A Note in Music

"She was fairly comfortable, she told herself (putting in the last hairpin) - quite comfortable really, embedded thick and flat now in her life. Nothing mattered, nothing would ever happen for her again."

In a grey manufacturing town in the north of England live Grace Fairfax and her dull, conventional husband Tom. At thirty-four Grace is settled and childless, inhabiting an outer world of dreary routine, sustained by an inner world of lush, wistful dreams. Her only friend is Norah, energetic, chaotic, equally resigned in marriage to the irritable university professor Gerald MacKay. Then Hugh Miller and his red-haired sister Clare descent upon the quiet town. Upon all four the hypnotic charm of these two visitors exerts a different spell, conjuring up what might have the lost dreams of youth, the hope of new passions to come. With their departure life thus violently disrupted will be the same, but never quite the same again.