The Prestige

His death nags at me. The obsession would end if I knew more about the boy, and what really happened to him that night. As I have learned about my family's past, I have learned inevitably about the Bordens. I traced you, Andrew, because I think you and I are the key to the whole thing — you are the sole surviving Borden, while I am to all intents the last living Angier.

Against all logic, I know Nicky Borden was you , Andrew, and that somehow you survived that ordeal.

5

The rain had turned to snow during the evening, and it was still falling as Andrew Westley and Kate Angier sat together over the remains of dinner. Her story appeared at first to produce no response from him, because he merely looked quietly at his empty coffee cup, fingering the spoon in the saucer. Then he said he needed to stretch. He crossed the room to the window to stare out at the garden, and cradled his hands behind his neck, waggling his head from side to side. It was pitch black out there in the grounds, and she knew there was nothing for him to see. The main road was behind the house and at a lower level; on this side of the house there was just the lawn, the wood, the rising hill, and beyond all that the rocky crag of Curbar Edge. He did not change position for some time, and without being able to see his face Kate felt that either his eyes must be closed or he was staring blankly into the dark.

In the end he said, "I'll tell you all I know. I lost contact with my twin brother when I was about the same age as you're describing. Maybe what you've told me would explain that. But his birth wasn't registered, so I can't prove he exists. But I know he's real. You've heard how twins have a kind of rapport? That's how I'm sure. The other thing I know is that he is connected in some way with this house. Ever since I arrived today I've been sensing him here. I don't know how, and I can't explain."

"I've looked at the records too," she said. "You don't have a twin."

"Could someone have tampered with official records? Is that possible?"

"That's what I wonder. If the boy was killed, wouldn't that give someone enough motive to find a way of falsifying the records?"

"Maybe so. All I can say for sure is that I don't remember anything about it. It's all blank. I don't even remember my father, Clive Borden. That child obviously couldn't have been me, and it's absurd even to think it was. It must have been someone else."

"But it was your father… and Nicky was his only child."

He turned from the window, and went back to his chair. It was across the wide table from hers.

"Look, there are only two or three possibilities," he said. "The boy was me, and I was killed and now I'm alive again. That doesn't make any sense, whichever way you look at it. Or the boy who died was my twin brother, and the person who killed him, presumably that's your father, later managed to get official records changed. I don't believe that either, frankly. Or you were mistaken, the child survived, and it might or might not have been me. Or… I suppose you could have imagined the whole thing."

"No. I didn't imagine it. I know what I saw. Anyway my mother as good as admitted it." She picked up her copy of the Borden book, and opened it at a page she had previously marked with a slip of paper. "There's another explanation, but it's as illogical as the others. If you weren't actually killed that night, then it might have been some kind of trick. The thing I saw being used that night was apparatus built for a stage illusion."

She turned the book around, and held it out to him, but he waved it away.

"The whole thing is ridiculous," he said.

"I saw it happen."

"I think you were either mistaken in what you saw, or it happened to someone else." He glanced again towards the windows with their undrawn curtains, then looked at his watch in a distracted way. "Do you mind if I use my mobile? I must tell my parents I'm going to be late. And I'd like to ring my flat in London."

"I think you should stay the night." He grinned briefly then, and Kate knew she had said it the wrong way. She found him fairly attractive, in a harmlessly coarse sort of way, but he was apparently the kind of man who never gave up about sex. "I meant that Mrs Makin will prepare the spare room for you."

"If she has to."

There had been that moment before they came in here for dinner. She must have given him too much rye whiskey, or had said too often that there were irreconcilable differences between her family and his. Or perhaps it was a combination of the two. Until then she had been rather liking the way he had leered in an open and unembarrassed way at her, off and on all afternoon, but an hour and a half ago, just before they came in here for dinner, he'd made it plain that he would like to try some reconciliation between the families. Just the two of them, the last generation. A part of her remained flattered, but what he had in mind was not what she had had in mind. She'd brushed him off, as gently as she knew how.