If you opened the Oxford English Dictionary and looked up "archetypal elderly English lady" you would find a picture of Claudia Hampton. Claudia is seventy-six years old, and an historian. She is now terminally sick, suffering with cancer. Her one remaining dream is to write a history of the world, but with a different slant; she wants to use her own life as the blueprint for this world history book, relating each major global event that occurs in her lifetime to the way in which her own lie was affected by it.
When Claudia tries to pinpoint her earliest memories, she comes up with two specific ones. The first, her father, although she didn't know him well and he passed away whilst fighting in World War One. The second, a hazy summer in 1920, when she and her older brother Gordon were fossil hunting and competing with each other to see who could find the best ones.
Gordon is the most important relationship in Claudia's life. As children they were both friends and rivals, as they grew older, they spent less time as rivals and more time as friends. In their late teens, they begin an incestuous relationship with each other. They are socially withdrawn and rather awkward. Claudia cannot relate to girls her age, and the only peer whom Gordon can relate to is Claudia. This awkwardness, and the feeling of being alone in their own little world, precipitates the relationship, but it ends when both leave home for college. Gradually, they open themselves up to other people, new experiences, the opposite sex outside of each other. Their sexual relationship ends, but they remain best friends.
The outbreak of World War Two changes both Claudia's and Gordon's lives. Gordon is an up and coming economist in 1939, but leaves his studies when he is sent to India. Claudia leaves university to become a war correspondent. She is a talker and very persuasive. Claudia will not take "no" for an answer and talks her way into the post of correspondent in Cairo. It is in Cairo that she meets a man named Tom Southern. Tom is an English Captain who drives an armored tank. She is smitten.
Whenever Tom is on leave from the front, he and Claudia spend the weekend together, and over the course of these weekends they fall in love. They dream of a long and beautiful future together, but this is not to be; the English army are defending Egypt rom Rommel's offensive at the Battle of El Alamein, and Tom is declared missing, later to be confirmed dead. Shortly after his death is confirmed, Claudia discovers that she is pregnant. She wants to keep the child because it is Tom's, and vows to raise it alone, but it seems that nothing of Tom is hers to keep, and she miscarries, never finding out whether or not she was having a girl or a boy. For the rest of her life Claudia is haunted by this, and also tormented by her fear that Tom's death was painful and tortuous.
When the war ends in 1945, Claudia and Gordon are reunited, both changed by the war, both having experienced things that have left them forever different. However, they do not like to share these experiences with each other and their conversations are not deep or detailed. Gordon gets married to a girl named Sylvia whom Claudia can't stand because she is boring and vanilla. For his part, Gordon does not like Claudia's new boyfriend Jasper either, because their relationship is on-again-off-again and very volatile, which he disapproves of.
Tom's sister Jennifer reads an article that Claudia has written about her wartime experiences in Egypt. She realizes suddenly that Claudia must be the mysterious woman Tom refers to as "C" in his letters home from the front. She mails Tom's diary to Claudia, in which he has written of his deep love for her.
A few years later, Claudia is pregnant again, this time with Jasper's child. She gives birth to a little girl whom she names Lisa, but she has no intentions of marrying Jasper. She loves her daughter but is not really cut out for motherhood. She is impatient and the day-to-day time committment to childcare does not really fit into the life she has carved out for herself. Lisa is ultimately raised by both of her grandmothers. Lisa never bonds with Claudia, which is hardly surprising, and commits what Claudia would consider the cardinal relationship sin by marrying a boring and respectable man at a very young age.
Claudia has continued to write since returning from the war, and writes regularly in condemnation of the Soviet Union. She is contacted by a low-level Hungarian functionary who has become implicated in the organization of the Hungarian Revolution. He asks Claudia to make sure that his son, Laszlo, does not return to Hungary. He knows that he is to be arrested soon and wants to protect his son from any kind of guilt by association. Laszlo is an art student in London, and Claudia becomes a surrogate mother to him, becoming very fond of him and respecting him enormously. He is like nobody else in her world at the time; honest, sensitive, self-deprecating and tortured, with the soul of an artist.
Claudia has never truly got over Tom, and in her later years travels back to Egypt alone, but it is not the Egypt she had known. Despite the changes in the country, Claudia finds that the desert brings her closer to Tom again. Her memories are so fresh, as if they had just happened yesterday. The intense pain of losing him hits her all over again; it is a lonely pain, because she has never managed to articulate it, or share it with anybody.
Shortly after she returns from Egypt, still so affected by Tom's death all those years ago, Claudia is devastated by Gordon's passing. His death leaves a gaping hole in her life. She feels alone without him.
A few years later, Claudia is diagnosed with cancer, and told that it is terminal. Feeling the pressure of her own mortality, she reaches out to Lisa to apologize or the distance between them and for her failings as a mother. Although Lisa accepts her apology, it doesn't change the way that she feels about Claudia, and the distance between them is still there.
Claudia is dying; as the end nears, she asks Laszlo to bring Tom's diary to her. She reads it over and over, and his declarations within it of his love for her enables her to finally grieve for him. She never really got over losing him, and reflects that her life would have been so very different had he survived. The day after reading the diary for the last time, Claudia passes away.
