Main characters
Stella Rodney: Stella is the novel's protagonist, an attractive, sophisticated, and independent woman. She is middle-aged, but is also "young-looking—most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life."[2] She works for a government agency called XYD, and the sensitive nature of her job leads her to be guarded. She is not inquisitive because she does not want to answer questions herself. Her patriotism is shaped by the fact that her brothers died serving in World War I. Stella has clear class prejudices, being herself descended from (now un-landed) gentry.
Robert Kelway: Robert is an attractive man in his late thirties who remains in London during the war after being wounded at the Battle of Dunkirk. Robert limps from this wound, but only when he feels "like a wounded man."[3] His identity is in constant flux throughout the course of the novel as Stella's investigation of his potential espionage unfolds. Robert's fascist sympathies are due to a combination of his wounding at Dunkirk and his growing up under the rule of his authoritarian mother and the example of his emasculated father.
Harrison: Harrison is a counterspy for England. His eyes are described as being uneven so that he gives the uncanny impression of looking at people with both separate eyes at once, or of looking at them twice. He is a quiet man, and his "emotional idiocy”[4] leads him to making uncomfortable and brash statements through the veiled double-speak of spies and counterspies. He sees "no behavior as being apart from motive, and any motive as worth examining twice."[5] At the end of the novel, he reveals that his first name is Robert.
Roderick Rodney: Roderick is Stella's son. He is a young soldier but is still in England, training, over the course of most of the novel. Roderick becomes a soldier because that is what young men in his time do, rather than out of any particular patriotic fervor. Stella worries that he is too emotionally distant, and indeed he makes no effort to maintain an emotional relationship with any besides his mother with the exception of his friend Fred, a fellow soldier (who we see only briefly on a train platform near the end of the novel), for whom Roderick demonstrates an almost hero-worshipping devotion.
Louie Lewis: Louie is a twenty-seven-year-old working-class woman looking for a model on which to base her life. She is alone in London: her husband, Tom, is away at war and her parents were killed by a bomb in her hometown of Seale-on-Sea. Flirtatious, flighty, and credulous, Louie is constantly seeking human contact as a means to form her own identity.
Minor characters
Connie: Louie's best friend and an avid and suspicious reader of newspapers
Ernestine Kelway: Robert's loquacious and busy widowed sister
Mrs. Kelway ("Muttikins"): Robert's authoritarian mother
Cousin Nettie: Cousin Francis's widow, who pretends to be mad so that she can live in exile at the madhouse Wisteria Lodge rather than return to her late husband's house
Colonel Pole: one of Stella's estranged ex-in-laws, a mourner at Cousin Francis's funeral.
Absent characters
Cousin Francis: dead Irishman who bequeathed his ancestral home to Roderick
Fred: Roderick's best friend and fellow soldier (who does appear briefly, described as even taller than Roderick, near the end)
Tom: Louie's husband, off at war through most of the book, dies by the end
Victor: Roderick's father, wounded in World War 1, and then dies, having allegedly left Stella for his nurse
