Ariadne sets off one night with the cat. She feels broken by her son's violence following the death of his violent father. Driving down the narrow lane to the Inn that takes pets, where she'll stay till she decides what to do, she has a re-birth experience: sensations of chiffon scarves sliding from her shoulders over and over again.

At the bottom of the hill where the narrow lane opens into a triangle of green with three May trees on it directly opposite the Maytime Inn, she emerges feeling exhilarated and filled with an optimism she'd never experienced before. Or that is how it strikes her, but later she discovers that it was the way she'd felt for the first three years of her life with her mother when her schoolmaster father was away at the war.

Her journey from the city to the Cotswolds and then Wales turns into a journey into her past and her unconscious, taking in the Welsh hill community where she finds another schoolmaster. Her mother's letters turn up, she goes on Ancestry and finally confronts the liberating truth. Then a young man notices her and draws her into an exciting but disturbing encounter.