The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

‘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.’

  ‘Have you got any more of his stuff?’

  While she reached over for the scrapbooks, I poured myself another slug of the American whiskey, which I had not tried before and which I was finding I liked. I also liked having Kate down there on the floor beside my legs, turning her head to look up at me as she spoke, leaning towards me. It was all slightly bemusing to be there, not fully comprehending what was going on, talk of magicians, meetings in childhood, not at work when I should have been, not driving over to see my parents as I had planned.

  In that part of my mind occupied by my brother, I felt a sense of contentment, unlike anything I had known from him before. He was urging me to stay.

  Outside the window the cold afternoon sky was darkening and the Pennine rain continued to fall. An icy draught came persistently from the windows. Kate threw another log on the fire.

  PART TWO

  Alfred Borden

  1

  I write in the year 1901.

  My name, my real name, is Alfred Borden. The story of my life is the story of the secrets by which I have lived my life. They are described in this narrative for the first and last time; this is the only copy.

  I was born in 1856 on the eighth day of the month of May, in the seaside town of Hastings. I was a healthy, vigorous child. My father was a tradesman of that borough, a master wheelwright and cooper. Our house at number 105 Manor Road was in a long, curving terrace built along the side of one of the several hills which Hastings comprises. Behind the house was a steep and secluded valley where sheep and cattle grazed during the summer months, but at the front the hill rose up, lined with many more houses, standing between us and the sea. It was from those houses, and from the farms and businesses around, that my father took his trade.

  Our house was larger and taller than others in the road, because it was built over the gateway that led to the yard and sheds behind. My room was on the street side of the house, directly above the gateway, and because only the wooden floorboards and some thin lath-and-plaster lay between me and the open air the room was noisy through every day of the year, and viciously cold in the winter months. It was in that room that I slowly grew up and became the man that I am.

  That man is Le Professeur de Magie, and I am a master of illusions.

  2

  It is time to pause, even so early, for this account is not intended to be about my life in the usual habit of auto-biographers, but is, as I have said, about my life’s secrets. Secrecy is intrinsic to my work.

  Let me then first consider and describe the method of writing this account. The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved.

  It is therefore only fair that I should from the beginning try to elucidate those closely connected subjects – Secrecy, and the Appreciation Of Secrecy.

  Here is an example.

  There almost invariably comes a moment during the exercise of my profession when the illusionist will seem to pause. He will step forward to the footlights, and in the full glare of their light will face the audience directly. He will say, or if his act is silent he will seem to say, ‘Look at my hands. There is nothing concealed within them.’ He will then hold up his hands for the audience to see, raising his palms to expose them, splaying his fingers so as to prove nothing is gripped secretly between them. With his hands held thus he will rotate them, so that the backs are shown to the audience, and it is established that his hands are, indeed, as empty as it is possible to be. To take the matter beyond any remaining suspicion, the magician will probably then tweak lightly at the cuffs of his jacket, pulling them back an inch or two to expose his wrists, showing that nothing is there concealed either. He then performs his trick, and during it, moments after this incontrovertible evidence of empty-handedness he produces something from his hands: a fan, a live dove or a rabbit, a bunch of paper flowers, sometimes even a burning wick. It is a paradox, an impossibility! The audience marvels at the mystery, and applause rings out.

  How could any of this be?

  The magician and the audience have entered into what I term the Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery. They do not articulate it as such, and indeed the audience is barely aware that such a Pact might exist, but that is what it is.

  The performer is of course not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part of a sorcerer and who wishes the audience to believe, if only temporarily, that he is in contact with darker powers. The audience, meantime, knows that what they are seeing is not true sorcery, but they suppress the knowledge and acquiesce to the selfsame wish as the performer’s. The greater the performer’s skill at maintaining the illusion, the better at this deceptive sorcery he is judged to be.

  The act of showing the hands to be empty, before revealing that despite appearances they could not have been, is itself a constituent of the Pact. The Pact implies special conditions are in force. In normal social intercourse, for instance, how often does it arise that someone has to prove that his hands are empty? And consider this: if the magician were suddenly to produce a vase of flowers without first suggesting to the audience that such a production was impossible, it would seem to be no trick at all. No one would applaud.

  This then illustrates my method.

  Let me set out the Pact of Acquiescence under which I write these words, so that those who read them will realise that what follows is not sorcery, but the appearance of it.

  First let me in a manner of speaking show you my hands, palms forward, fingers splayed, and I will say to you (and mark this well): ‘Every word in this notebook that describes my life and work is true, honestly meant and accurate in detail.’

  Now I rotate my hands so that you may see their backs, and I say to you: ‘Much of what is here may be checked against objective records. My career is noted in newspaper files, my name appears in books of biographical reference.’

