Ada woke up as Tilly slipped into bed. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘Move over. Don’t you want to hear? About the party.’
‘Yes,’ said Ada, solemnly. It was her duty. She sat up and blinked. The moonlight had gone and now she could see the black branches outside and hear their rooster, Captain George, crowing. That meant it was almost dawn. Oh, Captain George, she thought, because he was always there calling out in the morning.
‘It’s funny, at the beginning I almost ran away and came home. I didn’t want to go in,’ said Tilly with a little laugh.
Ada remembered how she had felt afraid to see Tilly being swallowed by the mouth of night and now she realised why she’d had the fear. It was a premonition of the living room and her naked father on the couch with one sock on and Mrs Layton on top of him. In comparison to that terrible thing in the living room, which had filled Ada with an unnameable horror, Tilly seemed so exactly like the Tilly she knew and could count on that she began to hope the world would be returned to how it had always been. Tilly’s story would take over; it would sweep away everything that had happened in the living room.
‘But you did go in, didn’t you?’ Ada said.
‘Of course I did. A guy came to the door and I went in behind him. Later he kissed me. He was a terrible dancer and a terrible kisser too. He was drunk enough to like me, I could tell.’
Ada snuggled back down into the bed, relieved. She would close her eyes and just listen.
Tilly lay on her back stiff with excitement and her feet danced a little. ‘Here’s some advice, Snug, for when you’re older. If a boy can’t dance, he probably can’t kiss either, because it shows he doesn’t know tenderness and listening.’
Ada made a mental note of this. Tenderness and listening. In the morning she would write those words in her diary. Even though she had no interest in boys. Or kissing. But dancing was important. Everyone wants to dance.
Tilly yawned. She told Ada about the humanist with the charming abode and how she had got cross with herself because she didn’t know how to be interesting, and how she was scared of something and it could have been the shoes or it could have been just the feeling that she couldn’t be true.
Ada couldn’t see how Tilly could not be true, but then she remembered that Tilly had become sly. If only she would go back to how she used to be.
‘That’s silly,’ mumbled Ada. But she couldn’t muster the right authority. Tilly ignored her anyway and went on. ‘You still awake? I haven’t got to the main bit.’
Ada’s eyes were closed. She nodded. ‘Keep going.’
‘Well I got it in the end. I found the right mood—the wine helped. And I didn’t care at all, about anything. And then someone took me by my hand while I was dancing. Open your eyes, Snug, this is the good part. Who do you think it was?’
Ada obeyed. Tilly had a wide smile, which she shone up at ceiling as if she was seeing God himself up there. Ada stuck her finger through one of Tilly’s black curls, which were spilled out on the pillow.
‘Raff Cavallo.’ Tilly gave a little laugh and then forced into it a condescending note, which Ada didn’t like, and although Tilly had turned expectantly towards her, waiting for Ada to share her scorn, Ada frowned and turned on her side, with her back to Tilly.
‘Why is that so funny?’ she whispered. She felt grave. Romantic figures shouldn’t be laughed at. Ada didn’t like it. She had not forgiven herself for what happened at the windmill. She had failed to impress Raff. Had Tilly impressed him without even meaning to? That would be too unfair.
Tilly didn’t answer.
Ada lay quite still for a moment. The filtering of morning light had begun to restore the room to its ordinariness. Things were distinctly things again. Their outlines came back with the same old exactness. Ada could no longer blend things into a sense of endless possibility. Tilly’s night with all its glittering grown-up mystery was over now. Life was plain old life again, with its list of things to do, and Raff Cavallo was still Ada’s secret hero.
Tilly turned over, cuddling Ada to her. ‘You be little spoon,’ she whispered.
For a moment all was quiet except for the 5 a.m. train hurtling through the dawn and the first uttering of birdsong announcing the end of night’s long haul.
Ada listened to Tilly’s breath getting deeper. She was sinking down into sleep. ‘Tilly?’ Ada said in a panic.
‘Hmmm.’
Mrs Layton had not gone away. Ada had to tell Tilly before the night was over, before the day really began, when she would get up and see her father and not know how to look at him or what to say.
‘I saw something. Something bad. It was Dad…’ Ada stopped. If she said it out loud it would become something, it would become a fact, it would push its way in alongside all the other things that happened—breakfast, birthdays, holidays, illnesses—with all its ugliness lit up like a shop sign. It wouldn’t belong to Ada anymore, it would belong to the great span of life, delivered into existence by Ada’s voice. But Tilly had to know. Ada couldn’t hold it all alone.
‘What was he doing?’ said Tilly, waking up.
‘He was with Mrs Layton,’ Ada declared. ‘On the couch, in the middle of the night,’ she said. And just to make sure Tilly understood, she added, ‘With no clothes on.’