Emma's grandmother, the dreamy and beautiful Pamela, maintains an ongoing feud with Emma's great-aunt Margot (wife of Britain's Prime Minister). Pamela's son Bim dies on the Somme, and his sacrifice is accepted "as if death lies in the faint outline of garden where it merges with rushes and reedbeds." Gradually, we encounter Emma herself, a lonely child left at the family estate, Glen, during World War II, witnessing the mysterious comings and goings of her extended family including her aunt, the wayward, thrice-married Clare. The penultimate chapter portrays the decline of Emma's uncle, the famous aesthete Stephen Tennant, who was written about by V. S. Naipaul in The Enigma of the Arrival.