A Bill of Divorcement

On Christmas Eve, the cracked ancestral manor exhales frost and old secrets: Hilary Fairfield, once patriarch, now asylum ghost, wanders home clutching a discharge paper that might as well be a death warrant. His daughter Sydney—luminous, modern, betrothed to a sailor who smells of salt and future—must decide whether to bolt for matrimonial sunlight or surrender her pulse to the crumbling portraits in the hallway. The mother, Margaret, poised to remarry a stalwart barrister, discovers that the law’s ink still chains her to the madman she once loved; Victorian statute decrees that a wife cannot divorce an institutionalised husband, yet if the husband is declared cured she is bound to him as if the years were a misprint. Sydney’s renunciation is no frail melodramatic sigh but a surgical act: she slices her own horizon so that her mother’s may expand. The final tableau—father and daughter framed by holly-heavy lintels, the camera retreating like a mourner—leaves the spectator holding a crumpled vow that smells of iron beds and pine needles.