I explain to the audience that I would invite some of its members on to the stage to examine the device for themselves, but for the immense danger to them. I hint at earlier accidents. Instead, I say, I have devised a few simple demonstrations of the power inherent within the machine. I allow some magnesium powder to fall across two bared contacts, and a brilliant white flash momentarily blinds the members of the audience closest to the stage! While the smoke from it balloons upwards I take a sheet of paper and drop it across another semi-concealed part of the apparatus. It immediately bursts into flame and its smoke also rises dramatically to the rigging loft above. The humming sound increases in volume. The apparatus seems to be alive, only barely constraining the frightful energies that lie within.
At stage left my female assistant appears with a wheeled cabinet. This is strongly made of wood, but because it is built on wheels she is able to turn the thing around so it might be seen from all sides. Then she lets down the front and sides to show that it is empty.
I grimace sadly at the audience then signal to the girl, who brings to me two immense dark-brown gauntlets, made to seem as if they are of leathern material. When these are covering my hands she leads me to the apparatus, until I stand behind it. The audience can see most of my body still, and satisfy themselves that there are no concealed mirrors or shields. I lower my two gauntleted hands to the surface of the platform, and as I do so the sound of electrical tension increases, and there is another brilliant discharge of electrical energy. I reel back, as if in shock.
The girl moves away from the apparatus, cowering a little. I break off from my introduction to plead with her to leave the stage for her own safety. At first she resists, then gladly hurries into the wings.
I reach up to the directional cone, grip it gingerly with my heavily gauntleted hands, and move it with great care until its apex is pointed directly at the cabinet.
The illusion is approaching its climax. From the orchestra pit there comes a roll of drums. I place both hands on the platform once more, and magically all the remaining lamps shine out brightly. The sinister hum increases. I first sit on the platform, and swivel around so that I can stretch my legs out, then lower myself until I am lying full length, surrounded by the evidence of the terrible electrical forces.
I raise my arms, and pull off first one, then the other gauntlet. As I lower my arms I allow my hands to droop below the level of the platform. One of them, the one the audience can see, falls casually into the receptacle where, a few seconds earlier, a piece of paper had been ignited.
There is a brilliant, blinding flash of light, and all the lights on the apparatus fuse into darkness.
In the same instant . . . I vanish from the platform.
The cabinet bursts open, and I am seen hunched up inside.
I roll slowly out of the cabinet, and collapse on to the floor, bathed in stage lights. Gradually I come to my senses. I stand. I blink in the brightness of the lights. I face the audience. I turn towards the platform, indicate where I had been, turn back to the cabinet immediately behind me, and indicate where I had arrived.
I take my bow.
The audience has seen me transmogrified. Before their eyes I was catapulted by the power of electricity from one part of the stage to another. Ten feet of empty space. Twenty feet, thirty feet, depending on the size of the stage.
A human body transmitted in an instant. A miracle, an impossibility, an illusion.
My assistant returns to the stage. Clasping her hand I am smiling and bowing as the applause rings out and the curtains close before me.
25
If I say no more of this, it will be acceptable. I shall not intervene again. I may continue to the conclusion.
26
Life in my flat in Hornsey, an area of north London several miles from my house in St Johns Wood, left much to be desired. I had chosen the flat, one of ten in an apartment house in a quiet side-street, simply because its anonymity seemed to fulfil my needs. It was on the second floor at the rear of a modest, mid-century building, occupying one of the corners, so that although it had several windows looking out into the surrounding small garden, entry to it was by a single plain door leading off the stairwell.
