 Her widowed mother in London tries to find an army commission for her wayward brother Basil Seal, who is sleeping with a Marxist artist called Poppet Green, but Basil fails his interview spectacularly.An aesthete friend of his, the left-wing gay Jewish intellectual Ambrose Silk, looks for a safe niche in the Ministry of Information.Basil's previous mistress, the married millionairess Angela Lyne, returns from a solitary holiday in France.