1975. Adeline returns for the day. Her grandparents are shocked by her appearance, for she has taken on Jeannie Watts’s identity fully, calling herself by this new name, in a new voice, and making no reference at all to Adeline. Even her face looks different. The spell has a power beyond anything the family may have envisaged. Another dress is prepared. It is folded and laid out on the floor of a cupboard, one in which Adeline used to hide when she was a little girl.

1976. Adeline returns. As do Camilla and David. Mary Estelle acts strangely at the ceremony, saying her lines out of turn, or forgetting them completely, instead making bizarre noises. She is losing her memory, and asks her husband why he is tearing a perfectly good dress like that, and why he is wiping his own blood on the cloth. A month later the family decide to send Mary Estelle to a nursing home.

1977. Leonard, Adeline, Camilla. They do not speak to each other. The dress is hardly touched: the tear is feeble, the blood a few spatters of paint. It will have to do. That week, Leonard moves into a downstairs room. He tidies away all the dresses still on view, placing them in drawers, in cupboards, in the attic. He can’t bear to witness them. He has never lived on his own before, and sometimes he imagines that Adeline is in the house with him, hiding from him, like she used to do as a child. And sometimes she is a child again, and he can hear her laughter down a corridor, or around the next corner.

1978. Leonard and Adeline. Half-forgotten lines, wrong cues. All the magic of the years has been reduced to a pitiful act.

1979. Twenty-five years. A quarter-century has passed. Despite this, the family stays away. Only Adeline turns up. She can see that her grandfather is struggling. He can’t remember where he placed the key for the cellar door, so Adeline breaks the lock for him, using a kitchen skewer, and they conduct the ceremony down there, in the cold. Leonard insists on presiding over the ritual, as usual, his voice feeble but resolute on every word. He is determined to protect his granddaughter, above all else. He will never stop, never …

1980. Adeline enters the house. She finds her grandfather asleep in his armchair in the living room. She rouses him, with some difficulty, and together they perform the ritual, as it used to be performed, each taking the lines of the missing family members. Briefly, the passion of the early years is brought to life. And the dress is torn, bloodied, arranged with its attendant scarf and shoes, and laid out on the floor of Leonard’s bedroom.