At one point in this thin transitioning novel, Rose Tremain's seventeenth, the fundamental person, Marianne, is denounced by her better half, Hugo, of being "a ridiculous troublesome individual to like". Marianne is really annoyed. She wedded him over 10 years prior, when she was only 20. It is the mid 1970s, Hugo runs a London sales management firm, and they are in Paris - Marianne has been persistently checking out at model manikin theaters day in and day out. She is giving her all, she thinks. Furthermore, it occurs to her, then, at that point, that her absolute best "looked like the shenanigans of a stricken sort of animal, similar to a debilitated dim parrot in an enclosure". Kind Hugo, a gigantic, ginger-haired, horse-cherishing companion of the family, loves her. They actually call each other by teen epithets, started by once sprucing up together in shaggy fur garments: he is "Anthracite", she "Sasquatch". However, as Marianne trails...