  Finally, I tweak at the cuffs of my jacket to reveal my wrists, and I say to you: ‘After all, what would I have to gain by writing a false account, when it is intended for no one’s eyes but my own, perhaps those of my immediate family, and the members of a posterity I shall never meet?’

  What gain indeed?

  But because I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow, but that you will acquiesce in it.

  Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.

  I have misdirected you with the talk of truth, objective records and motives. Just as it is when I show my hands to be empty I have omitted the significant information, and now you are looking in the wrong place.

  As every stage magician well knows there will be some who are baffled by this, some who will profess to a dislike of being duped, some who will claim to know the secret, and some, the happy majority, who will simply take the illusion for granted and enjoy the magic for the sake of entertainment.

  But there are always one or two who will take the secret away with them and worry at it without ever coming near to solving it.

  3

  Before I resume the story of my life, here is another anecdote that illustrates my method.

  When I was younger there was a fashion in the concert halls
for Oriental Magic. Most of it was performed by European or American illusionists dressed and made up to look Chinese, but there were one or two genuine Chinese magicians who came to Europe to perform. One of these, and perhaps the greatest of them all, was a man from Shanghai called Chi Linqua, who worked under the stage name Ching Ling Foo.

  I saw Ching perform only once, a few years ago at the Adelphi Theatre in Leicester Square. At the end of the show I went to the stage door and sent up my card, and without delay he graciously invited me to his dressing room. He would not speak of his magic, but my eye was taken by the presence there, on a stand beside him, of his most famous prop: the large glass bowl of goldfish, which, when apparently produced from thin air, gave his show its fantastic climax. He invited me to examine the bowl, and it was normal in every way. It contained at least a dozen ornamental fish, all of them alive, and was well filled with water. I tried lifting it, because I knew the secret of its manifestation, and marvelled at its weight.

  Ching saw me struggling with it but said nothing. He was obviously unsure whether I knew his secret or not, and was unwilling to say anything that might expose it, even to a fellow professional. I did not know how to reveal that I did know the secret, and so I too kept my silence. I stayed with him for fifteen minutes, during which time he remained seated, nodding politely at the compliments I paid him. He had already changed out of his stage clothes by the time I arrived, and was wearing dark trousers and striped blue shirt, although he still had on his greasepaint. When I stood up to leave he rose from his chair by the mirror and conducted me to the door. He walked with his head bowed, his arms slack at his sides, and shuffling as if his legs gave him great pain.

  Now, because years have passed and he is dead, I can reveal his most closely guarded secret, one whose obsessive extent I was privileged to glimpse that night.

  His famous goldfish bowl was with him on stage throughout his act, ready for its sudden and mysterious appearance. Its presence was deftly concealed from the audience. He carried it beneath the flowing mandarin gown he affected, clutching it between his knees, kept ready for the sensational and apparently miraculous production at the end. No one in the audience could ever guess at how the trick was done, even though a moment’s logical thought would have solved the mystery.

  But logic was magically in conflict with itself! The only possible place where the heavy bowl could be concealed was beneath his gown, yet that was logically impossible. It was obvious to everyone that Ching Ling Foo was physically frail, shuffling painfully through his routine. When he took his bow at the end, he leaned for support on his assistant, and was led hobbling from the stage.

  The reality was completely different. Ching was a fit man of great physical strength, and carrying the bowl in this way was well within his power. Be that as it may, the size and shape of the bowl caused him to shuffle like a mandarin as he walked. This threatened the secret, because it drew attention to the way he moved, so to protect the secret he shuffled for the whole of his life. Never, at any time, at home or in the street, day or night, did he walk with a normal gait lest his secret be exposed.

  Such is the nature of a man who acts the role of sorcerer.

  Audiences know well that a magician will practise his illusions for years, and will rehearse each performance carefully, but few people realise the extent of the prestidigitator’s wish to deceive, the way in which the apparent defiance of normal laws becomes an obsession which governs every moment of his life.

  Ching Ling Foo had his obsessive deception, and now that you have read my anecdote about him you may correctly assume that I have mine. My deception rules my life, informs every decision I make, regulates my every movement. Even now, as I embark on the writing of this memoir, it controls what I may write and what I may not. I have compared my method with the display of seemingly bared hands, but in reality everything in this account represents the shuffling walk of a fit man.

  4

  Because the yard was prospering my parents could afford to send me to the Pelham Scholastic Academy, a dame school run by the Misses Pelham in East Bourne Street, next to the remains of the mediaeval Town Wall and close to the harbour. There, amid the persistent stench from the rotten fish which littered the beach and all the environs of the harbour, and against the constant but eloquent braying of the herring gulls, I learnt the three Rs, as well as a modicum of History, Geography and the fearsome French language. All of these were to stand me in good stead in later life, but my fruitless struggles to learn French have an ironic outcome, because in adult life my stage persona is that of a French professor.

