With one eye on the present and one on the past, the lioness of English literature, Fay Weldon, offers up to the reader the fate of an aristocratic family in the years before the Second World War. In this sharply observed novel, London is a city soaked in drizzle, peopled with flat chested flappers, shell-shocked ex-servicemen, and an intelligent and rich society lady with a dark secret. A brilliant evocation of 1920s London.