Jenny North seeks the truth about Margaret, her stepmother, who deserted the family home when Jenny was seventeen years old. The Margaret plot unravels the charismatic linguist known to Jenny to reveal an Oxford intellectual, a second world war pacifist, an escaped German Jew and a post-war assassin. Margaret was a mass of contradictions and had a lot to hide. Meanwhile Jenny, in the world of 1960s and 1970s Britain, also has a lot to hide: a lesbian relationship running alongside a heterosexual one and a stepmother and biological mother who conspired to gull a man into bearing them a child.