Adapted from The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. It's 1943. The Rosamund Tea Rooms houses several women and elderly men, all of them single and lonely, who nurse resentments and wage minor wars with each other. Enid Roach makes two unfortunate friendships which heighten the tension to breaking point: one with Pike, an American lieutenant, the other with Vicki Kugelmann, a German who steals Pike from Enid and then sets about humiliating her former friend.