Walk On By

Walk On By is the song that briefly gathers three generations of Dexter Mayhew’s family life into one scene: it recalls his mother, Alison Mayhew, as he dances with his daughter, Jasmine, and draws his thoughts toward Emma Morley. The call that arrives as the song fades does not come from Emma, but from Sylvie, turning the moment from imagined connection toward present responsibility.

A song remembered through his mother

As Dexter dances with Jasmine in the small bedroom, Walk On By brings back a specific image from childhood: Alison dancing in the living room with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. The song reaches him through memory rather than explanation, linking the music around him now to an earlier domestic scene and to his mother’s presence.

The present scene is physical and makeshift. Dexter settles Jasmine on his shoulder, feels her breath against his neck, takes her other hand, and moves with her in a slow dance through discarded toys and books. The contrast between that intimate, improvised dance and the remembered living-room image gives the song its force: family life is not recalled as a distant story but carried forward in a gesture repeated with his daughter.

The call as the song fades

The music also brings Emma to mind. In the middle of his exhaustion and red wine, Dexter wants to tell her what he is listening to. His phone rings just as Walk On By fades, and he searches among the toys and books hoping that Emma may be calling back. The display identifies Sylvie instead. He swears, reminds himself to stay sober, settles Jasmine in his lap beside the cot, and answers.

The timing makes the song a hinge between memory and interruption. Dexter’s wish to share the moment with Emma arises before he knows who is calling; the incoming call then redirects him to Sylvie and to the demands of his present family life. Another song, Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, bursts from the Fisher Price train during the call, and Dexter scrambles to silence it. The scene moves from slow dancing and remembered music to an awkward attempt to manage the noise around his daughter and the conversation on the phone.

The song against later grief

The later account of Dexter’s first St Swithin’s Day after Emma’s death gives the earlier wish to speak to her a painful context. On the anniversary, he tries to frame the day as a celebration, takes money from the café register despite his manager Maddy’s protests, and goes drinking with staff. By the fifth martini, his insistence on having fun has become part of a night of mounting self-destructive behaviour. This later episode does not repeat Walk On By; it shows how the absence that surfaces momentarily during the song remains consequential in Dexter’s life.

That continuing connection also appears when Dexter sorts Emma’s possessions. Among boxes marked in her handwriting, letters, photographs, and other belongings, he finds a Paris Polaroid she had once insisted she would destroy but had kept. Its survival briefly pleases him before it brings her absence sharply back. The moment echoes the song scene’s movement from an object or sound into a memory of Emma, while making clear that remembrance can comfort and wound at once.

Memory carried into family life

Dexter’s later conversation with Jasmine makes the place Emma occupies in the family explicit. When Jasmine asks whether he misses Emma, he tells her that he does, every day, and calls Emma his best friend. Jasmine recalls Emma only faintly, chiefly through pictures and the wedding. The song scene already places that bond within Dexter’s ordinary care for his daughter: while Jasmine is close against him, music draws Emma briefly into his thoughts, even as the phone call returns him to the living relationships around him.