The hotel had eleven rooms and a lift that took its time, and at night it had Marcus.

He came on at ten. The day staff had gone by then, all except whoever was last out of the kitchen, and the bar had closed at half past nine because it was that sort of hotel, in that sort of town, where nobody had ever had a reason to be up late except the night porter, and the night porter was paid for it.

The desk was oak. It had stood in the same place since the hotel was built, and it had a brass bell on it that nobody rang, and a lamp with a green shade, and under the counter a drawer with the night’s things in it, the keys and the torch and the book where he wrote down whatever happened, which was usually nothing, in a careful hand.

Marcus liked the desk. He liked the lamp. He liked, most of all, the hour between ten and eleven, when the last of the guests were going up and the building was settling down for the night, creaking and ticking the way an old building does, and he could hear all of it, every part of it, from where he sat.

Tonight there were seven rooms taken. He knew who was in all of them without looking at the book. Room two was a couple from the north who had come for the walking and were in bed by nine. Room four was a man on business who had asked for a six o’clock call and would be awake before it. Room five was Delia, who came every October for a fortnight and had done for as long as anybody could remember, and who was, at this moment, coming slowly down the stairs in her dressing gown, one hand on the banister, to ask for the thing she asked for every night.

“Marcus,” she said. “Is it too late for a hot milk?”

“It’s never too late,” said Marcus, which was what he said every night, and got up.

The kitchen at night was a different kitchen. By day it was Ben’s, and full of noise and steam and Ben shouting cheerfully at things, but by ten it had been scrubbed down and the steel shone and the big range was off and cooling, and there was only the hum of the fridges and the drip of one tap that nobody had ever managed to fix. Marcus warmed the milk in the small pan, the one kept for it, and watched it, because milk that is not watched will do as it pleases, and poured it into the cup with the blue rim, and took it back through.

Delia had settled herself in the chair by the fire in the hall. The fire was not lit, it was October and not yet cold enough, but the chair was by it anyway, and she sat in it with her feet on the little stool and took the cup in both hands.

“How’s the sea?” she said. She said this every night as well.

“Quiet,” said Marcus. “Going out.”

“Good.”

She drank her milk. He went back behind the desk. This was their arrangement and it had been going on for eleven Octobers and neither of them saw any reason to change it.

At about a quarter to eleven Ben came through from the back in his coat with his knives rolled up under his arm, said, “Night, Marcus, night, Delia,” and went out through the front door, letting in a breath of cold and salt and the sound of the sea, going out, quiet, exactly as reported, and then the door shut and the breath was gone.

Delia finished her milk and went up. The stairs took her a while. Marcus listened to her go, the slow creak of each one, the pause on the landing, the door of room five, the click. And then the building was his.

He wrote in the book. Ten fifty. All quiet. He always put the time, though nobody had ever asked him to.

Then he sat.

There is a way of sitting that a night porter learns. It is not quite waiting and it is not quite resting. You are there, in the lamplight, with the building breathing around you, and you are listening, but you are not listening for anything. The lift sighed in its shaft. A pipe knocked twice somewhere on the second floor and stopped. Outside, a car went along the front with its tyres hissing on the wet road, and did not stop, and its sound went away round the corner by the church.

He had a book of his own, under the counter, but he did not always read it. Tonight he did not. Tonight he watched the lamp make its green circle on the oak, and he thought about not much, and the clock over the door went round.

At half past eleven the man in room four came down in his socks and asked, apologetically, if there was any chance of toast.

There was always a chance of toast. Marcus made two rounds in the kitchen under the humming fridges and buttered them the way he would have buttered his own, to the edges, and the man ate them standing at the desk, saying he was sorry, he had not eaten since Birmingham, and Marcus said that Birmingham was a long way, and the man agreed that it was, and went back up with crumbs on his jumper looking as though something had been settled.

Eleven forty. Toast, room four.

Then quiet again.

The last key on the board was room seven. Room seven was a young woman called Hannah who had come in the afternoon with a rucksack and asked where the pub was, and Marcus had told her, and had told her also that the door was locked at midnight but that she only had to ring, and she had said she would be back well before then, in the way that people do.

