[Malvolio's story continued]

I woke up still thinking about the weaver in the story I'd been reading earlier. He was a Puritan, though he'd stopped having anything to do with religion, and stopped trusting either God or people, after being falsely accused of theft. I knew how he felt. I'd stopped going to chapel as a matter of principle, thirty years ago. This was because I'd had a series of arguments with whoever happened to be preaching, on various subjects including how the doctrine of Predestination differed from Muslim belief in Fate, whether Christians should celebrate Christmas, whether women should be allowed to preach, whether music had any place in Christian worship, and whether it was hypocritical to campaign against bear-baiting and dog-fighting but still eat meat. (I can't remember now which side I was on in some of these arguments: only that I'd felt very strongly about them at the time.) In the end, the pastor had said that if I wasn't willing to let people finish preaching a sermon before I started criticising it, I'd better not attend chapel at all for a few weeks. I'd told him he was a crypto-Papist who would evidently prefer to preach in Latin so that nobody understood what he was saying and could tell him he was wrong, and walked out, never to return. Since then, I'd been too busy to bother with religion, though people still referred to me as 'a sort of Puritan'.

But when I looked back, it wasn't the endless arguments about predestination and Christmas carols and animal rights that were important. What had mattered had been all those sermons about why you must love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you, just as God has forgiven you. At the time, I'd sat through all this talk about grace abounding to the chief of sinners, and wondered why the New Testament didn't have much to say to those of us who were respectable law-abiding citizens, didn't need forgiveness, and therefore shouldn't need to forgive anyone else.

But now, last night, Feste and I seemed to made peace, at least for the time being, and it was oddly reassuring not to have to resent him any more. It's all very well to storm off, snarling, 'I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!' but in practice, if you have the capacity to antagonise virtually everyone you meet, then getting your own back on everyone who has ever bullied or insulted you can turn into a full-time job – especially as, if you don't have the resources to kill all your enemies outright, they are likely to want revenge on you for taking revenge on them for taking revenge on you. I wish I'd worked all this out a bit earlier. But on the other hand, being expected to forgive all my enemies (even Sir Toby? Even Maria?) didn't seem much more feasible.

When I went down to order breakfast, yet another familiar enemy was sitting slumped in one of the armchairs in the bar, with a suitcase at his feet. Sir Andrew was looking even paler and more wrung-out than he usually does; his head was bandaged, his right arm in a sling, and he had an only slightly faded black eye.

'What's wrong? Didn't the new Count want you staying in his house any longer?' I asked.

'I didn't want to stay any longer! I decided to leave as soon as I was well enough to get out of bed. I'm fed up with Illyria, everyone here is completely mad and I haven't got any friends and I just want to go home!' He was crying uncontrollably by this point, like a child. 'Even Toby isn't my friend, and I thought he was – I mean, he was always borrowing money off me and never paying it back, and you don't take money off someone who isn't your friend, do you?'

'I wouldn't borrow money without paying it back,' I pointed out.

'No, but then you haven't got any friends, have you? I mean, you haven't even got anyone who pretends to like you! But you still thought you were going to marry Olivia and get to boss us all around, didn't you? Loser!'

'You let Sir Toby convince you that you stood a chance with her,' I pointed out. Doesn't that make us both equally losers?'

'Yeah – I suppose I should've thought of that,' Sir Andrew admitted. 'Only Toby said she was pretending to flirt with that kid Cesario just to make me jealous, and that I had to challenge him to a duel to win back her favour. Only it wasn't Cesario – did you hear, Cesario's actually a girl called Viola? – but anyway, it wasn't her, it was her brother, and he's dangerous, and he attacked Toby and me! He slashed my head open, and I had to have eleven stitches, but I didn't scream at all!' he added proudly.

'You had eleven stitches without screaming?'

'Well, you see, I fainted as soon as the doctor came near me with a needle, so it saved time. But the difficult bit was finding a doctor, because the first one they sent for was drunk. It's not fair – if people like Toby and me are going to get pissed and start fights, other people ought to stay sober in order to patch us up!'

'And what do you expect me to do about it?' I retorted. 'Draw up binge-drinking rotas so that different people get completely out of their skulls on different nights?'

'Can I have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?'

'Certainly not,' I said sternly. 'That's much too often, and anyway, it isn't fair if the same people have the same day of the week every week. No, I think an eight-day rota would be fairer, don't you?'

Sir Andrew stared at me for a moment, trying to work out whether I was serious, and then we both burst out laughing. It was like the sort of ridiculous conversation you have with a small child – which, considering that Sir Andrew seemed to have the emotional maturity of the average six-year-old, was probably fair enough. 'I didn't know you had a sense of humour!' he gasped at last.

