he had not entered the
military but volunteered instead for a civil post. He had read German Literature at
university, spent some time in Leipzig during the 1930s, and so was seen as possessing a
skill useful to the British Government in wartime. Translation of messages intercepted
from the German High Command apparently came into it. He and my mother met in 1946 on a
train journey from Berlin to London. She was a nurse who had been working with the
Occupying Powers in the German capital, and was returning to England at the end of her
tour of duty.

They married in 1947, and around the same time my father was released from his post at the
Foreign Office. They came to live here in Caldlow, where my sister and I were eventually
born. I don't know much about the years that passed before we came into the world, or why
my parents left it so long before having a family. They travelled a great deal, but I
believe the driving force behind it was an avoidance of boredom, rather than a positive
wish to see different places. Their marriage was never entirely smooth. I know that my
mother briefly walked out during the late 1950s, because one day many years later I
overheard a conversation between her and her sister, my Auntie Caroline. My sister Rosalie
was born in 1962, and I followed in 1965. My father was then nearly fifty, and my mother
was in her late thirties.

Like most people, I can't recall much about my first years of life. I remember that the
house always seemed cold, and that no matter how many blankets my mother piled on top of
my bed, or how hot was my hot-water bottle, I always felt chilled through to the bone.
Probably I am remembering just one winter, or one month or one week in one winter, but
even now it seems like always. The house is impossible to heat properly in winter; the
wind curls through the valley from October to the middle of April. We have snow coverage
for about three months of the year. We always burnt a lot of wood from the trees on the
estate, and still do, but wood isn't an efficient fuel, like coal or electricity. We lived
in the smallest wing of the house, and so as I grew up I really had little idea of the
extent of the place.

When I was eight I was sent away to a girls’ boarding school near Congleton, but while I
was little I spent most of my life at home with my mother. When I was four she sent me to
a nursery school in Caldlow village, and later to the primary school in Baldon, the next
village along the road towards Chapel. I was taken to and from the school in my father's
black Standard, driven carefully by Mr Stimpson, who with his wife represented our entire
domestic staff. Before the Second World War there had been a full household of servants,
but all that changed during the war. From 1939 to 1940 the house was used partly to
accommodate evacuees from Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, and partly as a school for the
children. It was taken over by the RAF in 1941, and the family has not lived in the main
part of the house since. The part of it in which I live is the wing where I grew up.

If there had been any preparations for the visit, Rosalie and I were not told what they
were, and the first we knew about it was when a car arrived at the main gate and Stimpson
went down to let it in. This was in the days when Derbyshire County Council was using the
house, and they always wanted the gates locked at weekends.

The car that drove up to the house was a Mini. The paint had lost its shine, the front
bumper was bent from a collision, and there was rust around the windows. It was not at all
the sort of car that we were used to seeing call at the house. Most of my parents’ other
friends were apparently well-off or important, even during this period when our family had
fallen on relatively hard times.

The man who had been driving reached into the back seat of the Mini, and pulled out a
little boy, just now waking up. He cradled the boy against his shoulder. Stimpson
conducted them politely to the house. Rosalie and I watched as Stimpson returned to the
Mini to unload the luggage they had brought with them, but we were told to come down from
the nursery and meet the visitors. Everyone was in our main sitting room. Both my parents
were dressed up as if it was an important occasion, but the visitors looked more casual.

We were introduced formally, as we were used to; my family took social manners seriously,
and Rosalie and I were well versed in them. The man's name was Mr Clive Borden, and the
boy, his son, was called Nicholas, or Nicky. Nicky was about two, which was three years
younger than me and five years younger than my sister. There did not appear to be a Mrs
Borden, but this was not explained to us.

From my own researches I have subsequently found out a little more about this family. I
know for instance that Clive Borden's wife had died shortly after the birth of her baby.
Her maiden name was Diana Ruth Ellington, and she came from Hatfield in Hertfordshire.
Nicholas was her only son. Clive Borden himself was the son of Graham, the son of Alfred
Borden, the magician. Clive Borden was therefore the grandson of Rupert Angier's greatest
enemy, and Nicky was his great-grandson, my contemporary.

Obviously, Rosalie and I knew nothing of this at the time, and after a few minutes Mama
suggested that we might like to take Nicky up to our nursery and show him some of our
toys. We meekly obeyed, as we had been brought up to do, with the familiar figure of Mrs
Stimpson on hand to look after us all.

What then passed between the three adults I can only guess at, but it lasted all the
afternoon. Clive Borden and his boy had arrived soon after lunchtime, and we three
children played together, uninterrupted, all afternoon until it was almost dark. Mrs
Stimpson kept us occupied, leaving us to play together when we were happy to do so, but
reading to us or encouraging us to try new games when we showed signs of flagging. She
supervised toilet visits, and brought us snacks and drinks. Rosalie and I grew up
surrounded by expensive toys, and to us, even as children, it was clear that Nicky was not
used to such excess. With adult hindsight I imagine the toys of two girls were not all
that interesting to a two-year-old boy. We got through the long afternoon, however, and
I've no memory of squabbles.

What were they talking about downstairs?

