Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy remote one, who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl tuens up as - whether it's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

Eliza is a foundling. Discovered on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company in 1830s Chile, she is eagerly adopted by Miss Rose Sommers, who keeps house for her two brothers, a businessman and a sea captain. But although Rose is determined to turn her into a proper English lady, headstrong Eliza determinedly charts her own course.