When Tom moves with his wife Ann from their tiny Camden flat into a large house in Hackney, he feels as if it's the start of the rest of their life together. Deeply in love, and with a baby on the way, everything, Tom thinks, is finally coming together. He and Ann anticpate the arrival of the baby, as Ann, particularly galvanized, spends hours cleaning and reorganizing the house, and sitting up all night talking with a renewed passion about life, love, and art. But there is a darker side to this new fervour, somehow linked with her conviction that someone is lingering threateningly around their new home. Someone who - Tom soon realizes - may not exist at all.