[Told by Malvolio]

I couldn't sleep. With the curtains closed, my room was as dark as the dungeon where I'd been locked up, and I seemed to hear Feste earnestly asking me, 'So, are you really mad, or just pretending to be mad?' and 'Sir Topaz' (who was also Feste, disguising his voice) telling me that I was hallucinating and the room wasn't dark at all, and that he couldn't pronounce me cured unless I would agree that people were reincarnated as woodcocks. Worse, I could hear my voice, pleading with Feste to help me, grovelling to him. Worst of all was the memory of the lady Olivia's face, gazing at me in confused anxiety when I came in grinning like an idiot and prattling about the love-letter I thought she'd sent me – and Olivia again, even gentler and more pitying, when I was released from the dark room, still held in a straitjacket, dirty and degraded and furious, to confront her with the letter, and she explained that she didn't write it at all, and that someone must have tricked me.

I'd given notice, of course. It would be impossible to go on running the Countess Olivia's household, if everyone was laughing at me. When I'd informed my lady of this, she smiled and said, 'Oh, I wouldn't worry about that! Everyone here's been behaving rather strangely in the last few weeks, including me, and soon people will forget all about it. But I tell you what: why don't you take a sabbatical? You haven't taken any time off in – well, ever, actually, and you deserve it. Take a month's holiday, and think over what you're going to do next; and then, if you do decide to come back here, I'd be very glad to have you back; and if you still want to resign, I expect there are jobs going at Orsino's court, and he could pay you more than I do. But in the meantime, just relax.'

I agreed. I didn't want a holiday. I wanted a lot of things, including revenge, a grovelling apology from the entire universe, Olivia's hand in marriage, and, right now, a bath and a shave and some clean clothes. But most of these weren't achievable right now, so, when I'd at least washed and shaved and changed into fresh clothes, I packed my bags and set off. It wasn't as though arguing was going to do any good, and perhaps Olivia still secretly thought that I had been temporarily insane and that, now I was getting better, I needed some time to convalesce. So, I booked into the Elephant for the night.

And then, as I said, I couldn't sleep, in the darkness of the inn bedroom. It was ridiculous. I hadn't been afraid of the dark since I was six years old. I've always believed in sleeping well when I've done a good day's work, and being up bright and early the next morning to make sure everyone else gets up on time as well. (Not that getting any sleep was necessarily feasible with the Countess's uncle, blasted Sir Toby Belch, and his unspeakable friends, starting an impromptu party in the pantry when they reeled home at whatever time the pubs closed. But I believed in it as an ideal to aspire to, at any rate.)

But now, when I closed my eyes and tried to relax, I could hear Feste taunting me, 'Now, now, raving like this won't make you get better; just try to calm down and go to sleep,' and, before that, Olivia brushing cool fingers against my forehead to see if I'd got a fever, and asking kindly, 'Do you think you'd better go to bed?' – which I'd completely misunderstood. On reflection, thinking I had any chance of ending up in bed with Olivia, who was not only my boss but also thirty years younger than me and absolutely gorgeous, really was insane, but it had seemed reasonable enough at the time.

Come to think of it, hearing voices in your head was a sign of madness. What if I really did go mad from delayed shock, now that I was no longer busy trying to prove that I was sane? Perhaps something perverse in me even wanted to go mad, to prove that Feste and Sir Toby and Maria and the rest of that gang had done me a serious wrong and that it couldn't be dismissed as 'just a joke'.

Well, in the meantime, I might as well be comfortable. I made my way downstairs, and asked the night-porter how much a candle to last two hours would cost.

'Oh, they're free,' he said. 'Have a big one to last all night, if you'd rather – just as long as you don't let it set fire to the room! And if you're the scholarly type, there's books and newspapers in the bar. D'you fancy anything to eat or drink? The kitchen's closed now, but we've got some cakes and nuts and biscuits here, and a few bottles of beer...'

I ignored him, took a candle, helped myself to a book, and retired to my room. To my irritation, the book turned out to be a novel, but I didn't want to go down and speak to the infuriatingly chirpy porter again, so I sat up in bed and read. In fact, as fiction went, it wasn't too bad: a story about a lonely weaver who leaves his home town after his best friend has falsely accused him of theft and enticed his fiancée away from him, and settles on the edge of a village many miles away. I read until dawn, and then yawned, blew out the candle, stretched out in bed and wrapped the pillow round my head to blot out the frantically chattering sparrows, and slept until lunchtime.

