The Prestige

(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 investigation I can, but I have been unable to establish even whether he is still alive or not.)

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

My father would have been making a great show of hospitality, offering drinks and opening a rare 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 might be in the news, or even about his general wellbeing. 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 faзade 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 an exchange of letters in the recent past, 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 a reconciliation. 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, but he either hid or destroyed it before he died.

I'm certain 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 some research into what happened. I've read several books on stage magic, and a few biographies of 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 where someone 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.