Part one of two. An elderly bohemian suffers a minor heart attack, and the ordeal prompts her to look back over the events of her life. She reminisces about raising her three very different children, and the passionate affair she had with a dashing soldier who died during the Second World War. Romantic drama, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Maisie Dimbleby.

Penelope Keeling, a sixty-four-year-old daughter of a famous artist, reflects on her life, and the fate and choices that defined it, when she arrives in the Mediterranean to stay with her headstrong daughter. Shifting through time, and falling into place like the pieces of a jigsaw, the truth of Penelope's rich, heartbreaking and surprising life unfolds.