Christopher Priest - The Prestige

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.

In spite of this the feud has continued for nearly a century.

On the day of Clive Borden's visit we children were eventually brought down from the nursery, and taken to the dining room to eat with the grown-ups. We liked Nicky, and the three of us were pleased to be seated together along one side of the table. I remember the meal clearly, but only because Nicky was there with us. My sister and I thought he was acting up to amuse us, but I realize now that he could never have sat at a formally laid table before, nor have been served by other people. He simply did not know how to behave. His father sometimes spoke to him harshly, trying to correct him or to calm him down, but Rosalie and I were egging the little boy on. Our parents said nothing to us, because they almost never said anything to us. Parental discipline was not something my kind of parents went in for, and they would never dream of berating us in front of a stranger.

Without our knowing it, our rowdy behaviour undoubtedly contributed to the tension between the adults. Clive Borden's raised voice became a hectoring, grating sound, one I started to dislike. Both my parents were responding badly to him, and any pretence of courtesy was abandoned. They began arguing, and my father addressed him in the voice we usually heard him use in restaurants where the service was slow. By the end of the meal my father was half-drunk, half-enraged; my mother was pale and silent, and Clive Borden (presumably also more than a little drunk) was talking endlessly about his misfortunes. Mrs Stimpson ushered the three of us out into the room next door, our sitting room.

Nicky, for some reason, began to cry. He said he wanted to go home, and when Rosalie and I tried to calm him down he struck out at us, kicking and punching.

We'd seen my father in this sort of mood before.

"I'm frightened," I said to Rosalie.

"I am too," she said.

We listened at the double door connecting the two rooms. We heard raised voices, then long silences. My father was pacing about, clicking his shoes impatiently on the polished parquet floor.

There was one part of the house to which we children were never allowed to go. Access to it was by way of an unprepossessing brown-painted door, set into the triangular section of wall beneath the back staircase. This door was invariably locked, and until the day of Clive Borden's visit I never saw anyone in the household, family or servants, go through it.

Rosalie had told me there was a haunted place behind it. She made up horrifying images, some of them described, some of them left vague for me to visualize for myself. She told me of the mutilated victims imprisoned below, of tragic lost souls in search of peace, of clutching hands and claws that lay in wait for our arms and ankles in the darkness a few inches beyond the door, of shifting and rattling and scratching attempts to escape, of muttered plans for horrid vengeance on those of us who lived in the daylight above. Rosalie had three years’ advantage, and she knew what would scare me.

I was constantly frightened as a child. Our house is no place for the nervous. In winter, on still nights, its isolation sets a silence around the walls. You hear small, unexplained noises; animals, birds, frozen in their hidden places, moving suddenly for warmth; trees and leafless shrubs brushing against each other in the wind; noises on the far side of the valley are amplified and distorted by the funnel shape of the valley floor; people from the village walk along the road that runs by the edge of our grounds. At other times, the wind comes down the valley from the north, blustering after its passage across the moors, howling because of the rocks and broken pastures all over the valley floor, whistling through the ornate woodwork around the eaves and shingles of the house. And the whole place is old, filled with memories of other people's lives, scarred with the remains of their deaths. It is no place for an imaginative child.

Indoors, the gloomy corridors and stairwells, the hidden alcoves and recesses, the dark wall-hangings and sombre ancient portraits, all gave a sense of oppressive threat. The rooms in which we lived were brightly lit and filled with modern furniture, but much of our immediate domestic hinterland was a lowering reminder of dead forefathers, ancient tragedies, silent evenings. I learned to hurry through some parts of the house, fixing my stare dead ahead so as not to be distracted by anything from this macabre past that could harm me. The downstairs corridor beside the rear stairs, where the brown-painted door was found, was one such area of the house. Sometimes I would inadvertently see the door moving slightly to and fro in its frame, as if pressure were being applied from behind. It must have been caused by draughts, but if ever I saw that door in motion I invariably imagined some large and silent being, standing behind it, trying it quietly to see if it could at last be opened.

All through my childhood, both before and after the day that Clive Borden came to visit, I passed the door on the far side of the corridor, never looked at it unless I did so by mistake. I never paused to listen for movement behind it. I always hastened past, trying to ignore it out of my life.