For two young people found out in the rain one September night nothing can ever be the same again... Together through university, Mary Young and Richard English have long planned their journey to Italy. But in the months leading up to it, Richard begins what she will call a "a brief affair" with Alice Mcleod. Then a series of small decisions leads to disaster. In delicately evocative prose, Peter Robinson carefully, painfully, and tenderly depicts these relationships before and after the traumatic events at the heart of his first novel.