Anna Morgan is a young white woman who was born and raised in the West Indies. After her father died, her British stepmother, Hester, moved her to England, where she now works as a chorus girl in a traveling theater troupe. Anna longs for the West Indies and often loses herself in childhood memories, fantasizing about her home’s sights, sounds, and smells—all of which seem vibrant and lively compared to life in England, which she finds bleak and monotonous. One day, she and her friend Maudie go shopping in a small town. They meet two older men on the street who are obviously wealthy, and one of them—Walter—takes a liking to Anna, though she’s only 18. He buys stockings for her and then comes back to her and Maudie’s small room, where they have drinks and make awkward conversation. Before he leaves, they arrange to get together again when the theater tour passes through London. Anna claims after he leaves that she doesn’t like him, but Maudie urges her to go out with him, since he has money. She tells Anna about a relationship she had with an older man named Viv, who gave her lots of money but ended up breaking her heart.
Anna goes out with Walter when she comes to London. He takes her to a strange restaurant where each dining party has its own private room. She finds it difficult to connect with Walter, who makes a show of sending back a bottle of wine because it’s not to his satisfaction. Later, she tries to stop him from kissing her, but he doesn’t stop right away. Eventually, though, he backs off and apologizes, at which point Anna opens a door she hadn’t noticed before. It leads to a bedroom. When she expresses her surprise, Walter laughs. She gets her coat and shuts herself in the bedroom, lying down on the bed and waiting for him to come in, but he never does. When she finally comes out, he orders her a taxi and says goodbye.
The next day, Anna receives a letter from Walter, who insists that he’s worried about her. The envelope contains some money, which he hopes she’ll use to buy herself some clothes—which is exactly what she does, going out to purchase a new dress and a nice coat. When she returns, her landlady scolds her for coming home so late the night before after spending time with a man, and then she criticizes her for buying nice clothes, suggesting that Anna is promiscuous. She adds that Anna has until Saturday to find a new place to stay.
Anna starts to feel sick. She quickly loses her energy, but before she’s too ill to move, she mails a letter to Walter asking him to visit her. He comes as soon as he receives the note. Seeing the condition Anna is in, he runs out again and brings back food and wine. He also mentions that he’s going out of town for the next few days but that he’s going to have his doctor visit her. Before he leaves, he talks to Anna’s landlady and convinces her to let Anna stay.
Once Anna gets better again, she starts seeing Walter more frequently. She goes to his house one evening and has sex for the first time, though she initially tries to stop things from progressing too far—but then Walter tells her to be “brave,” so she lets down her guard. Afterward, she watches in the mirror as he slips money into her handbag. She doesn’t want him to do this and is about to tell him not to, but then she lets it go, deciding not to interfere with his desire to pay her.
Anna starts living in a much nicer boardinghouse. During this period, Walter introduces Anna to his cousin, Vincent, who is eager to put her in touch with people he knows in the theater. Both Walter and Vincent are excited about the idea of helping Anna become successful, and Walter even starts paying for Anna to have singing lessons. On her 19th birthday, Anna spends the day with Maudie because Walter is out of town. Maudie is impressed with her new living arrangements and her stylish new haircut, but she hints that it doesn’t bode well that Walter seems like the “cautious” type—that is, the type of man who always wants Anna to come over to his house at night but never visits her at her apartment. Maudie’s former lover, Viv, used to do the same thing. But Maudie doesn’t press the issue, instead simply telling Anna to get as much money out of Walter as she can.
Shortly after she sees Maudie, Anna visits Hester, who’s in London for a short stay. Hester says she thinks Anna would be better off returning to the West Indies, and then she shows her a letter from her Uncle Bo. It’s a response to a letter Hester sent, in which she asked Bo to pay for half of Anna’s passage back to the West Indies. In his response, Uncle Bo makes it clear that he resents the implication that he should have to financially support Anna. After all, Hester sold the family estate in the West Indies, so she should have plenty of money to pay for Anna’s passage. Hester tells Anna that this is ridiculous, claiming that she didn’t even make that much from selling the estate. Either way, she doesn’t have enough money to keep supporting Anna, but Anna tells her she doesn’t need her support. She’s about to explain why, but Hester stops her, saying that she doesn’t want to know. She also makes a number of racist comments about how Anna speaks like a Black person, and she implies that Anna’s mother was multiracial—something that Anna refutes. The two women then part ways after a tense farewell.
