Returning home. At sea with the English, as per usual.

One elderly woman, tucked in a porthole frame, clapped impatiently at a small boy who’d stood up and started to wander. (She was from elsewhere, surely, the original cutting on the family tree.) (They were at sea, they were all from elsewhere.) The boy was little, in elasticized jeans with prominent belt loops. Mistress Mickle wanted to set him in her own lap, whisper in his ear, Shh, let’s watch the show, lay her cheek against his hot head. She did feel inclined toward some children, little ones, those not yet taught by television to hate her. The boy’s older sister, a girl of six, knit her already comically serious eyebrows and grabbed him by the waist and gave him a good slug on the arm. Then, as though overcome with love, she seized and kissed him.

Mistress Mickle sat on the floor by the door.

The man in the Chinese hat turned to the audience. He held up to the light three balls filled with glittery fluid. Wordlessly he began juggling. Three balls was relatively easy, Mistress Mickle knew from her years with Circus a Go-Go, and then thought: but hard on a pitching boat. With a military hup, he popped the third ball, then again, again, till all the children were watching.

“Hello,” he said. “I am the Magnificent Jimmy.” He had a London accent, despite the Chinese hat and Moroccan slippers. Then he said, more firmly, “Hello!”

“Hello,” the audience answered, the way you might greet a friendly lunatic in the park.

“That’s rubbish, that is,” said the Magnificent Jimmy. “Hello!”

“Hello!” the children said, loudly this time. He gave a satisfied nod.

At juggling he was fine, he was acceptable, he was delightful: she had forgotten what a good audience member she was. How she liked looking at people who wanted only to entertain, no matter how talented—or untalented—they might be. That was why she’d begun acting in the first place, to be regarded by strangers in the way she did them, with a kind of open narrative love that made up stories. Had he done this all his life? Did he live on board? No: he lived in a bedsit in Harwich. He’d hoped to be a famous magician but had never thrown that first leg over the gate of success. His elderly mother was still alive. He took care of her.

The toddler girl threatened the Magnificent Jimmy’s knees as her mother looked on in admiration; the redheaded boy kept trying to go back of him, as though the Magnificent Jimmy himself were a trick to get to the bottom of.