The Prestige (15 page)

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.

“Are you fit to drive in snow, with drink inside you?” she said now.

“Yes.”

But he did not move from the chair. She laid the Borden book on the table between them,
face-down at the open pages.

“What do you want from me, Kate?” he said.

“I don't know any more. Perhaps I never did. I think this is what happened when Clive
Borden came to see my father. They both felt they should try to sort something out, went
through the motions of trying, but the ancient differences still mattered.”

“There's only one thing that interests me. My twin brother is somewhere here. In this
house. Ever since you showed me your grandfather's stuff this afternoon I've been aware of
him. He tells me not to leave, to come, to find him. I've never known his presence as
strong in me. Whatever you say, whatever the birth register shows, I think it was my
brother who came here to the house in 1970, and I think he's somehow still here.”

“In spite of the fact he doesn't exist.”

“Yes, in spite of that. At the same time, we both know there's something strange about
what happened that night. Or you do, at least.”

She had no answer to that, because she felt herself at an impasse. It was the same one she
had always known; the certain death of a little boy, whom she later discovered had somehow
survived. Meeting the man who had been the boy had changed nothing. It was him, it had not
been him.

She poured herself another drop of brandy, and Andrew said, “Is there somewhere I can make
those calls?”

“Stay in here. This is the warmest place in the house in winter. I've got something I want
to check.”

As she left the room she heard him jabbing at the buttons of his mobile phone. She went
down to the main hall and looked through the front door. There was a solid covering of
snow, two or three inches. It always settled smoothly here, on the sheltered pathway, but
she knew that further down the valley, where the main road was, the snow would already be
drifting against the hedges and roadside banks. There were no sounds of traffic, which
could usually be heard from here. She went around to the back of the house, and saw that a
drift was building up against the woodshed. Mrs Makin was in the kitchen, so she spoke to
her and asked her to get the spare room ready.

She and Andrew remained in the dining room after Mrs Makin had cleared away the meal,
sitting on opposite sides of the open fireplace, talking about various everyday things;
his trouble with the girl he lived with, hers with the local council who wanted some of
her land for building purposes. But she was tired, and had no real appetite for this. At
eleven she suggested they should continue in the morning.

She showed him where the spare room was, and which bathroom he could use. Rather to her
surprise, a second proposition was not offered. He thanked her politely for her
hospitality, said goodnight, and that was that.

Kate returned to the dining room, where she had left some of her great-grandfather's
papers. They were already stacked neatly; some hereditary trait, perhaps, that prevented
her from scattering paper everywhere. There had always been a part of her that wanted to
be untidy, casual, free, but it was in her nature not to be.

She sat down in the chair closest to the fire, and felt the glow against her legs. She
threw on another log. Now Andrew had gone to bed she felt less sleepy. It hadn't been him
that had worn her out, but talking to him, dredging up all those memories from childhood.
To talk them out was a kind of purging, a release of pent-up poisons, and she felt better.

She sat by the fire, thinking about that old incident, trying as she had done for a
quarter of a century to confront what it meant. It still struck fright to the core of her.
And the boy Andrew called his brother was at the heart of it all, a hostage to the past.

Mrs Makin came in just then, and Kate asked if she would make her some decaffeinated
coffee before she went to bed. She listened to the midnight news on Radio 4 as she sipped
the coffee, and later the BBC World Service came on. She continued to be wide awake. The
spare room Andrew was in was immediately overhead, and she could hear him turning
frequently in the ancient bed. She knew how cold that room could be. It had been her
bedroom as a child.