Hilary Wainwright, poet and intellectual, is enduring a grim wartime Christmas at his stiflingly suburban mother's house when a Frenchman, Pierre, turns up to give him news of the small son that he had to leave in occupied France. After the war, Hilary returns to a blasted and impoverished France in order to trace the child. Pierre thinks he may have found him. Is the child really Hilary's? And, after five years of having kept the child's possible existence a secret, does Hilary want him?.