Alison

Alison, Dexter Mayhew’s mother, is gravely ill during one of the most revealing encounters between them: she receives a thoughtful parcel from Emma Morley, speaks frankly about the person Dexter has become, and accepts his apology when he promises to stay. Her warmth is not indulgent. It gives her the authority to distinguish the exceptional man she believes her son might become from the less kind man he is at present, making her both a source of affection and a measure of his moral distance from himself.

Identity and family

Alison is the wife of Stephen Mayhew and the mother of Dexter Mayhew. By the time Dexter visits the family home in the Chilterns, her condition has deteriorated over the preceding six months. The novel does not specify her illness in these scenes; instead, it registers its effects through the altered family around her. Stephen, once a giant in Dexter’s eyes, now appears stooped, tired and drawn. The familiar home remains comfortable, but Dexter approaches it with dread, aware that his parents’ life has changed.

That change is set against Dexter’s conspicuous public success. Still under twenty-nine, he is a well-known television presenter and arrives in a sporty car, dressed with the jaunty confidence of his celebrity persona. Seeing himself as his father must see him, he feels ashamed. Alison’s illness makes that contrast harder to evade: his achievements and cultivated ease do not answer the private demands of being a son.

The visit and Emma’s gift

Emma’s parcel gives the visit a tangible connection to the friendship Dexter values. Inside are paperbacks by Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald, accompanied by a postcard bearing an agit-prop collage from 1982. Alison carefully folds back the wrapping, appreciates Emma’s thoughtfulness and asks Dexter to thank her. Her attention moves from the books to Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, whose title prompts a moment of gallows humour about mother and son. She then weighs the novel in her fingers and gently suggests that Emma might choose short stories for her in future.

The exchange shows Alison receiving the gift actively, with humour and discernment rather than as a passive emblem of illness. Dexter, however, dislikes the gallows humour: he sees it as an attempt to demonstrate courage and lift spirits, and would rather leave the unsayable unspoken. The difference matters. Alison can make room for a joke about their circumstances; Dexter’s discomfort exposes how difficult he finds confronting them. Her question about Emma also brings his absent friend into the room, and the books become a small sign of care reaching Alison through Dexter.

Affection and judgment

Alison’s tenderness does not prevent candour. She tells Dexter that she believes he has the capacity to become a fine, even exceptional, man, but that he has not got there yet. She then makes the judgment more intimate: sometimes she worries that he is no longer very nice. The force of the rebuke lies in its combination of confidence and disappointment. She does not write him off; she names a possibility in him while insisting that his present conduct falls short of it.

Her assessment also complicates Dexter’s reliance on Emma as a moral talisman. He thinks he is a better person when Emma is nearby, and wishes she could be present at an important moment in his life. Alison offers another kind of intimate witness: a parent who remembers his potential but sees the person he is now. Her judgment is painful precisely because it comes with enduring belief in him, not with rejection.

Dexter apologizes, and Alison answers by pressing her thumb into his palm. The small gesture makes their reconciliation physical as well as verbal: she acknowledges that he is sorry without withdrawing the criticism that made the apology necessary. When he says he will stay that night, the decision is a concrete response to her vulnerability and to his own recognition that he has been absent in ways that matter. The scene leaves their affection intact without pretending that affection has erased his failures.

Death and continuing influence

Alison dies before the later episode in which Dexter’s father calls ahead of Dexter’s television show. Since her death, the calls have become more frequent and more difficult; Stephen’s speech is circular and distracted, and on rare visits Dexter has seen him helpless before ordinary tasks such as using the kettle. The bereavement that follows Alison’s illness therefore affects the whole family, leaving her husband diminished and his son struggling to respond to him.

In the call, Stephen says Alison would have been proud of Dexter. A pause follows as both men recognise that this may not be true. The moment quietly recalls the earlier visit, when Alison had affirmed Dexter’s potential but also told him he was not yet the man she hoped he could be. Her absence cannot settle the difference between that hope and his behaviour; instead, the doubtful invocation of her pride shows how much her judgment still shapes the family’s understanding of him. Alison’s part in the story is brief, but it gives lasting emotional weight to Dexter’s remorse, his father’s grief, and the question of whether he can grow into the person she believed he might become.