Edmund Carr is at sea in more ways than one. An eminent journalist and self-made man, he has recently discovered that he has only a short time to live. Leaving his job on a Fleet Street paper, he takes a passage on a cruise ship where he knows that Laura, a beautiful and intelligent widow whom he secretly admires, will be a fellow passenger. Exhilarated by the distant vista of exotic islands and his conversations with Laura, Edmund finds himself rethinking all his values. A voyage on many levels, those long purposeless days at sea find Edumnd relinquishing the past as he discovers the joys and the pain of a love he is simultaneously determined to conceal.

As an unmarried 17-year-old, Lady Slane nurtures a secret, burning ambition—to become an artist. Instead, she becomes the wife of a great statesman and the mother of 6 children. 70 years later, released by widowhood, and to the dismay of her pompous children, she abandons the family home for a tiny house in Hampstead. Here she recollects the dreams of youth, and revels in the present with her odd assortment of companions. Genoux, her French maid, Mr. Bucktrout, her house agent, and Mr. Gosheron, her painter and carpenter. She is also accompanied by Mr. FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who had met and loved her in India when she was young and very lovely. It is here in this world of her own that she finds a passion that comes only with the freedom to choose, and it is this, her greatest gift, that she passes on to the only one who can understand its value.