The Gallery After Closing

After six o'clock the museum belonged to Eva and the night guard. She worked in the restoration studio at the end of the east wing, bent over a seventeenth-century portrait with a magnifying lamp and a tray of tiny brushes. He did his rounds every hour, footsteps echoing through the empty galleries.

His name was Jules. On his second round each night he knocked on the studio door, and she poured him a cup of coffee from her thermos, and he stood in the doorway and asked about the painting.

She told him about the cracked varnish and the layer of blue beneath the sitter's sleeve that nobody had seen for three hundred years. He told her about the sounds the building made at night and the statue in the Greek room he swore turned its head. She laughed at him. She also, sometimes, found herself listening for his footsteps.

One night in December the power failed in the east wing. The emergency lights flickered on, low and green. Jules found her in the studio with her lamp dead and her brush held in mid-air.

'Come and see something,' he said.

He led her by torchlight through the dark galleries to the Greek room, where moonlight fell through the skylight onto a marble figure. In that light, the stone looked almost warm.

'There,' he whispered. 'Tell me it doesn't move.'

She turned to answer and found his face very close to hers. She kissed him in the moonlight among the statues, and he kissed her back with a care that surprised them both.

The painting was finished in January. She stayed on for the next one anyway.