It is horrifyingly easy to let standards slip, and become one of the wastrels who spend their nights carousing in drunken revelry and the next day recovering. Not that I was interested in the carousing side, but this was the first time I'd tried being nocturnal, and it was strangely pleasurable. I wondered whether I ought to be ashamed of myself, but, while I was on holiday, I couldn't think of any particular reason why I shouldn't be nocturnal for the time being. It wasn't as though I had any work I needed to get on with. While I was here, I was a customer, and it was someone else's job to wait on me.

I had lunch sent up to my room, along with the newspapers so that I could have a look through the job adverts. There wasn't likely to be much of interest, I knew. It's difficult applying for a new job when you're in your fifties, and, since Illyria was in the middle of a recession, there weren't many jobs going generally. I'd always been very good at interviewing people, and asking the questions they hoped no-one was going to ask, like, 'Why did you leave your last job – what precisely do you mean by "mutual agreement"?' 'Can you tell me about a time when you've had conflicts with your colleagues, and how you resolved the issue?' 'What would you say are your greatest weaknesses?' and 'Have you ever had, or been suspected of having, any of the following illnesses?' I knew all the evasive answers and what they meant, but I hadn't the faintest idea how I was going to answer any of those questions now.

The system had been a lot simpler when I was a boy. My uncle, who was butler to the old Count, had promised he could find me a job as a page-boy, as long as I stayed on at school until I was twelve, always got good grades and never got into trouble. I was a sensible child, and I'd always tried my hardest, and by the time I was ten I had become blackboard monitor, collector of dinner-money, and supervisor of the school library (only a couple of shelves of books in the corner of the room, but it was a responsible position, all the same). I knew that it didn't matter when other children kicked me and called me names in the playground, because they were only peasant children who'd be leaving in a couple of years anyway to earn a few pennies scaring crows or collecting firewood, while I was going to be page to a real Count. And in the meantime, if I was busy spending break-times cleaning the blackboard, counting dinner-money and checking that all the reading-books had been handed back on time, I didn't have to be in the playground much of the time anyway. The teacher said I ought to try for a scholarship to grammar school, but, with the prospect of a real job lined up, I decided I was ready to move on from formal education.

Of course, the old system of patronage and jobs for life was hopelessly inefficient, leading employers to hire the relatives of current members of staff rather than the best-qualified applicants. Not only that, it encouraged employees to be complacent, assuming that they couldn't be sacked whether they were any good at their jobs or not. Nobody should expect a job for life as a matter of course. But all the same, after working for the same household for forty years and working my way up to the top, I think I deserved one.

In fact, when the newspaper arrived I didn't even read as far as the job adverts, because I was too busy staring at the headline on the front page: 'Twin Weddings For Orphans Of The Storm'. I recognised nearly everyone in the photograph: Cesario, the effeminate new page-boy whom Duke Orsino had been sending to pester Olivia on a daily basis, holding hands with the Duke himself; and then Olivia, holding hands with another boy who looked very like Cesario, and must have been his brother. Thinking back, I'd seen the other boy before, too, the previous night in Olivia's house, hugging his brother and sobbing, but I hadn't paid them any attention at the time.

But – weddings? Olivia hadn't been wearing a wedding ring when I'd seen her, had she? Had she finally accepted Orsino? But everyone knew she thought he was the most boring man in Illyria, though she'd always tried to be tactful, and made the excuse that, as she was merely a countess, she didn't think she was good enough to marry a duke. It hadn't been all that unreasonable to hope that she might marry down, rather than up; aristocrats do sometimes marry their servants, and, if it came to that, Sir Toby had just got married to Maria, if only because they were united in hatred of me. Personally, I couldn't understand how anyone could want to marry Sir Toby, a man who exists in three states: (a) hungover and obnoxious, (b) drunk and obnoxious, or (c) asleep and almost tolerable; but that was Maria's problem, not mine.

But if Orsino wasn't Olivia's husband, who was? Not the ineffably vacuous Sir Andrew, surely? Or the boy Cesario, who had pushed past me, demanding to speak to 'the honourable lady of the house – which one is she, by the way?' The pretty, impertinent brat whom Olivia had made me run after to give him a ring, as if I were the one who was a mere errand-boy? Was he even old enough to be legally married to anyone?