I realize that this meeting must have started as one of the occasional attempts our two
families have made to patch up the row between our ancestors. Why they, we, could not
leave the past to fester and die I do not know, but it seems deep in the psychological
make-up of both sides to need to keep fretting over the subject. What could it possibly
matter now, or then, that two stage magicians were constantly at each other's throats?
Whatever spite, hatred or envy that rankled between those two old men surely could not
concern distant descendants who had their own lives and affairs? Well, so it might seem in
all common sense, but passions of blood are irrational.

In the case of Clive Borden, irrationality seems part of him, no matter what might have
happened to his ancestor. His life has been difficult to research, but I know he was born
in west London. He led an average childhood and had a fair talent for sports. He went to
Loughborough College after he left school but dropped out after the first year. In the
decade afterwards he was frequently homeless, and seems to have stayed in the houses of a
number of friends and relatives. He was arrested several times for drunk and disorderly
behaviour, but somehow managed to avoid a criminal record. He described himself as an
actor and made a precarious living in the film industry, doing extra and stand-in work
whenever he could find it, with periods on the dole between. The one short period of
emotional and physical stability in his life was when he met and married Diana Ellington.
They set up home together in Twickenham, Middlesex, but the marriage turned out to be
tragically short-lived. After Diana died Clive Borden stayed on in the flat they had been
renting and managed to persuade a married sister, who lived in the same area, to help
bring up the baby boy. He kept working in films, and although he was again drifting
socially, he appears to have been able to provide for the child. This was his general
situation at the time he came to visit my parents.

(After this visit he left the flat in Twickenham, apparently moved back to the centre of
London, and in the winter of 1971 went abroad. He went first to the USA, but after that
travelled on to either Canada or Australia. According to his sister he changed his name,
and deliberately broke all contacts with his past. I have done what investigation I can,
but I have been unable to establish even whether he is still alive or not.)

#############

But now I return to that afternoon and evening of Clive Borden's visit to Caldlow House,
and try to reconstruct what had taken place while we children played upstairs.

My father would have been making a great show of hospitality, offering drinks and opening
a rare wine to celebrate the occasion. The evening meal would be lavish. He would enquire
genially about Mr Borden's car journey, or about his views on something that might be in
the news, or even about his general wellbeing. This is the way my father invariably
behaved when thrust into a social situation whose outcome he could not predict or control.
It was the bluff, agreeable façade put up by a decent English gentleman, lacking in
sinister connotation but completely inappropriate for the occasion. I can imagine that it
would have made more difficult any reconciliation that they were trying to achieve.

My mother, meanwhile, would be playing a more subtle part. She would be much better
attuned to the tensions that existed between the two men, but would feel constrained by
being, in this matter, a relative outsider. I believe she would not have said much, at
least for the first hour or so, but would be conscious of the need to focus on the one
subject that concerned them all. She would have kept trying, subtly and unobtrusively, to
steer the conversation in that direction.

I find it harder to talk about Clive Borden, because I hardly knew him, but he had
probably suggested the meeting. I feel certain neither of my parents would have done so.
There must have been an exchange of letters in the recent past, which led to the
invitation. Now I know his financial situation at the time, maybe he was hoping something
might come his way as a result of a reconciliation. Or perhaps at last he had traced a
family memoir that might explain or excuse Alfred Borden's behaviour. (Borden's book then
existed, of course, but few people outside the world of magic knew about it.) On the other
hand, he might have found out about the existence of Rupert Angier's personal diary. It's
almost certain he kept one, because of his obsession with dates and details, but he either
hid or destroyed it before he died.

I'm certain that an attempt to patch up the feud was behind the meeting, no matter who
suggested it. What I saw at the time and can remember now was cordial enough, at least at
first. It was after all a face-to-face meeting, which was more than their own parents’
generation had ever managed.

The old feud was behind it, no matter what. No other subject joined our families so
securely, nor divided them so inevitably. My father's blandness, and Borden's nervousness,
would eventually have run out. One of them would have said: well, can you tell us anything
new about what happened?

The idiocy of the impasse looms around me as I think back. Any vestige of professional
secrecy that once constrained our great-grandfathers would have died with them. No one who
came after them in either family was a magician, or showed any interest in magic. If
anyone has the remotest interest in the subject it's me, and that's only because of trying
to carry out some research into what happened. I've read several books on stage magic, and
a few biographies of great magicians. Most of them were modern works, while the oldest one
I read was Alfred Borden’s. I know that the art of magic has progressed since the end of
the last century, and that what were then popular tricks have long since gone out of
fashion, replaced by more modern illusions. In our great-grandfathers’ time, for instance,
no one had heard of the trick where someone appears to be sawn in half. That familiar
illusion was not invented until the 1920s, long after both Danton and the Professeur were
dead. It's in the nature of magic that illusionists have to keep thinking up more baffling
ways of working their tricks. The magic of Le Professeur would now seem quaint, unfunny,
slow and above all unmysterious. The trick that made him famous and rich would look like a
museum piece, and any self-respecting rival illusionist would be able to reproduce it
without trouble, and make it seem more baffling.