The Prestige

Tonight, when I pulled away the sheet, I discovered to my amazement that Gertrude was still in the chair, her face a torment of confusion and terror. I stood there, aghast.

Then, compounding the moment, one of the stage trapdoors snapped open, and a man came rising into view from below. He was wearing full evening dress, with silk hat, scarf and cape. As calmly as the devil, Borden (for it was he) doffed his hat to the audience, then strode calmly towards the wings, a drift of tobacco smoke swirling in his wake. I dashed after him, determined at last to confront him, when my attention was drawn by an immense discharge of brilliant light, from over my head!

An electrified sign was being lowered from the flies! In bright blue lettering, picked out in some electrical device, it said:

LE PROFESSEUR DE LA MAGIE

AT THIS THEATRE — ALL NEXT WEEK!

A ghastly cyanic pallor imbued the stage. I signalled to the stage manager in the wings and at last the curtain came down, concealing my despair, my humiliation, my rage.

When I arrived home and told her what had happened, Olivia said, 'You got to take revenge, Robbie. And you better make it good!'

At last I agree with her.

18th April 1897

Tonight, for the first time in public, Adam and I performed the switch illusion. We have been rehearsing it for more than a week, and technically the performance was faultless.

Yet the applause at the end was polite rather than enthusiastic.

13th May 1897

After many long hours of work and rehearsal, Adam and I have developed our cabinet switching routine to a standard which I know cannot be bettered. Adam, after eighteen months working closely with me, can imitate my movements and mannerisms with uncanny accuracy. Given an identical suit of clothes, a few touches of greasepaint and a (most expensive) hairpiece, he is my double to the last detail.

Yet each time we perform it, we bring the show to what we imagine will be a devastating climax, and our audiences declare themselves, by their lukewarm ripples of applause, to be unimpressed.

I do not know what I have to do to better the illusion. Two years ago the mere suggestion that I might be prevailed upon to include it in my act was enough to double my fee. These days, it is almost an irrelevance. I am brooding long.

1st June 1897

I have been hearing rumours for some time that Borden has 'improved' his switch illusion, but without further information I have taken no notice. It is years since I saw him performing it, and so yesterday evening I betook myself and Adam Wilson to a theatre in Nottingham, where Borden has been in residence for the last week. (I have a show tonight in Sheffield, but I left London a day early so that I might visit Borden at work en route .)

I disguised myself with greyed hair, cheek pads, untidy clothes, a pair of unnecessary eye-glasses, and took a seat only two rows from the front. I was just a few feet away from Borden as he performed all his tricks.

Everything is suddenly explained! Borden has substantially advanced his version of the illusion. He no longer conceals himself inside cabinets. There is no more stuff-and-nonsense with some object tossed across the stage (which I have been continuing to work with until this week). And he does not use a double.

I say with certainty: Borden does not use a double . I know everything there is to know about doubles. I can spot one as easily as I can spot a cloud in the sky. I am as sure as I can be that Borden works alone.

The first part of his act was performed before a half-drop, which only allowed the full stage set to be seen when he came to the climactic illusion. At this, the half-drop was raised and the audience saw an array of jars fuming with chemicals, cabinets adorned with coiling cables, glass tubes and pipettes, and above all a host of gleaming electrical wires. It was a glimpse into the laboratory of a scientific fiend.

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