At twenty past twelve the bell by the front door went.

He let her in. She was damp about the shoulders, and she was smiling in the way of someone who has had a good evening and not too much of it, and she said, “Sorry, sorry, there was a man with a fiddle,” and Marcus said that there often was, and gave her the key, and she went up the stairs two at a time and then remembered where she was and went up the rest of them one at a time, and he heard the door of room seven, and then the building was full, every key gone from the board, and that was the night begun properly.

Twelve twenty-five. All in.

He did his round at one. It was the same round every night. Up the back stairs to the top, along the corridor past the linen cupboard and the window at the end that looked out over the roofs to the sea, down the front stairs, checking each landing, checking the fire doors, checking nothing in particular. The carpet on the stairs had a worn place on the third step that he stepped over without thinking about it. Under the doors of the rooms there was no light. From room two came the sound of somebody snoring in a gentle, rhythmic, untroubled way, and from the other rooms nothing at all.

At the window on the top landing he stopped, as he always did, and looked out.

The town was asleep. There was a light on in the flat over the chemist’s, and the streetlamps along the front, and beyond them the dark of the beach, and beyond that the sea, which at this hour and this tide was a long way out and was not so much seen as heard, a soft long breath at the edge of things, in and out, and the moon over it, not full, going down.

He stood for a minute. Then he went down.

Back at the desk the lamp was where he had left it, and the book, and the pen, and the empty cup with the blue rim, which he had forgotten to take through, and he took it through now and washed it and set it upside down on the drainer for the morning.

One fifteen. Round done. All quiet.

The hours after one are the deep ones. He had learnt this early. Between one and four the building goes down into itself and nothing moves, and the porter goes down with it a little, not to sleep, never quite that, but to somewhere near it, where the lamp is very bright and the dark round it is very soft and the clock over the door is the only thing in the world that is going anywhere.

He made himself a tea. He sat with it.

He thought about the man in room four, who would be up at half past five and gone by seven, back to Birmingham or wherever it was, and who would remember, perhaps, for a day or two, that there had been toast. He thought about Hannah in room seven and the man with the fiddle. He thought about Delia, who had come here first with her husband, and then, for the last four Octobers, on her own, and who still asked how the sea was every night, and who would ask him again tomorrow, and he would tell her.

The pipe on the second floor knocked once, as if to check he was still there.

He was.

At three the rain started again, lightly, on the glass of the front door and on the road outside, and the sound of it came in and joined the other sounds, the clock and the fridges and the lift in its shaft, and made them somehow more complete.

He got up once, around then, and straightened the umbrellas in the stand by the door, which did not need straightening, and looked at the board with its eleven hooks and no keys on it, and at the little pile of leaflets about boat trips and the castle, and squared that up too. Then he went back to the chair. These were not jobs. They were only what the hands did while the rest of him listened.

At four the sea turned. He could not have said how he knew this, but he did, every night, a change in the breath at the edge of things, and he wrote it down, because it was something that had happened. Four o’clock. Tide turned. Raining.

At a quarter to five the papers came. A van, and a thump on the step, and the van going away. He brought them in and put them on the table in the hall in a neat pile, with the one the man in room four would want on the top.

And then it was the last hour, and the last hour is a gift.

The sky over the sea began to go from black to a colour that is not yet grey. The streetlamps, which had been bright all night, began to look tired. Somewhere up in the building a bed creaked and somebody turned over and did not wake. In the kitchen the fridges hummed on. Ben would be in at six, and the range would go on, and the smell of it would come through, and the day staff, and the couple from the north wanting their porridge, and the lift going up and down, and the whole hotel would wake and stretch and start again.

But not yet.

For now there was the lamp, and the desk, and the book with its careful hand, and Marcus in the chair with his tea gone cold beside him, listening to the building sleep.

The rain eased.

The clock went round.

Out past the front and the beach and the long wet sand, the sea came in, slowly, in the dark, the way it always had.

And every room was quiet, and every guest was sleeping, and the night, which was his, was very nearly done.