The story centers around Alice Bonnard, a young girl attending Saint-Sulvien Girl’s College, and takes place during a July/August, sometime in the turbulent sixties. Alice comes home to spend her summer holidays with her parents in the Landes region. 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 nonchalance 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’s 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.
