In 1960 Jane Wright, a reporter for a woman's magazine, spots the murder of missionary Nicholas Farrington in Haiti in a newspaper article. Remembering him from the time she first met him just after the war, she rings around her friends to try and get their memories of him during their time living at the May of Teck club in 1945, a place for "the social protection of single ladies of slender means." Jane soon recalls the dramas and characters back then, from the man eating Selina, to the religious, guilt ridden Joanne who taught elocution lessons, and Jane's first encounter with Nicholas Farrington, the young anarchist who enters the publishers she works for one day in the hope of having a manuscript published and who Jane falls in love with.