[still told by Malvolio]

The night before Sir Andrew and I were due to sail, something distinctly peculiar happened – almost as peculiar as our having struck up a kind of friendship in the first place, for want of anyone else to talk to. I had offered to pay our bills at the Elephant until Sir Andrew's next month's allowance arrived, if he promised not to eat or drink anything expensive. This was a matter of convenience, as I had a month's wages from the Countess Olivia in lieu of notice, plus some savings, while Sir Andrew was heavily in debt.

Now, the money from Sir Andrew's uncle had arrived at the Countess's house, and the new Count, Sebastian, had brought it round to the Elephant in person, so that he could apologise to Sir Andrew for having fought with him when they'd first met, and ask him if he was feeling better now, and hope we had a good voyage, etc, and Sir Andrew could reply that no, he didn't bear any grudges, actually he thought his new scar made him look rather tough, and yes, he was fine, or at least didn't feel any more confused than he generally did, well, he was an Englishman, if there was anything wrong with his brain it was down to all that British beef, ha ha, etc. And they shook hands and parted as friends, and, that evening after dinner, I went up to Sir Andrew's room to help him pack his bags.

Sir Andrew went in ahead of me, and I heard him exclaim, 'Toby, old chap, what are you doing here? I thought you were married to Maria!' and then 'Oh gosh, I'm frightfully sorry, I mistook you for a friend of mine.'

A deep, rich, wine-dark voice replied, 'What makes you think I'd want to be friends with a wisp of straw like you? You've got a face the colour of cottage-cheese and an expression like a kicked spaniel, you know that?'

'Yes, everyone says that,' replied Sir Andrew meekly.

'And you can't even take an insult properly!' exploded the voice. 'If I'd insulted the Prince like that, he'd have insulted me straight back, and we'd have gone on being friends. You're not much of a hallucination, I must say. I thought I'd got a better imagination than to invent something that looks like you!'

I knocked on the door. 'Oh, come on in, hallucination,' the voice said. 'Only you'd better not be the Fairy Queen again.'

Now, I'm not in the habit of staying in inns, but the Elephant is a fairly respectable establishment. Sir Andrew's bedroom was rather larger and better furnished than mine, but all the rooms were clean and well-aired, and, even with the shutters closed, you could always hear and smell the sea. By contrast, the room we had stepped into now was gloomy, greasy and flea-ridden, and it stank. There was an old man lying in a bed in one corner, next to a table with a half-empty bottle of sherry and two large glasses. There were a dozen or so empty wine-bottles on the floor.

The man did look rather like Sir Toby, only more so. He looked like a tapestry I had once seen of some satyrs, with an old satyr called Papa Silenus in the middle. He looked the way you imagine Father Christmas would after consuming one glass of sherry and once mince pie from every child in the world.

(Not that Father Christmas ever came to our family when I was a boy. My parents explained that they didn't want to bring me up to believe a lie, and that if people weren't prepared to keep Christmas properly with prayers and Bible readings, it was better not to celebrate it at all. Which I could see was reasonable, but it was still frustrating being the only child in the village who never got any Christmas presents, when children from much poorer cottages were showing off mittens that their mothers had knitted for them or wooden soldiers that their fathers had carved for them, or, at the very least, an apple and a piece of coal. Even if the apple was soon eaten and the coal had to go straight back in the fireplace, it meant they could jeer, 'What's wrong, Malvolio – Father Christmas hasn't missed you out again, has he? Haven't you learnt to be a good boy yet?' And I'd snap, 'I didn't want Father Christmas to bring me any presents – only babies want new toys for Christmas – but I asked him to bring your mum and dad a fresh stick to whip you with – your dad's belt must be nearly worn out by now!' and stride off home before they could see whether I was crying. But I digress.)

I was surprised that the landlord had allowed someone like that to stay there, and even more surprised that we hadn't heard him, as he was evidently the loud, talkative kind of drunk who would probably burst into song at the slightest excuse, usually in the small hours of the morning.

'I don't know how we've walked into the wrong room,' I began, 'but we're certainly not hallucinations. We're not the product of your drinking…'

'Oh, it's not the drinking,' the old man said. 'I'm dying, that's all. My author's decided to kill me off, and now he doesn't know where to send me. You see, he knows there's no logical reason why I should go to Heaven, when I've never done anything good and never been sorry for all the bad things I've done, but on the other hand he doesn't want to send me to Hell, because he loves me, and he knows the audience does, too. So he's sending me visions, and one minute it's green fields and fluffy lambkins, and the next it's hell-fire and damned souls looking like burnt raisins on the top of a cake, and then it's you two: one who looks like a black crow and one who looks like a wrung-out dishcloth. Sorry, I'm not at my best and I can't even come up with decent insults any more, so I'm just stating the facts. What d'you call yourselves, anyway?'

'My name's Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but that's just because of the way I look, you know – I'm not actually diseased.'

'My name's Malvolio, but I'm trying not to deserve it these days,' I said. In the past, I had always been rather proud of my name, because, after all, it was my name, and it did have a certain Italianate elegance about it. But in the last couple of weeks, I had begun to wonder whether it was actually fair. It wasn't as though I was noticeably more malevolent than, say, Sir Toby, who seemed to live as much for vindictive practical jokes on his friends and enemies alike as he did for drink and song.

