Christopher Priest - The Prestige

Borden, in his embarrassing persona of a French academic, strolled around the equipment, lecturing the audience on the perils of working with electrical power. At certain moments he touched one wire against another, or to a flask of gas, and there came an alarming flash of light, or a loud bang. Sparks flew around him, and a mist of blue smoke began to hover about his head.

When he was ready to perform, he indicated that a roll of drums be played from the orchestra pit. He seized two heavy wires, brought them dramatically together and made an electrical connection.

In the brilliant flash that followed, the switch took place. Before our very eyes, Borden vanished from where he was standing (the two thick wires fell snaking to the stage floor, emitting a trail of dangerous fizzing sparks), and he instantly reappeared on the other side of the stage — at least twenty feet away from where he had been!

It was impossible for him to have moved across that distance by normal means. The switch was too quick, too perfect. He arrived with his hands still flexed as if gripping the wires, the ones that even at that moment were zigzagging spectacularly across the stage.

Borden stepped forward in tumultuous applause to take his bow. Behind him the scientific apparatus still frothed and fumed, a deadly backdrop that seemed, perversely, to heighten his ordinariness.

As the applause continued to thunder, he reached into his breast pocket as if to produce something. He smiled modestly, inviting the audience to urge him to one final magical production. The applause accordingly lifted, and with his smile broadening into a full beam Borden thrust his hand into the pocket and produced… a paper rose, brilliant pink in colour.

This production was a reference back to an earlier trick. In this he had allowed a lady from the audience to select one flower from a whole bunch, before wonderfully making it vanish. To see the rose reappear utterly charmed his audience. He held the little flower aloft — it was most definitely the one the lady had chosen. When he had displayed it long enough he turned it in his fingers, to reveal that part of it had been charred black, is if by some infernal force! With a significant glance towards his apparatus behind him, Borden made one more sweeping bow, then departed the stage.

The applause continued for long afterwards, and I report that my hands were clapping as loudly as anyone’s.

Why should this fellow-magician, so gifted, so endowed with skill and professionalism, pursue a sordid feud against me?

5th March 1898

I have been working hard, with little time for the diary. Once more, several months have passed between my last entry and this. Today (a weekend) I have no bookings, so I may make a brief entry.

To record that Adam and I have not included our switch illusion in my act since that night in Nottingham.

Even without this mild provocation, the soi-disant greatest living magician has meanwhile dignified me with two more unprovoked attacks while I was performing. Both involved potentially risky interruptions to my act. One of them I was able to joke away, but the other was for a few minutes an unsustainable disaster.

I have as a result abandoned my faзade of disdain.

I am left with two apparently unachievable ambitions. The first is to forge some kind of equable reconciliation with Julia and the children. I know I have lost her forever, but the distance she puts between us is terrible to endure. The second is minor in comparison. It is that now my unilateral truce with Borden has ended, I of course wish to discover the secret of his illusion so that I might again outperform him.

31st July 1898

Olivia has proposed an idea!

Before describing it I should say that in recent months the ardour between Olivia and myself has noticeably cooled. There is neither rancour nor jealousy between us, but a vast indifference has been hanging like a pall over the house. We continue to cohabit peacefully, she in her apartment, I in mine, and at times we have behaved as man and wife, but overall we no longer act as if we love or care for each other. Yet we cling together.

The first clue I had came after dinner. We had eaten together in my apartment, but at the end she absented herself with some haste, taking with her a bottle of gin. I have grown used to her solitary drinking, and no longer remark on it.

A few minutes later, though, her maid, Lucy, came up and asked me if I would step downstairs for a few minutes.

I found Olivia seated at her green-baize card table, with two or three bottles and two glasses standing on it, and an empty chair opposite her. She waved me to sit down, and then poured me a drink. I added some orange syrup to the gin, to help take away the taste.

"Robbie," she said with her familiar directness. "I'm going to leave you."

I mumbled something in reply. I have been expecting some such development for months, although I had no idea how I would cope with it if, as at this moment, it happened.

"I'm going to leave you," she said again, "and then I'm going to come back. Do you want to know why?"

I said that I did.

"Because there's something you want more than you want me. I figure that if I get out there and find it for you, then I have a chance to make you want me all over again."

I assured her I wanted her as much as ever I had, but she cut me short.

"I know what's going on," she declared. 'You and this Alfred Borden are like two lovers who can't get along together. Am I right?"

I tried to prevaricate, but when I saw the determination in her eyes I quickly agreed.

"Look at this!" she said, and brandished this week's copy of The Stage . "See here." She folded the paper in half and passed it across to me. She had circled one of the classified advertisements on the front page.

"That's your friend Borden," she said. "See what he says?"

An attractive young female stage assistant is required for full-time employment. She must be terpsichorally adept, strong and fit, and willing to travel and to work long hours, both on and off stage. Pleasing appearance is essential, and so is a willingness to participate in exciting and demanding routines before large audiences. Please apply, with suitable references, to—

The address of Alfred Borden's rehearsal room followed.

"He's been advertising for an assistant for a couple of weeks, so he must be finding it difficult to hire the right one. I guess I could help him out."

"You mean you—"

"You always said I was the best assistant you ever had."

"But you—? Going to work for him ?" I shook my head sadly. "How could you do this to me, Olivia?"

"You want to find out how he does that trick, don't you?" she said.

As it dawned on me what she was saying I sat silently before her, staring at her and marvelling. If she could gain his confidence, work with him in rehearsal and on stage, move freely in his workshop, it would not be long before Borden's secret was mine.

We soon got down to details.

I was worried in case he recognized her, but Olivia was not. "You think I'd dream up this idea if I thought he knew my name?" she drawled. She reminded me that he had had to address her as "Occupant". The need to supply references seemed for a time to be an insurmountable problem, because Olivia had worked for no one but me, but she pointed out that I was entirely capable of forging letters.

And I had doubts, I don't mind admitting here. The thought of this beautiful young woman, who had wreaked such exciting emotional havoc on me, and who had given up her own life to be with me, and who had shared almost everything with me for five years, the thought of her preparing to enter the camp of my blackest enemy was almost too much to countenance.