1880
"It was an uncertain Spring." Colonel Abel Pargiter visits his mistress Mira in a dingy suburb, then returns home to his children and his invalid wife Rose. His eldest daughter Eleanor is a do-gooder in her early twenties, and Milly and Delia are in their teens. Morris, the eldest brother, is already a practising barrister. Delia feels trapped by her mother's illness and looks forward to her death. Ten-year-old Rose quarrels with twelve-year-old Martin and sneaks off by herself to a nearby toyshop. On the way back she is frightened by a man exposing himself. As the family prepares for bed, Mrs Pargiter seems at last to have died, but she recovers.
At Oxford it is a rainy night and undergraduate Edward, the last Pargiter sibling, reads Antigone and thinks of his cousin Kitty Malone, with whom he is in love. He is distracted by two friends, the athletic Gibbs and the bookish Ashley.
Daughter of a Head of House at Oxford, cousin Kitty endures her mother's academic dinner-parties, studies half-heartedly with an impoverished female scholar named Lucy Craddock, and considers various marriage prospects, dismissing Edward. She is sitting with her mother when the news is brought that Mrs Pargiter is dead.
At Mrs Pargiter's funeral Delia distracts herself with romantic fantasies of Charles Stewart Parnell and struggles to feel any real emotional response to her mother's death.
1891
"An Autumn wind blew over England." Kitty has married the wealthy Lord Lasswade, as her mother predicted, and Milly has married Edward's friend Gibbs. They are at a hunting party at the Lasswade estate. Back in London, Eleanor, now in her thirties, runs her father's household and does charity work to provide improved housing for the poor. Travelling to London on a horse-drawn omnibus she visits her charity cases, reads a letter from Martin (twenty-three and having adventures in India), and visits court to watch Morris argue a case. Morris is married to Celia. Back in the street, Eleanor reads the news of Parnell's death and tries to visit Delia, living alone and still an avid supporter of the Irish politician, but Delia is not at home.
Colonel Pargiter visits the family of his younger brother, Sir Digby Pargiter. Digby is married to the flamboyant Eugénie and has two little daughters, Maggie and Sara (called Sally).
1907
"It was midsummer; and the nights were hot." Digby and Eugénie bring Maggie home from a dance where she spoke with Martin, who has returned from Africa. At home, Sara lies in bed reading Edward's translation of Antigone and listening to another dance down the street. Sara and Maggie are now in their mid-twenties. Maggie arrives home, and the girls tease their mother about her romantic past.
1908
"It was March and the wind was blowing." Martin, now forty, visits the house of Digby and Eugénie, which has already been sold after their sudden deaths. He goes to see Eleanor, now in her fifties. Rose, pushing forty and an unmarried eccentric, also drops in.
1910
"...an English spring day, bright enough, but a purple cloud behind the hill might mean rain." Rose, forty, visits her cousins Maggie and Sara (or Sally), who are living together in a cheap apartment. Rose takes Sara to one of Eleanor's philanthropic meetings. Martin also comes, and so does their glamorous cousin Kitty Lasswade, now nearing fifty. After the meeting Kitty visits the opera. That evening at dinner Maggie and Sara hear the cry go up that King Edward VII is dead.
1911
"The sun was rising. Very slowly it came up over the horizon shaking out light." The chapter begins with a brief glimpse of the south of France, where Maggie has married a Frenchman named René (or Renny) and is already expecting a baby. In England Colonel Pargiter has died and the family's old house is shut up for sale. Eleanor visits her brother Morris and Celia, who have a teenaged son and daughter named North and Peggy (another son, Charles, is mentioned in a later section). Also visiting is Sir William Whatney, one of spinster Eleanor's few youthful flirtations. There is gossip that Rose has been arrested for throwing a brick (this was a time of Suffragette protests).
1913
"It was January. Snow was falling. Snow had fallen all day." The Pargiters' family home is being sold and Eleanor says goodbye to the housekeeper, Crosby, who must now take a room in a boarding house after forty years in the Pargiters' basement. From her new lodgings Crosby takes the train across London to collect the laundry of Martin, now forty-five and still a bachelor.
1914
"It was a brilliant spring day; the day was radiant." It is May of 1914, two months before the outbreak of the First World War, although no hint is given of this. Wandering past St Paul's Cathedral, Martin runs into his cousin Sara (or Sally), now in her early thirties. They have lunch together at a chop shop, then walk through Hyde Park and meet Maggie with her baby. Martin mentions that his sister Rose is in prison. Martin continues, alone, to a party being given by Lady Lasswade (cousin Kitty). At the party he meets teenage Ann Hillier and Professor Tony Ashton, who attended Mrs Malone's dinner party in 1880 as an undergraduate. The party over, Kitty changes for a night train ride to her husband's country estate, then is driven by motorcar to his castle. She walks through the grounds as day breaks.
1917
"A very cold winter's night, so silent that the air seemed frozen" During the war Eleanor visits Maggie and Renny, who have fled France for London. She meets their openly gay friend Nicholas, a Polish-American. Sara arrives late, angry over a quarrel with North, who is about to leave for the front lines and whose military service Sara views with contempt. There is a bombing raid, and the party takes its supper to a basement room for safety.
1918
"A veil of mist covered the November sky;" The briefest of the sections, at little more than three pages in most editions of the novel, "1918" shows us Crosby, now very old and with pain in her legs. She hobbles home from work with her new employers, whom she considers "dirty foreigners", not "gentlefolk" like the Pargiters. Suddenly guns and sirens go off, but it is not the war, it is the news that the war has ended.
Present Day
"It was a summer evening; the sun was setting;" Morris's son North, who is in his thirties, has returned from Africa, where he ran an isolated ranch in the years after the war. He visits Sara, in her fifties and living alone in a cheap boarding-house, and they recall the friendship they carried on for years by mail.
North's sister Peggy, a doctor in her late thirties, visits Eleanor, who is over seventy. Eleanor is an avid traveller, excited and curious about the modern age, but the bitter, misanthropic Peggy prefers romantic stories of her aunt's Victorian past. The two pass the memorial to Edith Cavell in Trafalgar Square and Peggy's brother Charles, who died in the war, is mentioned for the first and only time.
Delia, now in her sixties, married an Irishman long ago and moved away, but she is visiting London and gives a party for her family. All the surviving characters gather for the reunion.
