Downstairs in the evening, Dad's dinner party is going strong. The county guests and MPs and ladies in their dresses are toasting the success of another great debate in the House of Commons. Upstairs, in the morning before breakfast, Robert, aged seven, is lying nude in his father's bed while Dad kisses him from top to toe. His sisters are asleep, his brother down the corridor blissfully unaware. His mother is divorced and living in London with another woman...So the story unfolds over the next nine years, as seen through the eyes of an angry sixteen-year-old sitting in a ruined castle outside Rome - looking for answers and finding none except for those inside his head.