The observatory was open to the public on the first Friday of every month, weather permitting, and on the first Friday of November the weather did not permit, and Nadia went up anyway, because somebody had to be there to tell people that.

Rory drove. The observatory was on a hill outside the town, at the end of a track with a gate, and it was a small white dome on a brick base, no bigger than a garage, with a telescope in it that was older than the dome and had been given to the town by a man who had died a long time ago and had liked looking up. Nadia was one of the volunteers. On a clear first Friday there might be forty people up there, queuing on the grass with their coats done up to look at Saturn for eight seconds each and say oh. On a cloudy one there was nobody.

“Nobody,” said Rory, pulling up.

“Somebody might.”

“Nobody will.”

“Then we’ll have it to ourselves,” said Nadia, and got out, and unlocked the gate.

The cloud was the flat grey sort that comes in low and stays, and there was no wind under it, and the town below was a spread of orange lights with the cloud lit orange from underneath, so that the whole sky had a faint warm glow to it, like a lamp with a cloth over. It was not cold, for November. It was the kind of still, mild, muffled night that feels as if it has been put in a box.

Nadia opened the dome. This was done with a handle and a chain, and the shutter slid back with a long metal complaint and showed a strip of grey sky, and the telescope stood under it on its iron mount, pointing at nothing, patient as a heron.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” said Rory.

They had a chair each. They had a flask. They had, because Rory had thought of it, a bag of the gingery biscuits she liked, and a blanket, and the radio in the car if it came to that. Nadia sat with the eyepiece cap in her hand, turning it over, and looked up through the slot at the cloud, which looked back, and did not move.

“Give it an hour,” she said.

“I was going to give it all night.”

They gave it an hour. Nobody came. A car went along the road at the bottom of the hill and did not turn in. An owl said something in the wood behind the dome, and something small in the grass decided to be elsewhere. Rory ate biscuits. Nadia told him, because she could not help it, what they would have seen. Jupiter, low in the east, with its four moons in a line like beads. The Pleiades coming up, that smudge of blue you could see better if you did not look straight at it. The double star in the Plough, the one the old astronomers used to test your eyes with, which was two stars if you were sharp and one if you were not, and she could always see two, and he could never see two, and it had become a thing between them.

“I’d have seen two tonight,” said Rory.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I’ve been practising.”

“On what?”

“Street lights.”

At half past nine a wind got up, a small one, no more than a breath, and the cloud began to move. You could not see it move. You could see the orange glow on it change shape, slowly, brighter here and darker there, like something under a blanket turning over.

Nadia stood up.

“Don’t,” said Rory. “You’ll jinx it.”

She sat down. She stood up again. She went to the telescope and took the cap off the eyepiece and put it in her pocket and put her hand on the iron of the mount, which was cold, and wound the dome round so the slot faced east, which took a while and made the metal complain again, and the cloud went on moving over the slot in the same grey and the same orange and gave nothing away.

Then it did.

A gap. Not big. A tear in the grey, low in the east, going over the hill, and in it, for a moment, black, real black, with two stars in it, and then three, and one that was not a star, because it did not flicker.

“Jupiter,” said Nadia, and she was already at the eyepiece, and her hand was already on the slow-motion wheel, and Rory was already up.

It took her ten seconds to find it, which was fast. She looked. She breathed out. Then she stepped back without a word and he stepped in, and put his eye to the glass, and there it was, a small striped world hanging in nothing with four points of light in a line beside it, three one side and one the other, close enough to touch and further than anywhere he would ever go.

“Oh,” he said, which was what everybody said.

He looked for as long as the gap lasted, which was about a minute. Then the cloud came over it like a hand over a lamp, and the eyepiece went grey, and that was that.

He stepped back. Nadia put the cap on.

“That’s it, then,” she said.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“That was worth it.”

“It always is.”

They did not close the dome yet. They sat back down with the blanket over both their knees and the flask between them and looked up at the slot, where the cloud went on going over, grey and orange, and there was no reason to think it would open again and no reason not to wait a little in case it did.

The owl said its thing again. The town glowed. The telescope stood pointing at where Jupiter had been and where, behind the cloud, it still was, going slowly down the sky towards the hill with its four moons beside it, not caring in the least whether anybody saw.

“Four,” said Rory, after a while.

“Four moons.”

“I counted them. Three and one.”

“You did.”

“And I’d have seen two on the double star.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I’m not asleep.”

He was nearly. She could hear it in his voice, that softness at the edges, like the cloud. She let him lean. The blanket went warm between them. The dome held its small round darkness over them with the slot of grey at the top, and the hill went down to the town, and the town went on being orange and asleep, and the sky did what it liked, the way it always had, above the cloud, whether the cloud was there or not.

At half past ten she closed the shutter. The chain ran, the metal complained, the strip of sky went narrow and then went out.

Rory woke up enough to carry the flask.

They locked the gate. They drove down the track with the lights on low. Behind them, the little white dome sat on its hill under the cloud with the old telescope inside it, pointing east, at a planet it could not see and knew was there.

“First Friday in December,” said Nadia.

“Weather permitting.”

“Weather permitting.”

The road went down into the orange, and the cloud closed over the hill, and somewhere above all of it Jupiter went on down towards the morning with its moons in a line, three and one, three and one.