Not long after her conversation with Hester, Anna goes away for the weekend with Walter, who has arranged for them to take a short vacation in the countryside with Vincent and a French woman named Germaine. Anna and Walter spend the beginning of the vacation by themselves, exploring the countryside and having sex as they wait for Vincent and Germaine to arrive. Anna feels overwhelmingly happy, but soon Vincent and Germaine’s arrival shatters her bliss. Throughout the weekend, Germaine makes rude comments about Vincent because they’re in the middle of a fight. Eventually, Walter explains to Anna that Germaine is mad because Vincent is going away for a while, and Germaine thinks he’s not leaving enough money for her. In the course of telling Anna what happened between Vincent and Germaine, Walter reveals that he, too, is going away. Both he and Vincent are traveling to New York and will be there for an extended period. Anna is hurt and upset, but she doesn’t say anything. When they go back to the city, she has sex with Walter without bringing up her feelings.
Walter has been gone for several weeks when Anna receives a letter from Vincent. It informs her that Walter no longer loves her. Vincent explains that Walter asked him to write this letter, wanting to make sure Anna knows she will be provided for financially—for a little while, that is. If she needs anything, she should write to Vincent. He also asks her to send any letters she might have kept from Walter. Distraught, Anna writes to Walter (who is apparently back in London), and he agrees to meet her that evening in a public place. It doesn’t go well. She tries to convince him to go somewhere private, but he refuses. The next day, Anna moves to a new address and doesn’t update Walter, making it impossible for him to send money.
Anna gets sick in her new boardinghouse, where a slightly older woman named Ethel befriends her. Ethel is very impressed by Anna’s beautiful coat and won’t stop talking about how expensive it must have been. She then talks about how she’s only in this depressing boardinghouse because her flat in a nicer part of town is under renovation. She’s trained as a nurse, but she’s opening a massage and manicure company that will operate out of her flat—and she wants Anna to live there and work as a manicurist, even though Anna doesn’t know how to do manicures. Ethel tells her not to make any decisions before she sees the flat.
The next day, Anna bumps into her theater friend Laurie and two men. The men are named Carl and Joe, and they—along with Laurie—invite her to dinner. Anna spends the evening with them and gets quite drunk. Carl leaves after dinner to go gambling, but Joe takes Laurie and Anna to a hotel. It seems likely that Laurie is a sex worker, but Anna appears to not have picked up on this. When Laurie tries to undress her in front of Joe, Anna starts an argument and storms out of the room, eventually going to sleep in the room across the hall. Joe has left by the time she wakes up the next morning, but Laurie is still there. She and Anna make up with each other, and then Anna goes to see Ethel’s flat.
Ethel was telling the truth: her flat is very nice. Anna agrees to live there and work as a manicurist. Ethel is overjoyed and speaks extensively about how respectable her business is. And yet, men often come to the massage parlor with the intention of having sex. Ethel claims that this isn’t what she wants the business to be, but she also encourages Anna to be very friendly to these male clients. When Carl comes and takes her out one night, Ethel says that Anna can go out with men and bring them back to the apartment whenever she wants, as long as she’s willing to pay a little extra rent. Anna agrees. But living at Ethel’s isn’t easy, since Ethel gets jealous when Anna goes out and frequently finds ways to get money out of Anna.
After a while of casually seeing several men, Anna gets pregnant, but she doesn’t tell anyone for three months. When she finally reveals her pregnancy, Ethel kicks her out, fearing that the pregnancy will attract negative attention to her business. With nobody to turn to except Laurie, Anna writes to Walter asking for money so that she can get an abortion from a woman Laurie knows. Walter arranges for her to meet with Vincent, who assures her that she will be taken care of. Before he leaves, though, he makes her hand over all the letters Walter ever sent, including one in which he wrote, “Shy Anna, I love you so much.”
Anna’s abortion does not go well. She wakes up that night in excruciating pain, so her landlady calls Laurie. But when Laurie arrives, she’s angry and wants to know why the landlady got her involved when she really should have called a doctor. The landlady, for her part, didn’t want a doctor to know what happened. But she eventually summons one, and Laurie tells Anna to claim that she had a nasty fall. The doctor immediately sees through this lie, but he still treats Anna, who drifts in and out of a dream state full of memories from her childhood in the West Indies. At one point, she hears the doctor scornfully say that she’ll be all right and that she’ll surely be ready to “start all over again” in no time—a phrase that echoes in her mind as she drifts to sleep.
