Dexter's affair with his student Tove Angstrom in Rome

Dexter Mayhew’s affair with Tove Angstrom, his student at a language school in Rome, is both a sexual entanglement and the conduct behind his dismissal from teaching English. Its importance lies in the gap between Dexter’s easy pleasure in the relationship and his evasive account of its professional consequences: he treats the affair as an indulgence when it happens, as an overreaction by the school when he writes about it, and as a disputed question of age when Emma Morley later presses him for an explanation.

The Affair in Rome

The scene takes place during a humid July afternoon in Dexter’s tiny room in Rome’s Centro Storico. The teachers’ accommodation is institutional and cramped, with a balcony ledge above a picturesque square that also serves as a car park. The single bed proves inadequate, so Dexter and Tove lie among cushions on the terracotta floor. The surroundings make their intimacy feel improvised and enclosed, far from the professional setting in which their relationship began.

Their flirtation is physical and playful. After Tove punches Dexter in the shoulder over his description of a language, she apologizes by kissing his shoulder, neck, and mouth. The joke turns teaching into a source of sexual gratification for him: Dexter is struck anew by how rewarding it can be. That thought sits beside the plain fact of their roles. Tove is his student, and their intimacy takes place in teachers’ accommodation where overnight visitors are strictly forbidden.

The scene also shows Dexter briefly registering the ethical problem without allowing that recognition to interrupt him. He wonders whether sleeping with a student has a moral dimension, then acknowledges that the time to weigh its pros and cons would have been earlier, when Tove first came to his room after the college party. He recalls that Emma was already present in his thoughts then, but dismisses her relevance and tells himself that Tove is an adult and that he is not a real teacher. His reasoning does not resolve the conflict; it gives him a way to proceed while knowing what he is setting aside.

Pleasure and Evasion

Dexter has an appointment with his parents and tells Tove that he has to leave. She protests, coiling a leg around him and turning the exchange into a mock grammar lesson about kissing. When she asks for ten more minutes, he gives in. His decision is narrated through his own list of consolations: he is in Rome on a beautiful day, twenty-four, financially secure, healthy, and doing something he knows he should not be doing. The admission of wrongdoing and the insistence on good fortune occupy the same thought. Pleasure does not erase his awareness; it helps him postpone acting on it.

That self-description gives the affair a wider connection to Dexter’s appetite for sensation and self-gratification. He imagines that a life devoted to pleasure may eventually wear thin, but considers that a problem for another time. The immediate choice is small—stay on the floor rather than go to his parents—but it condenses the pattern: an obligation is acknowledged, an indulgence is made available, and Dexter lets the obligation wait.

The affair also has an ironic counterpart in Emma’s correspondence. In a letter from Leeds, she urges Dexter to keep reading the books she has sent, including Primo Levi, and asks him to promise that he is not sleeping with his students. Her concern reaches him across the distance between them, but it does not prevent the relationship with Tove. In the Rome scene, he remembers Emma as far away and occupied with her own work, using that distance to question why her opinion should matter. The contrast is not simply between Emma’s seriousness and Dexter’s pleasure: her letter identifies the very boundary he is crossing, while his private reasoning makes the boundary seem irrelevant to the moment.

Dismissal and Later Recollection

Dexter’s own later account makes the professional consequence explicit. Writing to Emma from a hostel in Bombay, he says that being banned from teaching English as a foreign language turned out to be the best thing that had happened to him, while maintaining that the school had overreacted. He also gives Tove’s age as twenty-one. The breezy, drunken letter presents the dismissal as a fortunate turn in his travels, converting a sanction into an opportunity and treating the school’s judgment as excessive.

When Emma later asks why he was sacked from the language school in Rome, Dexter again answers by disputing Tove’s age, this time saying she was twenty-three. The variation between his accounts—twenty-one in the letter and twenty-three in the later exchange—makes his explanation less secure rather than clarifying it. Emma’s question returns the affair to the foreground after Dexter has tried to narrate it as an episode that worked out for the best. Her response is to end the conversation and pick up her Russian novel; his answer has not supplied an account that settles the matter.

Significance

The affair is presented through a recurring division between what Dexter knows and what he permits himself to do. In Rome, he recognizes the student-teacher boundary, the hostel rule, and Emma’s possible disapproval, yet proceeds by narrowing the question to Tove’s adulthood and his own claim not to be a real teacher. Later, he frames the school’s decision as an overreaction and offers shifting ages when Emma asks about it. The episode therefore connects private desire to professional accountability, while showing how Dexter’s charm and self-deprecation can soften the telling without changing the underlying facts: he slept with a student, the school banned him from teaching, and Emma continued to ask him why.