The Long Night

Once a year, in the last week of the examination period, the central library stays open until six in the morning. Students call it the long night and plan their revision around it. It began because a librarian argued for it in a committee eleven years ago and nobody has since found a reason to end it.

Odile Marchetti has run seven of them. She knows the shape of the night as other people know a timetable: the noisy start, the settling at midnight, the collapse after three, and the small number who are still at their desks when the windows on the mezzanine turn grey.

At nine there are two hundred and eleven people in the building. The reading room is full, the group rooms are full, and the desk argues perennially about whether the study booths can be booked twice by the same person under two names.

The caretaker, Sam Oyelaran, unlocks the side stair and locks the archive corridor, which is the only concession the building makes to the fact that it was not designed to be inhabited at night. Then he sits in the entrance hall with a paperback and does not read it.

By one o'clock the noise has gone out of the place. What remains is the sound of the ventilation and, every twenty minutes or so, somebody standing up too fast and catching a chair. Odile pushes a trolley along the upper floor and begins to reshelve what the evening left behind.

In the lull she counts heads without appearing to. Ninety-four. A woman asleep with her forehead on a folder. Two students eating something furtive behind a screen of coats, which is against the rules and which Odile decides, as every year, not to have seen.

The young man on the mezzanine has been on the same chapter since ten. She noticed him because of the pen: he turns it over, sets it down, picks it up and turns it over again, and in four hours the page in front of him has not been replaced by a different page.

At half past two the numbers begin to dwindle in earnest. People leave in twos, having agreed on it in whispers; those who go alone go quickly, as though leaving early were something to smuggle past the desk. By four there are twenty-six left.

Odile makes her round with the water jug, which is not part of her duties. Most people take a glass with a grudging nod. The young man does not look up, and she puts one down beside him anyway and moves on without a word.

He comes to the desk at twenty past four. "Do you know," he says, "whether the exam hall is the old building or the new one?" Odile tells him. He nods, stands there for a moment under the fluorescent light, and then says that he does not think he is going to be ready.

She has been asked, over seven long nights, to be many things she is not qualified to be. She is reticent by nature and the library has no policy on this. So she says only that the chapter he is holding on to is one chapter, and that at this hour nothing more is going to go in.

He goes back up, packs his bag, and stops at the threshold with the air of a man expecting to be told off for leaving. Sam, who has seen this arrive every year for a decade, opens the door for him and remarks that the first bus goes at ten to five.

Nineteen people see the vigil out. At six Odile unlocks the front doors properly, and the night ends the way it always ends, with three people asleep who have to be woken, one lost umbrella, and a trolley of books that will not be reshelved until Monday.

In the report she writes that attendance held up and that the long night should run again. She does not mention the water, or the young man, or the fact that she stayed forty minutes past her shift. Institutions record what can be counted, and Odile has never argued with that.