'Then why don't you change it?' demanded the old man, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

'Change it?'

'Well, you have to change your identity sometimes, don't you? When you've got the world coming after you – police, girlfriends' husbands, loan sharks, bookies, people with bills from wine merchants and pox-doctors, army officers wanting to know why you haven't reported for duty – all barging into where you're staying and saying, "Is there a John Oldcastle living here?" and your friends say, "Oldcastle? Never heard of him, sorry, you must have got the wrong address," and they go away. Besides, they all know Oldcastle died heroically as a martyr, and I'm dying in bed alone, so it can't be me, can it? Not that I've got any objection to dying in bed,' he added, 'but it's a pity about the "alone" part. There used to be a tart here – nice girl, and even when I couldn't make anything happen, if it wound up just being a cuddle, I promised to pay her just the same. And she knew I usually couldn't afford to pay anyway, but they'd just put it on my bill, and I'd pay the lot if I got round to having any money.'

'You mean the Elephant is a brothel?' I exclaimed, horrified. 'This is supposed to be the best inn in Illyria!'

'No, no, not the Elephant in Illyria. And the place I'm talking about is shutting down that side of the business anyway, just because one of my followers has got married to the landlady and he's too proud to run a brothel. They don't even want to run it as an inn any more, just a pub and restaurant. Hah! He wasn't too respectable to be a customer here in the old days, when the Prince was with us. But now that he's become king, he thinks he's got to be respectable and An Ideal King, and now everyone else seems to have the same idea.'

'What does that mean: "An Ideal King"?' asked Sir Andrew.

'One who starts wars with other countries instead of having civil wars against people who used to be his allies when he was busy deposing the last king. The wars are exactly the same, but you have to travel further for them and the food tastes funny and the enemy are Frogs or rag-heads, so, as far as the history books are concerned, that means you were A Good Thing, even if you had to banish all your old friends before you could start being it.'

'So this king banished you?' I asked, feeling that the king had the right idea.

'That's right, sent for armed guards to march me and the other lads off to prison, and gave orders that we weren't to be released unless we left his court forever – but I didn't think he meant it! I mean, we were mates, so we were always fooling around like that – we'd decide to do a highway robbery, but then the Prince would fail to show up, and then, when the rest of us were divvying up the cash, a mysterious cloaked figure would come out of the darkness and rob us – and of course it turned out to be the Prince all along! He used to be fun, until suddenly he decided to be all grown-up and serious and responsible.'

'There's a difference between someone laughing with you and laughing at you,' I pointed out.

'Well, maybe there is,' put in Sir Andrew, 'but it's still better than people not laughing and not wanting to be your friend any more, isn't it? We're sort of banished too,' he added kindly to the stranger, 'well, we've banished ourselves, really. You see, my friend Toby – the one who looks like you…'

'You mean old, fat, and drunk?' suggested the stranger.

'Uh, well, yes, actually, but anyway, his niece is the Countess of Illyria – this lovely girl called Olivia – and he invited to come and stay so that she'd fall in love with me and we could get married, to try to cheer her up after her brother died. I mean, I wasn't sure she was that interested in me, and there was this Duke called Orsino who was trying to court her as well and she wouldn't even see him – but Toby said she was just being distant to keep me interested, and I needed to try harder. And in the meantime, Maria – she's Olivia's housekeeper, only now she's married to Toby – well, she decided it would be a good idea to write Malvolio a fake love-letter from Olivia, because he'd always wanted to marry her so he'd become the Count and could throw us out – so he got dressed up in what were his idea of trendy clothes and went in grinning like an idiot and…'

'And this is turning into a very long story, and I'm sure this gentleman would like a rest now,' I said, trying to make the word 'gentleman' sound as though I meant it.

'No, go on, what happened next?' asked the old man. 'Did she think you were mad, and throw you in the moat to try to bring you to your senses?'

'The Countess Olivia is not in the habit of throwing her servants in the moat,' I said stiffly (and there wasn't a moat anyway). 'No, she was called away by an urgent message, so she asked her uncle, Sir Toby, to take charge of me, and I thought that was my cue to assert myself by talking down to him. And he locked me up, and it was several days before I was freed, and then only by having to grovel to the Countess's jester for help. And if you must know, I've had to leave a perfectly good job because it would be impossible for me to exercise any authority, and I still have nightmares about it sometimes, which shows how hilarious it was!'

'And anyway,' continued Sir Andrew, 'we none of us had a chance, because Olivia was in love with Orsino's new page-boy who turned out to be a girl who was in love with Orsino, and Toby got me to fight a duel with her – the page-boy-girl, I mean, not Olivia – but it turned out to be her brother and he beat us up, and now Olivia's married to him, and Toby doesn't want to be my friend any more, and I don't think he ever really liked me, he was just pretending to because he enjoyed laughing at me and spending my money. I thought he'd be like a sort of brother, because we'd fought the same enemy and been wounded together – you know, like the knights-errant in the legends?'

'No, don't be a knight-errant; be a knight erring, it's much more fun. You wouldn't want to die without having had a few adventures in your time, would you? Come on, have a drink and cheer up.'