The Prestige

I lay awake in the darkness, trying to think how to deal 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 realize 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 realized 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 Angier 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."

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 these 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.

11

I write, unwillingly, in the year 1903. I had planned to leave my notebook closed forever, but events have conspired against me.