During World War II, Honor Carmichael and her two young children are uprooted to Linfield, to join Honor's husband Colin, a dapper, small-town doctor stationed at the military hospital. She is visited by her sister Claudia, whose fiancé, Andrew waits to be invalided out of the Army.

While Andrew dismisses himself as 'damaged goods', Colin becomes absorbed by the petty feuds and power games of uniformed life. Apparently peripheral to this 'male pirouetting', Honor and Claudia are nevertheless deeply affected by this war - for its threat to notions of masculinity forces both women to re-assess the roles they've always played.