The Truth

I have just read a short story in The New Yorker. A fairly young couple are preparing a dinner party for two friends, a man and wife. But though they are friends of the wife who is giving the dinner, her husband hates them. In the course of the story he gets his hate off his chest, especially since the "friends" did not actually arrive, but his wife is appalled at his behaviour is obviously ready to leave him.
It took me back to a scene in a restaurant in London years ago.
I was there with two friends on the evening after a rugby match at Twickenham we had attended. We ordered our meals and proceeded to eat them quielty, not saying very much.
On the next table were two men and two women. They had evidently had quite a lot to drink. They were middle class/respectable so to speak. Not the sort who make a noise or kick up a fuss.
Except that something must have been said to cause one of the women to turn on her husband and tell him what she thought of him.
But she didn't do it so that only he could hear her; she did so that everyone could hear her. She didn't shout but spoke in a calm, sensible-sounding voice as one would, perhaps, speak to a servant.
In about twenty minutes she told him he was useless, a bore, that he never did anything to help her, that he was beneath contempt - and so on and so on.
It was a performance of a woman in a play by Noel Coward but who resembled more someone in a play by Samuel Beckett.
I cannot believe that that marriage survived that evening. I'll never know.
They say "the truth will out". That evening, while we ate our meals at the next table, a drama of gigantic proportion was taking place at the next table - but all on a civilised level.... one can't help thinking "on a civilised English" level.