'I didn't know I did, either. I think you may have awakened it.'

'Yeah, but why are you being – well, almost nice to me?'

This was a good question, under the circumstances. I could think of various sarcastic replies, but in the end I settled for, 'Well, now that we're both defeated, there isn't much point going on being enemies, so we might as well help each other.'

'We should gang up on Toby for a change – see how he likes it!' suggested Sir Andrew.

'We could,' I agreed. 'But do you really think it's worth it? Anyway, I got the impression most of it was Maria's idea, and if she's married to Sir Toby, I suppose that's enough punishment in itself.'

'"But she'll regret it! The whole thing's doomed before they even take their vows!" That was a line from a play I saw once.'

'And if it comes to that, Sir Toby isn't going to have an easy life being married to anyone as sharp-tongued as Maria,' I continued. 'Perhaps they're each other's punishment.'

'Yes, they're each other's punishment. And they don't want me around any more, anyway. I'm going to send for the rest of my luggage and stay here until I'm well enough to travel, and then I'll go – oh, somewhere or other. Maybe Italy.'

'Do you speak Italian?'

'No, that's pretty much why I came here. You see, after I'd failed my university entrance exams for the fourth time, my uncle said I ought to go on a gap year until I'd got a bit more sense, and he'd pay me an allowance as long as I didn't come home. So I decided to start with Illyria because nearly everyone here speaks English, and I don't speak much of anything else.'

'Some people would have bought a phrasebook,' I suggested.

'I did! It said how to say, "I want a beer," and, "I want a steak," and, "I challenge you to a duel," in a dozen languages, but it didn't say how to say, "On second thoughts, I don't want to have a fight with you after all because you're a lot bigger than me, so please can I buy you a drink?" But anyway, I've seen lots of plays set in Italy, and the characters in the plays can all speak English.'

'Yes, but that's not the same as real life,' I pointed out.

'It might be! How do you know we're not characters in a play? I met this philosopher once who said that the whole world is a stage, only the author keeps running short of ideas, so he re-uses the same plots over and over, like twins and shipwrecks and girls disguised as boys. I mean, I saw a play once set in Ephesus, or maybe Syracuse, that was exactly like what's been happening here, only it was about two sets of identical twins who'd been separated at birth, so one of each twin had grown up in Ephesus and the others had grown up in Syracuse. I think Ephesus is in Greece...'

'No, actually it's in Asia Minor,' I corrected him.

'Right, so Syracuse must be the one that's in Italy. Or somewhere foreign like that, anyway. I mean, I can't remember much about the play, I just remember one of them saying at the end, "We came into the world like brother and brother; Now let's go hand in hand, not one before the other." But I'd like to go to Syracuse or Ephesus or wherever it was, and find out if it's really like that.'

'I think it'd be a good idea to find out where it is first,' I said gently. 'There's an atlas on the shelf over there, and an encyclopaedia. Why don't you look it up?'

He yawned. 'Later. I'm really tired now, and I'm hurting all over. I just want to go and lie down for a bit.'

'Understood. Do you want a hand with your suitcase?'

'Thanks, if you don't mind.' Sir Andrew didn't say anything else until he'd found his room and clambered into bed, at which he glanced up and asked sleepily, 'Malvolio, what are you planning to do next?'

'I haven't decided yet,' I admitted. 'I just don't want to go back.'

'Well – do you want to come with me? I mean, I know we hate each other, but it's no fun travelling alone.'

'I'll think about it,' I said. 'And I don't hate you any more. I don't like you, you understand, but I might be able to put up with you.'

'Okay. I can put up with you, too.' He fell asleep, and began snoring, with a high-pitched nasal whine.

I returned to my own room, wondering why I had agreed even to consider travelling around the world with a monolingual drifter. It was hard to explain, except that I didn't want to be proudly aloof and alone any more, now that I'd found out what being utterly alone feels like. It had something to do with the brothers in the play Sir Andrew had quoted, and something to do with the reclusive weaver in the story I'd been reading, wanting to adopt the baby who'd crawled into his cottage out of the snow, because 'It's a lone thing, and I'm a lone thing.' Admittedly, adopting a whiny, petulant twit on a permanent gap year was going to be a lot more complicated than adopting a golden-haired orphan child, but, after all, somebody needed to keep an eye on him. At any rate, before we left Illyria, I was definitely going to buy my own copy of Silas Marner.

It might help me to stay sane.