The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

  When I was eight I was sent away to a girls’ boarding school near Congleton, but while I was little I spent most of my life at home with my mother. When I was four she sent me to a nursery school in Caldlow village, and later to the primary school in Baldon, the next village along the road towards Chapel. I was taken to and from the school in my father’s black Standard, driven carefully by Mr Stimpson, who with his wife represented our entire domestic staff. Before the Second World War there had been a full household of servants, but all that changed during the war. From 1939 to 1940 the house was used partly to accommodate evacuees from Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, and partly as a school for the children. It was taken over by the RAF in 1941, and the family has not lived in the main part of the house since. The part of it in which I live is the wing where I grew up.

  3

  If there had been any preparations for the visit, Rosalie and I were not told what they were. The first we knew about it was when a car arrived at the main gate and Stimpson went down to let it in. This was in the days when Derbyshire County Council was using the house, and they always wanted the gates locked at weekends.

  The car that drove up to the house was a Mini. The paint had lost its shine, the front bumper was bent from a collision, and there was rust around the windows. It was not at all the sort of car that we were used to seeing come to the house. Most of my parents’ other friends were apparently well-off or important, even during this period when our family had fallen on hard times.

  The man who had been driving reached into the back seat of the Mini, and pulled out a little boy, just now waking up. He cradled the boy against his shoulder. Stimpson conducted them politely to the house. Rosalie and I watched from an upstairs window as Stimpson returned to the Mini to unload the luggage they had brought with them, but we were told to come down from the nursery and meet the visitors. Everyone was in our main sitting room. Both my parents were dressed up as if it was an important occasion, but the visitors looked more casual.

  We were introduced. The man’s name was Mr Clive Borden, and the boy, his son, was called Nicholas, or Nicky. Nicky was about two, which was three years younger than me and five years younger than my sister. There did not appear to be a Mrs Borden, but this was not explained to us.

  I’ve subsequently found out a little more about this family. I know for instance that Clive Borden’s wife died shortly after the birth of her baby. Her maiden name was Diana Ruth Ellington, and she came from Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Nicholas was her only son. Clive Borden himself was the son of Graham Borden, the son of Alfred Borden, the magician. Clive Borden was therefore the grandson of Rupert Angier’s greatest enemy, and Nicky was his great-grandson, my contemporary.

  Obviously, Rosalie and I knew nothing of this at the time, and after a few minutes Mama suggested that we might like to take Nicky up to our nursery and show him some of our toys. We meekly obeyed, as we had been brought up to do, with the familiar figure of Mrs Stimpson on hand to look after us all.

  What then passed between the three adults I can only guess at, but it went on all afternoon. Clive Borden and his boy had arrived soon after lunchtime, and we three children played together until it was almost dark. Mrs Stimpson kept us occupied, leaving us to play together when we were happy to do so, but reading to us or encouraging us to try new games when we showed signs of flagging. She supervised toilet visits, and brought us snacks and drinks. Rosalie and I grew up surrounded by expensive toys, and to us, even as children, it was clear that Nicky was not used to such excess. With adult hindsight I imagine the toys of two girls were not all that interesting to a two-year-old boy. We got through the long afternoon, however, and I can’t remember any squabbles.

  What were they talking about downstairs?

  I realise that this meeting must have started as one of the occasional attempts our two families have made to patch up the row between our ancestors. Why they, we, could not leave the past to fester and die I do not know, but it seems deep in the psychological make-up of both sides to need to keep fretting over the subject. What could it possibly matter now, or then, that two stage magicians were constantly at each other’s throats? Whatever spite, hatred or envy that rankled between those two old men surely could not concern distant descendants who had their own lives and affairs? Well, so it might seem in all common sense, but passions of blood are irrational.

  In the case of Clive Borden, irrationality seems part of him, no matter what might have happened to his ancestor. His life has been difficult to research, but I know he was born in west London. He led an average childhood and had a fair talent for sports. He went to Loughborough College after he left school but dropped out after the first year. In the decade afterwards he was frequently homeless, and seems to have stayed in the houses of a number of friends and relatives. He was arrested several times for drunk and disorderly behaviour, but somehow managed to avoid a criminal record. He described himself as an actor and made a precarious living in the film industry, doing extra and stand-in work whenever he could find it, with periods on the dole between.

  The one short period of emotional and physical stability in his life was when he met and married Diana Ellington. They set up home together in Twickenham, Middlesex, but the marriage turned out to be tragically short-lived. After Diana died Clive Borden stayed on in the flat they had been renting and managed to persuade a married sister, who lived in the same area, to help bring up the baby boy. He kept working in films, and although he was again drifting socially, he appears to have been able to provide for the child. This was his general situation at the time he came to visit my parents.

