The time is warm September; the place a villa on the coast near Cannes
where lives Clare, Comtesse de Vernay, and Alexis Mouranoff. She was
formerly a great opera singer, he was once a fashionable painter, and
the villa is a house of regrets, half-hearted hopes, and memories, its
only real life coming from Nicole, the pretty young maid. But now
visitors arrive: Angela Dale-Adams, an attractive Englishwoman in her
late thirties, recently divorced, her seventeen-year-old son Simon, and
Simon's tutor for the holidays, Charles Latimer, who turns out to be
different from the expected dry-as-dust schoolmaster. In the
circumstances romantic attachments are inevitable, and we see how love
is different for the elderly, the ageing, and the very young.