Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure

In Surrey, England, in 1938, fifty-year-old Ellie Endicott is blindsided when her husband Lionel announces he wants a divorce. He has fallen in love with a younger woman named Michelle from his bank and expects Ellie to accept a small flat and a modest allowance. Ellie, who has spent thirty years running the household and raising their two sons, refuses. With encouragement from her cleaning lady, Mavis Moss, a Cockney woman trapped in a marriage to an abusive husband named Reggie, Ellie retains a solicitor and negotiates aggressively, securing fifty pounds per month and the deed to a London flat.

Rather than settle into a dreary English existence, Ellie decides to travel to the French Riviera, recalling a youthful trip there with her adventurous great-aunt. Two unlikely companions join her. Miss Smith-Humphries, the formidable elderly spinster who runs the village altar guild, the church group that tends the sanctuary, reveals her doctor has given her only months to live and she wants to see the Mediterranean one last time. Mavis agrees to come to escape Reggie. The three women take Lionel's Bentley without permission and cross the English Channel.

Driving south through France, the women experience a warmth foreign to their English lives. In a Burgundy village celebrating a harvest festival, locals welcome them at communal tables laden with food and wine. The formality between them softens: Miss Smith-Humphries becomes Dora, a name she prefers from her youth. At a petrol station along the Rhône, Ellie rescues a terrified young French girl named Yvette from a lorry driver making threats. Yvette claims to be a seventeen-year-old fleeing a father who tried to force her into marriage, and the women bring her along.

The Bentley's radiator fails on a mountainous road, and Ellie follows a hand-painted sign to Saint-Benet, a tiny fishing village nestled between sandstone cliffs with pastel buildings lining a small harbor. The car dies on arrival. A large, imposing fisherman named Nico directs them to a local pension. The village handyman, Louis, says parts must be ordered, stranding the women for days.

Yvette confesses she is pregnant, abandoned by a soldier sent to North Africa. Meanwhile, the women meet Thomas Ramsey and Clive Webster, an English couple living openly together on the hillside. Tommy and Clive fled England years earlier after their relationship was reported to authorities. They mention an abandoned villa on the cliffs, the Villa Gloriosa, once belonging to a famous opera singer who was the mistress of a Parisian duke.

Ellie becomes captivated by the villa. With the local notaire, a legal official named Monsieur Danton, as guide, the women find the house eerily preserved under dustsheets, with a grand piano in a music room overlooking the sea. From the terrace, the panoramic view leaves Ellie certain she is meant to live here. The absentee owner agrees to let them rent with three months free in exchange for restoration. With help from villagers, the women repaint walls, repair the roof, and restore the plumbing. Ellie also befriends Viscount Roland, a reclusive neighbor in an impressive château above. Roland reveals that his father knew the duke who built the villa, leading Ellie to suspect Roland may be the duke's illegitimate son.

The women move in by November. Dora begins painting lessons with Clive, Mavis learns French, and Ellie plays the piano and takes cooking lessons from Henri, a former chef who runs the village bar. Nico is caught crossing the garden at night, claiming the owner allows him to access a dock below the cliff; Ellie suspects smuggling but tolerates his presence. Dora confides her secret past: Far from the spinster everyone assumed, she had been the mistress of her company director for years. She says Saint-Benet has brought her the happiest days she can remember and draws up a will making Ellie her heir.

During the peaceful months of early 1939, Ellie takes the ferry to a nearby island abbey, where she forms a deep bond with Abbot Gerard, a former World War I chaplain who entered the Benedictine order after a crisis of faith. When war breaks out in September, Ellie decides to stay. Yvette gives birth to a girl named Josephine, called Jojo, then vanishes, abandoning the baby and stealing jewellery. Ellie raises Jojo herself. Mavis later connects Yvette to a newspaper photograph of bank robbers, realizing the girl used the women as a hideout.

Mavis marries Louis in a joyful village ceremony. Shortly after, Dora dies peacefully on the terrace overlooking the sea, slipping away one afternoon while Ellie is at lunch with Roland. Her journal contains a final poem about seeing "the way ahead quite clear" and having "no fear" (268). Over a year after abandoning Jojo, Yvette returns with a menacing man named Ali to reclaim the child. Ellie is legally powerless since Yvette's name is on the birth certificate. Nico finds Ellie sobbing and holds her, the first physical intimacy between them.

When German soldiers occupy Saint-Benet, Tommy and Clive move into the villa under a scheme involving a forged marriage certificate that gives Ellie a French identity card. Roland also takes refuge after Germans commandeer his château. Nico reveals he works with the French Resistance and enlists the household in smuggling Jewish refugees to safety: They shelter the men at the villa, then transport them by speedboat to the abbey, where Gerard hides them before arranging passage to Corsica. During one nighttime visit, Nico tells Ellie his true identity: He is the illegitimate son of the opera singer and the duke, born in the very room where Ellie sleeps. The duke insisted his mother surrender him to protect his reputation, and she arranged his adoption by a village family.

The operation is betrayed by Roland, who harbors anti-Jewish hatred and hopes to regain his château. Tommy is arrested and sent to a prison camp. A German officer tells Ellie that Nico and the abbot were shot dead after their boat was sunk. Ellie expels Roland and endures months of grief, sustained by Mavis, Clive, and Nico's elderly mother, whom she takes in as promised.

In August 1944, the Allies liberate southern France and the Germans withdraw from Saint-Benet. At a village celebration, an American naval vessel arrives, and Nico steps ashore, alive. After their boat was destroyed, he played dead and swam with the wounded abbot to Corsica, where they recovered for months, unable to send word. Tommy did not survive; he was transported to Auschwitz. Ellie and Nico marry in a village ceremony. Monsieur Danton reveals that Nico had willed everything to her, including the villa. Clive moves to an artist colony. Ellie receives a letter from Yvette, whose real name is Jeanne-Marie, confirming Jojo is safe after Ali was imprisoned.

Lionel arrives hoping to win Ellie back after Michelle left him, but Ellie introduces him to Nico and firmly refuses. In an epilogue on the anniversary of Dora's death, Ellie and Mavis sit on the villa terrace, toasting their friend with champagne. Mavis observes that neither could have imagined, setting out from Surrey in a stolen Bentley, that they would find new lives in a French fishing village. Ellie reflects that the key was daring to take the first step. She raises her glass: "To Dora." Mavis adds, "And to us."