  After this visit he left the flat in Twickenham, apparently moved back to the centre of London, and in the winter of 1971 went abroad. He went first to the USA, but after that travelled on to either Canada or Australia. According to his sister he changed his name, and deliberately broke all contacts with his past. I have done what searches I can, but I can’t even be sure whether he is still alive or not.

  4

  But now I return to that afternoon and evening of Clive Borden’s visit to Caldlow House, and try to reconstruct what took place while we children played upstairs.

  My father would have been making a great show of hospitality, offering drinks and opening a good wine to celebrate the occasion. The evening meal would be lavish. He would enquire genially about Mr Borden’s car journey, or about his views on something that was in the news, or even about his general well-being. This is the way my father invariably behaved when thrust into a social situation whose outcome he could not predict or control. It was the bluff, agreeable façade put up by a decent English gentleman, lacking in sinister connotation but completely inappropriate for the occasion. I can imagine that it would have made more difficult any reconciliation that they were trying to achieve.

  My mother, meanwhile, would be playing a more subtle part. She would be much better attuned to the tensions that existed between the two men, but would feel constrained by being, in this matter, a relative outsider. I believe she would not have said much, at least for the first hour or so, but would be conscious of the need to focus on the one subject that concerned them all. She would have kept trying, subtly and unobtrusively, to steer the conversation in that direction.

  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 a recent exchange of letters, 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 patching things up with our family. 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.

  I�
�m sure 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 my research. I’ve read several books on stage magic, and biographies of a few of the 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 in which a woman 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 realise 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 must have 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.

  5

  There was one part of the house into which we children were never allowed. 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 always 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 imagine 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 was no place for the nervous. In winter, on still nights, its isolation set a silence around the walls. You heard small, unexplained noises. Animals, birds, frozen in their hidden places, moved suddenly for warmth; trees and leafless shrubs brushed against each other in the wind; noises on the far side of the valley were amplified and distorted by the funnel shape of the valley floor; people from the village walked along the road that runs by the edge of our grounds. At other times, the wind came 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 was old, filled with memories of other people’s lives, scarred with the remains of their deaths. It was 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 delayed by anything from this macabre past. 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.

  The three of us, Rosalie, myself and the Borden boy Nicky, had been made to wait in the sitting room, next to the dining room where the adults still conducted their inexplicable conflict. Both of these rooms led out into the corridor with the brown door.

  Voices were raised again. Someone passed the connecting door. I heard my mother’s voice and she sounded upset.

  Then Stimpson walked briskly across the sitting room and slipped through the connecting door into the dining room. He opened and closed it deftly, but we had a glimpse of the three adults beyond. They were still in their positions at the table, but were standing. I briefly saw my mother’s face, and it seemed distorted by grief and anger. The door closed quickly before we could follow Stimpson into the room. He must have taken up position on the other side, to prevent us pushing through.

  We heard my father speaking, issuing an order. That tone of voice always meant trouble would follow. Clive Borden said something and my father replied angrily, in a sufficiently loud voice for us to hear every word.

  ‘You will, Mr Borden!’ he said, and in his agitation his voice broke briefly into falsetto. ‘Now you will! You damned well will!’

  We heard the dining-room door to the corridor being opened. Borden said something again, still indistinctly.

/>   Then Rosalie whispered against my ear, ‘I think Daddy is going to open the brown door!’

  We both sucked in our breath, and I clung to Rosalie in panic. Nicky, infected with our fear, let out a wail. I too started making a yowling noise so that I could not hear what the adults were doing.

  Rosalie hissed at me, ‘Hush!’

  ‘I don’t want the door opened!’ I cried.

  Then, tall and sudden, Clive Borden burst into the sitting room from the corridor and found the three of us cowering there. How our little scene must have seemed to him I cannot imagine, but somehow he too had become tainted with the terror that the door symbolised. He stepped forward and down, bracing himself on a bended knee, then scooped Nicky into his arms.

  I heard him mutter something to the boy, but it was not a reassuring sound. I was too wrapped up in my own fears to pay attention. It could have been anything. Behind him, across the corridor, beneath the stairs, I saw the open rectangle where the brown door had been. A light was on in the area behind and I could see two steps leading down, then a half-turn with more steps below.

  I watched Nicky as he was carried out of the room. His father was holding him high, so that he could wrap his arms around his father’s neck, facing back. His father reached up and placed a protective hand on the boy’s head as he ducked through the doorway and went down the steps.

  6

  Rosalie and I had been left behind and we were faced with a choice of terrors. One was to remain alone in the familiar surroundings of our living room, the other was to follow the adults down the steps. I was holding on to my older sister, both of my arms wrapped around her leg. There was no sign of Mrs Stimpson.