Christopher Priest - The Prestige

The night before the idyll was to end — I was due to take my show to the Hippodrome in Brighton — she sprung her surprise. It was late at night, and we were resting companionably together before falling asleep.

"Listen, hon," she said. "I've been thinking you might want to start looking around for a new assistant."

I was so thunderstruck that at first I did not know how to answer. Until that moment it had seemed to me I had reached the kind of stability I had been seeking all my working life. I had my family, I had my mistress. I lived in my house with my wife, and I stayed in my flat with my lover. I worshipped my children, adored my wife, loved my mistress. My life was in two distinct halves, kept emphatically apart, neither side suspecting the other even existed. In addition, my lover worked as my beautiful and bewitching stage assistant. She was not only brilliant at her job but her lovely appearance, I was certain, had doubtless helped me obtain the much larger audiences I had been playing to since she joined me. In popular parlance, I had my cake and was greedily eating it. Now, with those words, Olive seemed to be unbalancing everything, and I was thrown into dismay.

Seeing my reaction, Olive said, "I got a lot I want to get off my chest. It isn't so bad as maybe you think."

"I can't imagine how it could be much worse."

"Well, if you hear half of what I say, it'll be worse than you ever imagined, but if you stick around to hear it all, I guess you'll end up feeling good."

I took a careful look at her and noticed, as I should have done from the start, that she seemed tense and keyed up. Clearly, something was afoot.

The story came out in a flood of words, quickly confirming her warning. What she said filled me with horror.

She began by saying that she wanted to stop working for me for two reasons. The first was that she had been treading the boards for several years, and simply wanted a change. She said she wished to live at home, be my lover, follow my career from that standpoint. She said she would continue to work as my assistant as long as I asked her to, or until I could find a replacement. So far so good. But, she said, I hadn't yet heard the second reason. This was that she had been sent to work for me by someone who wanted to know my professional secrets. This man—

"It's Angier!" I exclaimed. "You were sent to spy on me by Rupert Angier?"

To this she readily confessed, and on seeing my anger she moved back and away from me, then began to weep. My mind was racing as I tried to remember everything I had said to her in the preceding weeks, and to recall what apparatus she had seen or used, what secrets she might have learned or discovered for herself, and what she might have been able to communicate back to my enemy.

For a time I became unable to listen to her, unable to think calmly or logically. For much of the same time she was weeping, imploring me to listen to her.

Two or three hours passed in this distressing and unproductive way, then at last we reached a point of emotional numbness. Our impasse had lasted into the small hours of the morning, and the need for sleep loomed heavily over us both. We turned out the light, and lay down together, our habits not yet broken by the terrible revelation.

I lay awake in the darkness, trying to think how to deal with this, but my mind was still circling distractedly. Then out of the dark beside me I heard her say quietly, insistently, "Don't you realize that if I was still Rupert Angier's spy I would not have told you? Yes, I was with him but I was bored with him. And he'd been messing around with some other lady, and it kind of annoyed me. All the time he was obsessed with attacking you, and I needed a change and so I cooked up this idea myself. But when I met you… well, I felt differently. You're so unlike Rupert in everything. You know what happened, and all that was real between us, right? Rupert thinks I'm spying for him, but I guess by now he's realized he isn't going to hear anything back from me. I want to stop being your assistant because so long as I'm up there doing the act with you, Rupert's waiting for me to do what he wants. I just want to get out of it all, live here in this apartment, be with you, Alfred. You know, I think I love you—"

And so on, long into the night.

In the morning, in the grey and dispiriting light of a rainy dawn, I said to her, "I have decided what to do. Why don't you take a message back to Angier? I will tell you what to say, and you will deliver it, telling him it's the secret for which he has been searching. You may say whatever you wish to make him believe that you stole the secret from me, and that it is the prime information he has been seeking. After that, if you return, and if you then swear that you will never again have anything to do with Angier, and if, and only if , you can make me believe you, then we will start our lives together again. Do you agree?"

"I will do it today," she swore. "I want to put Angier out of my life forever!"

"First I have to go to my workshop. I have to decide what I can safely tell Angier."

Without further explanation I left her in the flat and took the omnibus to Elgin Avenue. Sitting quietly on the top deck, smoking my pipe, I wondered if I was indeed a fool in love, and that I was just about to throw away everything.

The problem was discussed in full when I arrived at the workshop. Although potentially serious, it was just one of several crises the Pact has had to confront over the years, and I felt no great or novel problem was being presented this time. It was not easy, but at the end of it the Pact emerged as strong as ever. Indeed, as a recordable testament of my continued faith in the Pact, I can say that it was I who remained in the workshop while I returned to the flat.

Here I dictated to Olive what she should inscribe on the sheet of paper, in her own handwriting. She wrote it down, tense but determined to do what she saw as necessary. The message was intended to send Angier searching in the wrong direction, so it needed to be not only plausible but something he would not have thought of on his own.

She left Hornsey with the message at 2.25 p.m., and did not return to the flat until after 11.00 p.m.

"It is done!" she cried. "He has the information I gave him. I shall likely never see him again, and I certainly shall never again, in this lifetime, speak a friendly word of, about or to him."

I never enquired what had taken place during those eight and a half hours she was absent, and why it had taken her so long to deliver a written message. The explanation she gave is probably the true one for being the simplest, that with the time taken to travel about London on public transport, and with not finding Angier immediately, and with discovering that he was in performance in another part of the city, the time was innocently used up. But as that long evening went by I harboured many grim fantasies that the double agent I had turned against her first master might have doubled back once more, and either I should never see her again or that she would return with a renewed subversive mission on his behalf.

However, all this occurred at the end of 1898, and I write these words at the end of the momentous month of January 1901. (The events in the outside world resound in my ears. The day before I penned these words Her Majesty the Queen was finally laid to rest, and the country is at last emerging from a period of mourning.) Olive returned to me more than two years ago, true as her word, and she remains with me, true to my wishes. My career continues smoothly, my position in the world of illusions is unassailable, my family is growing, my wealth is assured. Once again I run two peaceful households. Rupert Angier has not attacked me since Olive passed him the false information. All is quiet around me, and after the turbulent years I am at last settled in my life.