They have purchased a large detached house on a newly built luxury estate in Middlesex, England, and are starting to furnish and decorate it.

Frances teaches English to GCE A-level students, while Steve is a sales executive in an electrical appliance company, enjoying the regular driving his job entails.

To Steve's considerable shock and surprise Ella turns up at his home whilst he is away and introduces herself to Frances.

After they become acquainted over several bottles of wine, she claims to be pregnant by another man, then begs to be allowed to stay for the weekend.

Calculating and manipulative, when Steve returns and Frances is away Ella threatens to abort the baby, which she reveals is his.

[4] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Three into Two Won't Go is a slight improvement on Work is a Four Letter Word (it could hardly be otherwise), but Peter Hall still has a long way to go if he is to be reckoned as a director who can give some overall consistency of style to his material instead of playing it by ear as he goes along.

Here he has several things working in his favour: some sharp dialogue from Edna O'Brien (in between a number of those irritatingly ostentatious blows for the cause of the vulnerable woman which pepper her novels); a marvellously tetchy performance from Peggy Ashcroft as the slightly unhinged mother-in-law confined to an old people's home in which both her fellow inmates and the food ("It's the gravy they give us") are clearly not what she is accustomed to; and Claire Bloom almost managing to suggest that the character she plays is actually a real person as she responds to the camera's probing exploration of her face with commendable restraint.

When Peggy Ashcroft diffidently inquires of the final drawingroom mélée 'Isn't this a little boisterous?