Broom is in her fifties. She is spending Christmas in the Alps, where some years before she had fallen in love with Al, a climber who was subsequently involved in an accident abroad. Lockhart, with whom Broom once had an affair, is returning to the family estate on a remote Scottish island, with painful family news for his autocratic father. As Broom looks back on her life and past lovers, she becomes drawn to Micky Flint, a young executive who is her polar opposite, and an intimacy develops that will wrench Broom out of the past and into her new life.