The Night Curator – Part 1: After Hours

The last visitor left at five-fifteen. By six, the museum's galleries were hushed and gold, the guards gone, the alarm set to the quiet zone only. Beatrix had the keys to the reading room, the old rotunda and the storeroom where plaster casts of long-dead emperors stood in rows.

She was forty-three, the chief curator, composed and precise, with half-moon glasses and a talent for silence. He was thirty-six, an exhibitions designer, boyish, forever anxious about getting things right. They had been together four years, and he had finally told her, in a corridor of Roman busts, what he wished she would do.

In the reading room, at an oak table lit by a green lamp, she slid a single typed sheet across to him. Conditions of Access. His limits, hers, and the rule that either could stop at any moment. No marks, no real humiliation, nothing that left the building. The word was Closing.

"Say it back."

"Closing."

"I will ask you every half hour whether you wish to continue. You will answer honestly."

"Yes, Dr Voss."

"Not yet." She took off her glasses, folded them into her pocket and put on the long grey coat that hung by the door. Her voice dropped into the cool, perfectly level register she used to deliver bad news to funding committees. "Mr Hale. I have been disappointed by your work this quarter."

"I'm very sorry, Dr Voss."

"You will be shown how it is done." She led him slowly through the dim galleries, her heels loud on the marble, until they reached the rotunda. A single spotlight lit the floor beneath the dome. "Stand there. Hands at your sides. You will look at the statue opposite until I tell you otherwise."

He stood. She walked a slow circle round him, and said nothing, and the silence in the vast domed room grew until he could hear his own pulse.

"Are you content?" she asked.

"Content, Dr Voss."

"Good. Then we begin the inventory."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Inventory.