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up one night without calling and stepped inside the apartment without taking off his overcoat and as he sat himself on the edge of her sofa, sandy hair greying at the edges of his large head, one hand in the grip of the other, she had an intimation of why he must be there. He said, We got the results of the scan two days ago and the first tumour is gone, but there is another, smaller one. They are doing a biopsy. He said, It is easy to feel you have done something wrong, you have done something to deserve this. This isn’t rational. At every instant one has to fight against this. I don’t know what lies ahead or what I’m going to do, but please don’t tell me you can’t see me right now.
    She had a vision of what they were together, a huge, tensile creature alive in the room. In any relationship, you made a vibrating creature together, and theirs was jagged and roiling and kind and ferocious and tender, it was all these things. She had already put in a request to switch jobs, to do something that would keep her closer to home. She went to the kitchen and made them each a cup of tea with brandy in it: there was no adequate gesture in such a circumstance, and this was the best she could do.
    She’d first thought of buying a house when pregnant; in her grief, she went ahead and did it anyway. Friends helped her move. Greta went back into treatment.
    She and David had survived all this, and what they shared, whatever you called it, had burgeoned into its own form of commitment.
    On the round stage below, two creatures with nubby horns protruding from their heads led a small figure in a blonde wig away from a coat rack and its mother and father, who were seated in two large armchairs. The armchairs vanished and were replaced by another realm in which, as the small blonde person and her companions watched, silver-clad figures descended from the heights of the metal rafters, bending and twisting within silver hoops clasped by a hand or a flexed knee. Tiny Chinese contortionists wrapped their limbs into helixes, as if their joints were liquid or air, while balancing silver balls on various parts of their bodies. Virile, Spandex-clad acrobats rode bicycles, hopped on and off them while keeping the bicycles continuously in motion, tossed the bicycles back and forth, until every one of them was upside down, legs in the air, atop a moving bicycle, balanced on one arm and a hand that grasped a bicycle seat. Sara wondered what Raymond Renaud thought of all this. She kept being distracted by the spectre of money, how much it must cost to mount a spectacle like this, as a woman spun her way down a skein of red cloth attached to a high crossbeam, her sequined body held in place now by a foot, now by a wrist wrapped around the ribbon of red. Violins surged. Everything she saw made her think of money or death. There was the peculiar and mounting exhaustion of watching one act of extreme dexterity after another, the desire for more risk and possible disaster warring with the impossibility of one feat topping another. She found herself longing for the simpler, intimate vitality of the children’s circus.
    At the post-show reception, back in the smaller tent, Raymond Renaud stood in a corner surrounded by a cluster of hangers-on as Juliet filmed him and a photographer snapped his picture. His juggler’s arms, in their yellow checked sleeves, swooped through the air, although Sara was too far off to hear what he was saying. The tiny Chinese contortionists huddled in another corner towered over by the hulking gymnasts. Around the perimeter of the room, on black-cloth-covered risers, large-scale photographs of the Ethiopian circus children were mounted. The photographs must have been there during the pre-show talk, but she had failed to notice them. Glass of wine and plate of canapés in hand, Sara drew close to take a look, all shot, a small sign said, by an Italian photographer.
    The photographs were dense with colour: the saturated red of