The story below the photograph demonstrated that I had only to be removed from my position for a few days for complete chaos to descend. 'Cesario' was, it turned out, a girl called Viola. She and her brother, Sebastian, were illegal immigrants: travellers from Messaline who had been shipwrecked off the coast of Illyria and had managed to swim ashore, though neither of them had known that the other had survived. After that – well, the whole thing was almost too bizarre to be shocking, if only because it was impossible to decide what to be scandalised about first. What kind of hussy disguises herself as a boy, and then brazenly asks for a job at the court of a man she's never even seen before? What kind of boy gets married on the spur of the moment to a woman whom he's never met, but who thinks she knows him and has obviously mistaken him for someone else? What kind of woman asks a boy still young enough to be mistaken for his sister to marry her – and isn't even disappointed when she discovers she's accidentally married a complete stranger, whose only achievement is to have beaten up her uncle and his friends? Admittedly, it was high time someone taught Sir Toby and Sir Andrew a lesson, and I'm sure they deserved it, but Illyria has quite enough lawless vagabonds of its own without needing to import them – and, now that both Viola and Sebastian were married into the two noblest households in Illyria, there was no chance of sending them back.

The news was too depressing to go on with, so I finished reading the book about the weaver who adopted an orphaned child, and, when I'd finished it, went down to the bar to see whether they had Paradise Lost, which I've always meant to read and never quite got round to. They didn't, so I made do with another novel. This one turned out to be a sort of love story, although in practice most of it was about sheep. This was because it was about a young woman who inherits a farm, and decides to run it by herself, without the end of a bailiff, and, although both her shepherd and a neighbouring farmer are in love with her, the silly girl becomes infatuated with a fickle soldier. It was fairly obvious that she was going to end up marrying the shepherd, but it was interesting to see the plot winding its way through murder, ruined hay-harvests, elopement, faked suicides, sheep-bloat, illegitimacy, and over-enthusiastic sheepdogs. I hadn't realised just how many things could go wrong with sheep, but I could see how people became addicted to reading fiction if they didn't have anything better to do.

There was a folk singer in the bar that evening, who stayed until the small hours of the morning, so I decided to sit up in bed reading as the night before, since I wouldn't be able to get any sleep anyway. I didn't need to go down to see who it was; the voice was all too recognisable, and so were most of the songs, which had been in his repertoire for decades: Come Away Death, and Bottle Of Wine, and O Mistress Mine, and The Merryman And The Maid, and The Armadillo, and The Wind And The Rain, which is the most blatant lie imaginable. Feste isn't the kind of fool who ever gets turned out into the wind and the rain, unless he decides to go out there just for the fun of it.

There are genuine fools, who become court fool to a rich patron because they can't do any other job, who call their master 'Nuncle', and, if the master is ruined, will follow him into exile, like a beggar's dog. Feste is more like a cat: the sort of cat that positively refuses to catch mice, but goes from house to house, knowing that it can always find someone soft-hearted enough to give it a saucer of milk or a plate of fish-heads, and that it can come and go as it pleases, and scratch anyone who doesn't show it the respect it thinks it deserves. He also probably gets – I can't say he earns – more money than I do, though it's impossible to prove this, because everyone gives him money and it doesn't show up on a wage-slip at the end of each month. The old Count, Olivia's father, told me that Feste was one of those anomalies you have to work round, and he laughed at me when I pointed out that my job was to rationalise matters and deal with anomalies.

Right now, the anomaly was explaining that, 'Some of you might have heard me at the lady Olivia's court, but she doesn't need a professional fool right now; she's got a husband to do the job for free. But still, they say one drink too many makes you a fool, the next makes you a madman, and the third drowns you. So, here's a song for any lunatics here!' and he launched into a new song, called Mad Tom O'Bedlam.

I didn't think he was getting at me personally. I couldn't be sure whether he even knew I was there, though Feste generally seems to know practically everything that's going on. But if he was trying to provoke me, and I stayed in my room, he'd think I was afraid of him, and if I got angry and stormed down to tell him to shut up, then he'd won. On the other hand, he had rescued me when I was locked up, and I had promised to reward him. Not that he deserved it, of course, but I ought to keep my promises anyway. I made my way downstairs, with an envelope of banknotes, and handed it to Feste. 'There's the money I owe you,' I muttered, trying to sound as casual as possible. 'Oh – and – thank you.'

'That's okay – you'd suffered enough,' said Feste quietly. 'Now, why don't you buy me a drink? With all this singing, I'm as dry as the Egyptian mummy in the Metropolitan Museum.'

'What do you want?'

'Cider. Cheers, mate.'

I fetched a pint of cider for Feste and a mineral water for myself. 'By the way, do you do requests?' I asked.

'I might. Why?'

'Because I'd like to ask you to stop singing. Some of us are trying to sleep.'

'Okay, just one to finish off with and I'll call it a night. It's quite a quiet one anyway. Think of it as a lullaby.'

It was a quiet song, too: a melancholy Irish ballad called The Youth Of The Heart, with a haunting tune. I caught myself humming the chorus as I drifted off to sleep, and slept more peacefully and dreamlessly than I had for a long time.