‘’Ello ladeez, can I ’elp?’

‘We’re looking for Mr Roger Popham,’ said Pauline desperately. ‘We thought he would be here with the circus.’

The clown’s polite, enquiring face changed almost at once. His own lips stopped smiling under the big red painted lips. He looked at the two women very carefully and then he said, ‘Yes?’ quite blankly, like a question, as if he didn’t understand. A lion roared somewhere nearby and Pauline jumped slightly, bumping into the sequinned lady.

‘Sorry,’ she said miserably, ‘sorry.’ For a moment they all stood there silently.

Mrs O’Brien said, finally, ‘An Englishman joined this circus after the war. He was... he needed to leave England and he joined The Great Zelda Brothers’ Circus and I think he sometimes worked with the clown troupe and someone called Zarko and he loved the chimpanzees and I think he might have... used another name.’

Pauline remembered always how the light seemed to fade just at that moment, looking at her mother then, understanding that her mother knew more than she had told. Lights flickered in the dusk in the trailers, and in some of the houses across the heath. People were still streaming away down the hill, shadowy groups now; small boys looked wistfully for elephants still, there was the smell of animals; somewhere there was the smell of woodsmoke. Great patterns of cloud formed in the vast sky that darkened above Blackheath and again a lion roared, incongruous there, and yet not.

In the silence, just afterwards, the little clown said, ‘You mean Popka.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs O’Brien. Pauline stared at her mother.

‘Well zen you know,’ said Zarko. ‘’E iz of courze not ’ere. And ’e doz not want to see ’iz familee, none of you. They... shamed him.’

Mrs O’Brien looked surprised and half laughed despite herself. ‘Well I suppose you could say he shamed them,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said the little clown, ‘depending on you point. You view point.’ He pronounced the word in the French way giving the sentence an exotic quality.

‘Where is he then? Isn’t he still with the circus?’

‘Are you ’is familee? You are one of ’eez seesters I suppose?’

‘No,’ said Mrs O’Brien.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Pauline, ‘we are part of his family, we are.’

‘’E doz not wish to see ’iz familee,’ said the clown and his mouth was quite tight beneath the painted red smile as he walked away in the dusk. The sequinned woman went into her caravan and closed the door.

After a little while, Mrs O’Brien and her daughter Pauline turned away from the caravans and walked across the heath to a pub where Mrs O’Brien bought a large brandy for herself and a small one for her daughter.