Not long after I had taken up occupancy, I began to regret the choice. Most of the other tenants were lower-middle-class families, running modest households; all the other flats on my floor had children living in them, for instance, and there was much coming and going of domestic servants of one kind or another. My single state, especially in a flat of such a size, obviously aroused the curiosity of my neighbours. Although I gave out every sign of wishing not to be drawn into conversations, some were nevertheless inevitable and soon I felt exposed to their speculations about me. I knew I should move to another address, but at the time I first took the flat I craved to have a steady place in which I could stay between performances, and even if I were to move I knew there would be no guarantee I would not attract curiosity elsewhere. I decided to adopt a pretence of polite neutrality, and came and went discreetly, neither mixing too much with my neighbours nor appearing secretive in my movements. Eventually I believe I became dull to them. The English have a traditional tolerance of eccentrics, and my late-night arrivals, my solitary presence without servants, my unexplained method of making my living, came eventually to seem harmless and familiar.
All this aside, I found life in the flat disagreeable for a long time after I first moved in. I had rented it unfurnished, and because I was necessarily sinking most of my earnings into the family house in St Johns Wood, I could at first only afford cheap and uncomfortable furniture. The main source of heating was a stove, for which logs had to be brought up from the yard below, and which provided fierce heat in the immediate vicinity and none at all discernible in any other part of the flat. There were no carpets to speak of.
Because the flat was a refuge for me, it was essential that I should make it a comfortable place to live in, and convenient for living quietly, sometimes for long periods at a time.
The physical discomforts aside, which of course began to ease as I was able to acquire the various practical things I wanted, the worst of it was the loneliness and the feeling of being cut off from my family. There has never been any cure for this, then or now. At first, when it was just Sarah from whom I was separated, it was intolerable enough, but during her difficult confinement with the twins I was often in agonies of worry about her. It became even more difficult, after Graham and Helena were born, especially when one of them fell ill. I knew my family was being cared for and looked after with love, and that our servants were dedicated and trustworthy, and that should the worst illnesses occur we had sufficient funds to be able to afford the best treatment, but none of this was ever quite enough, even though such thoughts did provide a measure of consolation and reassurance.
In the years when I had been planning THE TRANSPORTED MAN and its modern sequel, and my overall magical career, it had never occurred to me that having a family might one day threaten to make it unworkable.
Many times I have been tempted to give up the stage, never perform the illusion again, abandon, in effect, the performance of magic altogether, and always because I have felt calls of affection and duty to my lovely wife, and of fervent love for my children.
In those long days in the Hornsey flat, and sometimes in the weeks when the theatrical season gave no openings for my act, I had more than abundant time to reflect.
The significant point is, of course, that I did not give up.
I kept going through the difficult early years. I kept going when my reputation and earnings began to soar. And I keep going now when, to all intents and purposes, most of what remains of my famous illusion is the mystery that surrounds it.
However, things have been a lot easier recently. During the first two weeks that Olive Wenscombe was working for me I happened to discover that she was staying in a commercial hotel near Euston Station, a most dubious address. Explaining why, she told me that the
Hampshire magician had provided lodgings with his job, but she had of course given these up when she left his employ. By this time, Olive and I were making regular intimate use of the couch at the rear of my workshop. It did not take me long to realise I too might be able to offer her permanent lodgings.
The Pact controlled all decisions of such a nature, but in this case it was just a formality. A few days later, Olive moved into my flat in Hornsey. There she stayed, and has stayed, ever since.
Her revelation, that was to change everything, came a few weeks after she arrived.
27
Towards the end of 1898 a theatre cancellation meant that I had to spend more than a week between performances of THE NEW TRANSPORTED MAN. I passed the time in the Hornsey flat, and although I went across to the workshop once, for most of the week I was ensconced happily with Olive. We began redecorating the flat, and with some of the recent proceeds of a successful run at the Illyria Theatre in the West End we bought several attractive items of furniture.
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 her to find out my professional secrets and pass them on to him. This man, she said—
‘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 cope 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 realise 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 realised 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 him 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.’
28
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 th
ese 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.
29
I write once more, this time unwillingly, in the year 1903. I had planned to leave my notebook closed forever, but events have conspired against me.
Rupert Angier has died suddenly. He was forty-six, only a year younger than myself. His death, according to a notice in The Times, was caused by complications following injuries incurred while performing a stage illusion at a theatre in Suffolk.
The Prestige Page 9