Latchkey Ladies opens in 1918 in the Mimosa Club, a women's hostel in central London where young women office workers and ladies on declining incomes find refuge from the tedium of war work and the chilliness of impending poverty. Anne Carey is twenty-five. She is engaged to a young lieutenant in the army, but she is bored of him and bored of the war. When she meets Dampier, a man unlike anyone she has ever met before, they begin an affair, and then when he is holidaying with his wife and children at Easter, Anne realises that she is pregnant.