Episode 1

Geoffrey Carr's marriage is on the rocks because Frances has worked out that she married him for his money. That is a hard thing to hear, and harder to argue with, and the episode does not soften it. Geoffrey, for his part, is genuinely in love with her. A workaholic who has let the job eat his life, he decides that the way to fix things is to buy the house she grew up in, an Irish mansion, and give it to her as proof of devotion. As grand gestures go, it is both generous and slightly mad.

The plan is the kind of thing that sounds romantic in theory and complicated in practice. The house carries a very large price tag and a weight of family history, and Frances's reaction to the news is not the one Geoffrey was hoping for. The episode is shrewd about money as a language: Geoffrey is fluent in it, and Frances understands it all too well; neither of them is saying what the other one hears. The episode suspects he is really trying to buy back a version of himself.

Peter Barkworth plays Geoffrey Carr, with Harriet Walter as Frances Carr. Derek Thompson is Frank Crossan, Terry Orr is the Jeweller, Tony Coleman is Mick, Ingrid Holohan is Mary and Susanna Reid is Clare. Adrian Dunbar appears as Willy, Aingeal Grehan as Kate and Jerry Judge as the Chauffeur. Peter Barkworth and Peter Ransley wrote it, and Peter Smith directed. The serial began on 10 January 1985.

And yet the episode works because it keeps its feet on the ground. This is a story about two people who have stopped understanding each other, with a house that means everything to one of them and nothing yet to the other. The memory tied to a place turns out to be the most expensive thing in the story. That mismatch, between what the gesture costs and what it buys, is the quiet engine of the whole serial.