The story centres around a young girl, sometime in the turbulent sixties. Alice comes home from boarding school, to spend her summer holidays with her parents in rural France. They run a sawmill where they employ a young man, Jim. Business isn't going well, although Mr and Mrs Bonnard are too proud to admit it, and Jim's nonchalant attitude when it comes to work doesn't help things. Alice is attracted to Jim, but she's too scared to let him know, believing that as far as he is concerned, she doesn't exist. She constantly hangs around him, but silence becomes a barrier, because the closer she comes, the more impossible she finds it to speak...