Christopher Priest: The Prestige

"Only the book. I assume you sent it."

She nodded. "They had this feud going, and it went on for years. They were constantly attacking each other, usually by interfering with the other one's stage show. The story of the feud is in Borden's book. At least, his side of it is. Have you read it yet?"

"It only arrived in the post this morning. I haven't had much of a chance—"

"I thought you would be fascinated to know what had happened."

I was thinking, again: why go on about the Bordens? They are too far back, I know too little about them. She was talking about something that was of interest to her, not to me. I felt I should be polite to her, listen to what she was saying, but what she could never know was the resistance that lay deep inside me, the unconscious defence mechanism a kid builds up for himself when he has been rejected. To adapt to my new family I had had to throw off everything I knew of the old. How many times would I have to say that to her to convince her of it?

Saying she wanted to show me something, she put down her glass and crossed the room to a desk placed against the wall just behind where I was sitting. As she stooped to reach into a lower drawer her dress sagged forward at the neck, and I stole a glimpse: a thin white strap, part of a lacy bra cup, the upper curve of the breast nestling inside. She had to reach into the drawer, and this made her turn around so she could stretch her arm, and I saw the slender curves of her back, her straps again becoming discernible through the thin material of her dress, then her hair falling forward about her face. She was trying to involve me in something I knew nothing about, but instead I was crudely sizing her up, thinking idly about what it might be like to have sex with her. Sex with an honourable lady; it was the sort of semi-funny joke the journalists in the office would make. For better or worse that was my own life, more interesting and problematical to me than all this stuff about ancient magicians. She had asked me where in London I lived, not who in London I lived with, so I had said nothing to her of Zelda. Exquisite and maddening Zelda, with the cropped hair and nose-ring, the studded boots and dream body, who three nights before had told me she wanted an open relationship and walked out on me at half past eleven at night, taking a lot of my books and most of my records. I hadn't seen her since and was beginning to worry, even though she had done something like that before. I wanted to ask this honourable lady about Zelda, not because I was interested in what she might say, but because Zelda is real to me. How do you think I might get Zelda back? Or, how do I ease myself out of the newspaper job without appearing to reject my father? Or, where am I going to live if Zelda moves out on me, because it is Zelda's parents’ flat? What am I going to survive on if I don't have a job? And if my brother's real, where is he and how do I find him?

Any one of these was more involving to me than the news of a feud between great-grandparents of whom I had never heard. One of them had written a book, though. Maybe that was interesting to be told about.

"I haven't had these out for ages," Kate said, her voice slightly muffled by her exertions of reaching inside the drawer. She had removed some photo albums, and these were piled on the floor while she reached to the back of the deep drawer. "Here we are."

She was clutching an untidy pile of papers, apparently old and faded, all in different sizes. She spread them on the settee beside her, and picked up her glass before she began to leaf through them.

"My great-grandfather was one of those men who is obsessively neat," she said. "He not only kept everything, he put labels on them, compiled lists, had cupboards specifically in which to keep certain things. When I was growing up my parents had a saying: "Grandpa's stuff". We never touched it, weren't really allowed to look at it, even. But Rosalie and I couldn't resist searching some of it. When she left to get married, and I was alone here, I finally went through it all and sorted it out. I managed to sell some of the apparatus and costumes, and got good prices too. I found these playbills in the room that had been his study."

All the time she had been talking she was sifting through the bills, and now she passed me a sheet of fragile, yellow-coloured paper. It had been folded and refolded numerous times, and the creases were furry with wear and almost separating. The bill was for the Empress Theatre in Evering Road, Stoke Newington. Over a list of performers it announced a limited number of performances, afternoons and evenings, commencing on 14th April until 21st April. ("See Newspaper Advertisements for Further Arrangements.") Top of the bill, and printed in red ink, was an Irish tenor called Dennis O"Canaghan ("Fill Your Heart With The Joy Of Ireland"). Other acts included the Sisters McKee ("A Trio of Lovely Chanteuses’), Sammy Renaldo ("Tickle Your Ribs, Your Highness?") and Robert and Roberta Franks ("Recitation Par Excellence"). Halfway down the bill, pointed out by Kate's prodding forefinger as she leaned over towards me, was The Great Danton ("The Greatest Illusionist in the World").

"This was before he actually was," she said. "He spent most of his life being hard up, and only really became famous a few years before he died. This bill comes from 1881, when he was first starting to do quite well."

"What do all these mean?" I said, indicating a column of neatly inked numbers inscribed in the margin of the playbill. More had been written on the back.

"That's The Great Danton's Obsessive Filing System," she said. She moved away from the settee, and knelt informally on the carpet beside my chair. Leaning towards me so she could look at the bill in my hand, she said, "I haven't worked it all out, but the first number refers to the job. There's a ledger somewhere, with a complete list of every gig he did. Underneath that, he puts down how many actual performances he carried out, and how many of those were matinees and how many in the evenings. The next numbers are a list of the actual tricks he did, and again he had about a dozen notebooks in his study with descriptions of all the tricks he could do. I have a few of the notebooks still here, and you could probably look up some of the tricks he did in Stoke Newington. But it's even more complicated than that, because most of the tricks have minor variations, and he's got all those cross-referenced as well. Look, this number here, "10g". I think that's what he was paid: ten guineas."

"Was that good?"

"If it was for one night it was brilliant. But it was probably for the whole week, so it was just average. I don't think this was a big theatre."

I picked up the stack of all the other playbills and as she had said each one was annotated with similar code numbers.

"All his apparatus was labelled as well," she said. "Sometimes, I wonder how he found time to get out into the world and make a living! But when I was clearing out the cellar, every single piece of equipment I came across had an identifying number, and each one had a place in a huge index, all cross-referenced to the other books."

"Maybe he had someone else do it for him."

"No, it's always in the same handwriting."

"When did he die?" I said.

"There's actually some doubt about that, strangely enough. The newspapers say he died in 1903, and there was an obituary in The Times , but there are people in the village who say he was still living here the following year. What I find odd is that I came across the obituary in the scrapbook he kept, and it was stuck down and labelled and indexed, just like all the other stuff."

"Can you explain how that happened?"

"No. Alfred Borden talks about it in his book. That's where I heard about it, and after that I tried to find out what had happened between them."