In a dark night of the soul a bourgeois citizen runs away from home: his life has been a lie, a waste, a wilful delusion. For forty days and forty nights he suffers and shivers alone in a derelict Notting Hill villa. Then, the inevitable. A pre-Thatcherite workers' cooperative, led by a minor aristocrat, storms the villa and lays waste his precious penance. "Live and let live!" he cries. But no. If the workers cannot save him, they must damn him.