In a parish of wealthy women, Rose Antrobus forms a committee to decide who should benefit from a small bequest left to charity. Secretly she hopes the money will go to the Peachey family - a mother cruelly abandoned and looking after her three young children on a pittance. But the situation isn't as simple as all that, and soon it causes unexpceted ructions and confrontations - and Rose finds herself turning back the clock to remember a childhood vacation spent at the Marigny chateau in France ... a vacation which, thirty years later, is to provide the solution to her dilemma.

'The dialogue is subtle and the atmosphere of the French visits economically and brilliantly conveyed.' A. S. Byatt