In a parish of wealthy women, Rose Antrobus forms a committee to decide who should benefit from a small bequest left to charity. Secretly she hopes the money will go to the Peachey family - a mother cruelly abandoned and looking after her three young children on a pittance. But the situation isn't as simple as all that, and soon it causes unexpceted ructions and confrontations - and Rose finds herself turning back the clock to remember a childhood vacation spent at the Marigny chateau in France . . . a vacation which, thirty years later, is to provide the solution to her dilemma.