Plot

A depressed middle-aged man contemplates suicide while visiting the hotel resort where he spent happy moments with his parents in his youth. He meets a woman by chance and falls for her. Or does he?

(It's over 30 years since I saw the film, so there will be gaps and mistakes.) A weary and depressed middle-aged man visits a holiday resort on the English coast at the edges of the holiday season. Beaches and fairground rides are nearly deserted but for him. As he wanders the town and returns to the hotel which he had visited with his parents when he was a child, fragments of those early happy days return to him as flashbacks of memory. Coming into the hotel, an attractive young woman brushes past him, dashing out of the hotel door. He continues into the hotel and books a room.

Going to his room, he slumps down on the bed by the window, and takes out a pistol, which he gradually loads. There's a clatter of feet down the stairs outside his door, and a knock. He puts away the pistol and, going to the door, finds the girl he had bumped into. She asks him to help her with the gas fire in her room.

Their lives get twined together, they become lovers, and the town becomes happy for him again. She tells him that she has come here, to get away from her boy friend. She finds out from him that he had intended to shoot himself when he came here, as his life had become so empty; she persuades him not to, and asks him to come and visit her when she gets back to London.

Coming back to the hotel one day, the hotel porter gives her a message from her boy friend; he wants to meet her again. Suddenly, she's flustered and happy and distracted, almost forgetting her companion. They go up to her room, where she starts rushing around, packing. He moves to the window, listening to her voice, and sees that from her window she can see directly into his room, to the bedside where he had sat loading his pistol, days ago. .... and he realises why she had come knocking on his door those days ago, to distract him.

As she carries on talking and packing, he fades from her room and makes his way back to his room, where he takes out his pistol again. She comes rushing into his room, telling him that she's got to hurry, he must visit her in London, and tosses a rolled up sketch/painting on his bed as she leaves. As her footsteps die away, the roll of paper on the bed disappears and we realise that this whole love story, from the moment he first sat on the bed after she brushed past him at the front door of the hotel, has been just a dream, a wistful wish for love.

And the camera pans back up from the hotel window until we hear the gun shot.