Social Class and Identity Anxiety

Social Class and Identity Anxiety is expressed through the everyday frictions between Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew: where they eat, how they travel, what they wear, and what each believes those choices say about the other. Dexter treats money and cultivated taste as signs of a life going well, and resents Emma's refusal to receive them as uncomplicated generosity. Emma's working-class background, meanwhile, is both a real part of her history and, in Dexter's view, a posture she keeps using against him. The result is not simply a difference in income, but a struggle over who gets to define what their differences mean.

Taste as a Measure of Difference

Dexter's efforts to accommodate Emma and Ian bring their class tension into ordinary social settings. He sits with them in cinemas, cheap restaurants, and old pubs; he even joins the men from Sonicotronics to watch Ian's stand-up set at The Laughter Lab in Mortlake, with Emma nudging him when she thinks he should laugh. These gestures show him trying to behave well within her social world. But he experiences the resulting atmosphere as mutually hostile: Ian implies that Dexter is a fake, a snob, or a fop because he is publicly visible and prefers taxis to night buses, members' clubs to saloon bars, and good restaurants to takeaways.

For Dexter, paying is an act of generosity that ought to settle the matter. When he picks up a dinner bill or offers to pay for a taxi, Ian and Emma's subdued response feels to him like an accusation rather than gratitude. The same gesture therefore carries opposing meanings: Dexter sees care and success; the couple's reaction, as he interprets it, makes the display of money look like an insult. His irritation grows because he cannot separate being resented for his preferences from being resented for having the means to indulge them.

The last shared evening turns this conflict into a particularly concrete tableau: a video night on a decrepit sofa, watching Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and drinking tinnies while curry spills fluorescent ghee onto Dexter's Dries van Noten trousers. The expensive designer clothing and cheap, makeshift meal collide in one image. Dexter experiences the evening as the final proof that he would rather see Emma without Ian; the class argument has become inseparable from his desire to reclaim their friendship as a private relationship.

The Restaurant and the Performance of Affluence

At Club Tropicana, the restaurant itself makes social aspiration visible. Its velvet booths, liveried waiters, cocktails, and decorative portholes promise the romance of a luxury liner, but the portholes look out onto nothing. The lack of natural light gives the room a submarine quality, while kitchen noise and the clamor of youth, sex, money, and frying food overwhelm the intended inter-war elegance. Emma reads the spectacle as the Eighties arriving in full force: polished surfaces and conspicuous consumption, but also noise and excess.

Dexter presents the outing as his treat and checks the label in the back of Emma's dress before tucking it in, then leads her downstairs with a little Astaire-style trot. His manner makes the scene more than a meal: he is staging a passage into a world of money, youth, and sexual confidence, a world he enjoys and wants to share. Emma's concern that the place looks expensive does not disappear just because he offers to pay. The difference between them is not resolved by his ability to cover the bill; it is made more visible by the fact that he can treat expense as part of the occasion while she notices it as a cost.

Their disagreement over the Cigarette Girl extends this performance into a dispute about gender and political language. Dexter insists that he is a feminist, but argues that a woman should be free to display her breasts for tips and that the movement should concentrate on equal pay, equal opportunities, and civil rights. He tells Emma that it is not 1988 anymore, framing her objection as a battle already lost. The exchange does not reduce neatly to a class dispute, but it reveals a related divide in how each understands progress: Dexter claims the authority to distinguish current priorities from outdated battles, while Emma rejects his confidence that the matter is settled.

Class as Memory and Accusation

In private, Dexter's resentment becomes explicit. He associates Emma with the community centre, the theatre co-operative, and the politics of 1988, describing her as subsidised. His list turns her commitments into signs of a life shaped by collective institutions and limited means, in contrast with the restaurant's secret-agent glamour and the cocktails, cigarettes, and flirtation he has come to enjoy. He remembers his mid-Eighties education as a grim ideological experience, full of guilt and bolshy politics; the pleasure he now takes in luxury feels to him like release. His complaint is therefore not only that Emma disapproves of his tastes, but that her presence brings back a version of himself he wants to have outgrown.

He also interprets her humor as a repeated indictment. References to things being posh, to her fat bum, and to orthopaedic high heels strike him as put-downs that keep his failings in view. He wishes she would show grace, elegance, and self-confidence instead of behaving like a stand-up comic. Yet his account of her jokes is itself judgmental: he turns her wit into evidence of insecurity and self-loathing, just as she and Ian's criticism turns his preferences into evidence of snobbery. Neither can treat the other's style as merely a style; each reads it as a claim about status and character.

The sharpest class grievance concerns Emma's repeated references to having attended a comprehensive school, never having gone abroad on holiday, and never having eaten an oyster. Dexter regards these facts as old history that she should stop using to explain herself. He calls her working-class-hero act a form of vanity and self-regard, but his irritation shows how much the reminders unsettle him: the history he calls irrelevant remains present in the very expensive restaurant where he is trying to establish his ease. As he returns from the toilets, he sees Emma fiddling with her cutlery in a High Street funeral dress and feels another wave of irritation. Her appearance, to him, does not fit the polished setting he has chosen, and the mismatch becomes a judgment he makes about her.

An Intimate Conflict Without a Shared Measure

The conflict has no neutral measure of generosity, taste, or independence. Dexter regards his spending as proof that he is doing well and as something Emma should welcome; she and Ian, in his account, make the same spending evidence against him. Conversely, what Dexter calls Emma's attachment to a working-class identity, she does not need to experience as a pose for it to have become a source of friction between them. The novel places these interpretations beside specific objects and habits—the taxi, the bus, the oyster, the tinnie, the designer trousers—rather than resolving them into a simple argument about who is right.

At the restaurant, Dexter buys cigarettes again, and the Cigarette Girl touches his wrist and laughs. The flirtation follows his detour away from Emma after he has seen her across the room. In this moment, his dissatisfaction with her manner and class references accompanies his turn toward a setting that confirms the ease and glamour he wants to inhabit. The episode shows the cost of treating class difference as a personal slight: a dinner intended as a shared pleasure becomes another occasion on which Dexter and Emma assign opposed meanings to money, taste, and each other's conduct.