In autumn 1947, on her sheep farm at Doornfontein near Beaufort West, South Africa, Lesley Hamlyn receives a parcel delivered by Johan, the postman. Forwarded over many months from Penang via London and Cape Town, it contains a first edition of W. Somerset Maugham's The Casuarina Tree, with no note or inscription. Inside, the title page bears Maugham's customary glyph, but a stranger's hand has framed it with a vertical rectangle bisected by a line, a marking Lesley suddenly understands, though its meaning is left unspoken to the reader.

Lesley reflects on her past: her late husband Robert, dead nearly six years, and their relocation from Penang to South Africa at the end of 1922, where Robert's cousin Bernard Presgrave built them a bungalow on his farm. She recalls their first dinner with Boer neighbors, who gossiped about a wealthy Englishman, Graham, whose young wife had run off the same morning their local doctor disappeared—a tale Robert noted Willie Maugham would have relished. Robert had told the guests Maugham was an old friend who had stayed with them in Penang.

Lesley remembers her quiet life with Robert—separate bedrooms, his memoir-writing, her gardening with Liesbet's son Pietman, evenings of whisky and piano music—and the oppressive nearness of the Great Karoo desert, which evokes for her a story of an estranged husband and wife lost in the Gobi. She did not return to Penang after Robert's death because the world she knew there was gone, destroyed by time and the Japanese invasion.

Liesbet's entrance pulls Lesley back to the present. Carrying the book inside, she studies her wall of photographs: her wedding portrait at St George's, Penang; herself and Ethel with rifles in Kuala Lumpur; and a photograph of herself, Robert, Willie Maugham, and Gerald lounging beneath a casuarina tree at Cassowary House. Her thoughts return to the two weeks in 1921 when Maugham and his secretary stayed with them. Watching two raptors circle the equinoctial sky, Lesley feels off-balance, the past pressing in.