  My way to and from school was across the ridge of West Hill, which was built up only in the immediate neighbourhood of our house. Most of the way led along steep narrow paths through the scented tamarisk bushes that had colonised so many of Hastings’ open spaces. Hastings at the time was experiencing a period of development, as numerous new houses and hotels were being built to accommodate the summer visitors. I saw little of this, because the school was in the Old Town, while the resort area was being built beyond the White Rock, a former rocky spur that one day in my childhood was enthrallingly dynamited out of existence to make way for an extended seafront promenade. Despite all this, life in the ancient centre of Hastings continued much as it had done for hundreds of years.

  I could say much about my father, good and bad, but for the sake of concentrating on my own story I shall confine myself to the best. I loved him, and learnt from him many of the cabinet-making techniques which, inadvertently by him, have made my name and fortune. I can attest that my father was hard-working, honest, sober, intelligent and, in his own way, generous. He was fair to his employees. Because he was not a God-fearing man, and no churchgoer, he brought up his family to act within a benign secularism, in which neither action nor inaction would occur to cause hurt or harm to others. He was a brilliant cabinet-maker and a good wheelwright. I realised, eventually, that whatever emotional outbursts our family had to endure (because there were several) his anger must have been caused by inner frustrations, although at what and of what sort I was never entirely sure. Although I was never myself a target for his worst moments, I grew up a little scared of my father but loved him profoundly.

  My mother’s name was Betsy May Borden (née Robertson), my father’s name was Joseph Andrew Borden. I had a total of seven brothers and sisters, although because of infant deaths I knew only five of them. I was neither the oldest nor the youngest child, and was not particularly favoured by either parent. I grew up in reasonable harmony with most, if not all, of my siblings.

  When I was twelve I was taken away from the school, and placed to work as a wheelwright’s apprentice in my father’s yard. Here my adult life began, both in the sense that from this time I spent more time with adults than with other children, and that my own real future started to become clear to me. Two factors were pivotal.

  The first was, simply enough, the handling of wood. I had grown up with the sight and smell of it, so that both were familiar to me. I had little idea how wood felt when you picked it up, or cleaved it, or sawed it. From the first moment I handled wood with purposeful intent I began to respect it, and realise what could be done with it. Wood, when properly seasoned, and hewed to take advantage of the natural grain, is beautiful, strong, light and supple. It can be cut to almost any shape; it can be worked or adhered to almost any other material. You can paint it, stain it, bleach it, flex it. It is at once outstanding and commonplace, so that when something manufactured of wood is present it lends a quiet feeling of solid normality, and so is hardly ever noticed.

  In short it is the ideal medium for the illusionist.

  At the yard I was given no preferential treatment as the proprietor’s son. On my first day, I was sent to begin learning the business by taking on the roughest, hardest job in the yard – I and another apprentice were put to work in a saw-pit. The twelve-hour days of that (we started at 6.00 a.m. and finished at 8.00 p.m. every day, with only three short
breaks for meals) hardened my body like no other work I can conceive of, and taught me to fear as well as respect the heavy cords of timber. After that initiation, which continued for several months, I was moved to the less physically demanding but more exacting work of learning to cut, turn and smooth the wood for the spokes and felloes of the wheels. Here I came into regular contact with the wheelwrights and other men who worked for my father, and saw less of my fellow apprentices.

  One morning, about a year after I had left school, a contract worker named Robert Noonan came to the yard to carry out some long-needed repair and redecoration work to the rear wall of the yard, which had been damaged in a storm some years before. With Noonan’s arrival came the second great influence on the direction of my future life.

  I, busy about my labours, barely even noticed him, but at 1.00 p.m., when we broke for lunch, Noonan came and sat with me and the other men at the trestle table where we ate our food. He produced a pack of playing cards and asked if any of us would care to ‘find the lady’. Some of the older men chaffed him and tried to warn off the others, but a few of us stayed to watch. Tiny sums of money began to change hands; not mine, for I had none to spare, but one or two of the workmen were willing to gamble a few pence.

  What fascinated me was the smooth, natural way that Noonan manipulated the cards. He was so fast! So dexterous! He spoke softly and persuasively, showing us the faces of the three playing cards, placing them down on the small box in front of him with a quick but flowing motion, then moving them about with his long fingers before pausing to challenge us to indicate which of the cards was the Queen. The workmen had slower eyes than mine; they spotted the card rather less often than I did (although I was wrong more often than I was right).

  Afterwards, I said to Noonan, ‘How do you do that? Will you show me?’