Kate and Josh Hutchins have lived on Dancing Hill Farm in Dorset for thirty years. Here they have brought up three children, expected to grow old, and imagined they would pass the farm on to one of their boys, like generations of family before them. But things have not gone to plan. Neither of their sons wants the farm, their daughter is in love with a man with no real liking for the countryside, and Dancing Hill itself is no longer the profitable place it was once.

And Kate is restless. Longing for some time to herself, dreaming of what she might have achieved had she not married so young. When her children give her a week's painting holiday in Provence she seizes it like a lifeline, hardly realising what a dangerous thing it is that she is doing.