Karen makes it clear that she hates emotional involvements—what she harshly describes as "people digging into each other"—and likewise resents Jean's attempt to engage her in a close relationship. In a sudden fit of pique, Karen quits Jean's home and Wetherby for good. But before leaving, she cruelly taunts Jean by remarking that, if Morgan's suicide wasn't merely an accident, then she would love to know what possible role the spinster played in causing it. In addition to the events occurring in the present day, there are flashbacks of Jean and her lifelong friend, Marcia, as teenagers in 1953. These scenes reveal Jean had been engaged to airman, Jim Mortimer, and that she failed to stop him from going away on active service in southeast Asia. In a brutal twist of fate, Jim was senselessly murdered in a gambling den during the anti-imperial uprisings in British Malaya. As these episodes from the past and present criss-cross and overlap, Jean begins to understand the dull resentment and lonely despair that drove Morgan to take his life. She also seems to gain some insight into the restlessness and self-destructive impulses of the younger generation. In a related incident, she tries to get one of her female students to see the value of continuing her education (At the end of the film, Jean is told that the girl has dropped out of the Sixth Form to run away to London, presumably with a boyfriend). Jean is likewise affected by the diminished hopes of her contemporaries, who bemoan the state of the country under Thatcherism. She regularly discusses these current matters with Stanley Pilborough, Marcia's husband and the town solicitor, who is often purposefully drunk. She observes the unhappy marriages of her middle-aged friends, particularly the endless bickering that goes on between Roger and Verity Braithwaite. Even lonely, despondent Mike Langdon confesses the failure of his relationship with his mistress, Chrissie, who eventually leaves him to return to her sheep farmer husband. In the end, it seems that Jean no longer needs to mourn for the life she might have had, and the person she might have become, had she not allowed her fiancé to make his fatal departure for Malaya three decades earlier. She will make the best of what she has, and the way things are, in the here and now. Principal cast Vanessa Redgrave ..... Jean Travers Ian Holm ..... Stanley