Arcadia is where all is tranquil, balanced and harmonious. Aidan Hamilton is an artist and a teacher. He works in a college of education where he is able happily and effectively to combine both aspects of his vocation. He teaches student teachers, and he paints Arcadia. While he does not push the notion of Arcadia too far, he never ceases to give thanks to the Gods he doesn't believe in, for having been called to such congenial labour. His favourite artist is Nicholas Poussin. Poussin, in Italy in the seventeenth century, painted landscapes which embodied the very essence of Arcadia with its lofty trees, its olive groves, its distant walled city basking in the golden light of the late afternoon sun. At first, you do not see, in a dark shadowed overhang of rock a man being crushed by a serpent. Aidan is also blessed with a family, a wife and two beautiful and adoring daughters. Here lurks the serpent. Cathy, Aidan's wife, cannot love their elder daughter, Bobbie. Slowly and inexorably, she is crushing Bobbie's happiness, and destroying the secure world within which the family has been safe, and Aidan's desperate attempts to mediate are of no avail. And then the talented Louse De Grey arrives at the college.