The story rests on the efforts of the high-flying Doctor David Mortimore, about to deliver a prestigious speech on which may rest a knighthood, to deal with something that has just now come back to haunt him: something eighteen years old and apparently delinquent. Dr Mortimore's efforts to deal with his primary concern, that his wife (at the hospital to hear his lecture) not meet the evidence of his past, sets off a cascading disaster of conflicting fictions to which he and others must react ever more creatively.