Adam Sykes, farmer and owner of a beloved if crumbling country house, and Polly Montagu, art student, meet in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The next months in both their lives are explosive. Adam discovers an entirely new person in his recently dead wife. Flora, who turned out to be pregnant when she walked into their lake. Polly finds that her parents, the exuberant concert pianist and his counsellor wife, are at the beginning of a bitter divorce, and she is consumed by an unreasonable passion for Adam. But it is the spirit of Flora, which appears differenly to each of them, which haunts the house, the family and them both.