Charlotte, aged 83 and still sprightly, comes from well-ordered circumstances. She always clears up before visitors arrive, and several people have spent the night at her place. Now someone special has announced his arrival: Hugo, her brother-in-law, for whom she always had a weakness. Can it be that they will pass a romantic evening together? Will their story have a happy end? Charlotte makes her plans with longing tinged with anxiety, but above all she is invaded by vivid memories of her eventful past: how she fought her way through during the war and the post-war years as a single mother, and how long it took for the wounds of a shattered love to heal. But Charlotte is not a pathetic figure, she is a wise woman with wit and charm whose final trump is her age... Her life together with a man who was not her husband, her fear of being an old maid, and a man who came back too late from the war – all this combines to make a colourful picture in which the joy and love of life have a prominent place – provided that the principles of marriage are not taken too seriously. Ingrid Noll's heroine's narrations of a disseminated family are touching and tragicomic at one and the same time. It is no coincidence that Cora, who contrived to make her Tuscan lover disappear beneath the tiles on the terrace, is Charlotte's granddaughter...