The new American owner of an old English estate hires forty-year-old Frances Jellicoe to compile an inventory of garden architecture. On the estate, she meets a beautiful and attractive couple - Kara and Peter, who quickly become her best friends. Almost all the time they spend three: they dine, taking rare wines from the cellars, smoke, listen to music, talk about life. They stay up late, then disperse to their rooms, and Francis, in an accidentally discovered secret peephole, spies on friends. It turns out that everything is not quite as she is told. Or not at all...