5. “Period Piece” by Joyce Cary Tutin, married sixteen years, with three children, had an affair with his secretary, Phyllis, aged eighteen, and wanted a divorce. His wife, Clare, with her usual good sense, was resigned. ‘If you feel you must make a break,’ she said, sadly but without bitterness, ‘there’s no more to be said . It would be stupid to try to hold you against your will. You’d only hate me and that wouldn’t help either of us.’ But when her mother in remote Yorkshire heard of this arrangement, she wrote and said it was preposterous and wicked, she wouldn’t allow it. Old Mrs. Beer was the widow of a canon. She was a short, stout woman with a red face and a heavy jaw – a pugnacious and indomitable face. Yet there was something defeated about it too. The little faded blue eyes especially seemed to confess that the old woman had long given up hope of any serious attention from anybody. You see such faces in boxing booths among the seconds and backers, men who have been in the ring all their lives and lost all their fight, but still follow the games as bottle holders, training partners, punching bags for young champions. Her son-in-law laughed at her when she didn’t exasperate him to madness by her sudden raids and arbitrary commands. Each time a child was born she planted herself in the household and took charge of every detail – laying down the law in an intolerable manner and flatly contradicting everybody from the doctor to the monthly nurse. Now, at this talk of divorce, she excelled herself. When Clare wrote her explanations she came south without any warning whatever broke into Tutin’s office and, marching up to his desk, umbrella in hand as if about to beat him, demanded, ‘What’s this nonsense about a divorce?’