Dexter Mayhew

Dexter Mayhew is a handsome, socially assured young man whose pursuit of success and pleasure repeatedly outruns his capacity to accept their consequences. He moves from an uncertain post-university future to television fame, from fame into addiction and personal failure, and eventually toward the modest routines of café work and fatherhood. His significance lies in the contrast between the life he wants to have photographed and the difficult, ordinary life he must learn to live: one shaped by responsibility, love, shame and, after Emma Morley’s death, grief that cannot be undone.

Identity and Early Ambitions

At twenty-three, Dexter has no clear vocation, although he wants to succeed, make his parents proud, appear in magazine profiles and someday have a retrospective of work whose nature he has not yet decided. He also wants to sleep with more than one woman at once, live intensely without mess, and avoid sadness except in small and manageable quantities. The image matters as much as the achievement: he wants any photograph taken at random to make him look cool. This is not simply ambition without a plan; it is a desire for the appearance of a coherent life without the toil, rejection and compromise that might make one possible.

His first response to possible consequences is to prepare an escape. After an intimate night with Emma, he anticipates tears and awkward calls, looks toward his discarded clothes, then finds a small yellow mustard tin containing condoms and the grey remains of a joint. Their presence briefly restores his optimism and persuades him to stay longer. The detail catches his early habit of treating risk as something that can be contained by improvisation: he can acknowledge that the night may have repercussions and still choose immediate pleasure over the work of facing them.

Dexter’s confidence is also grounded in family affection and good fortune. In Rome, he watches his mother, Alison Mayhew, flirt with a waiter and reflects that people seem to fall in love with her. His father, Stephen Mayhew, watches her with adoration; at parties, accomplished men gather around her, and even Dexter’s school friends become flirtatious in her presence. Dexter regards his close relationships with both parents as an unusual piece of luck. That security sits alongside his self-indulgence: the family life he takes for granted gives him a safe background against which he can imagine a future of pleasure and achievement without much reckoning with loss.

From India to Television Fame

A letter from Bombay shows Dexter making a performance of his travels even when nobody is watching. Writing after beers at lunchtime, he describes rain, a hostel, a compilation tape from Emma and his difficulty getting through Howards End. He jokes about the books she has given him and asks her to pretend to be interested in his thousands of photographs. His comic, boastful letter is also an account of an unexpected opening: a television producer he meets on a train has seen his photographs and suggests he call when she returns. Dexter presents the trip as an experience and a source of material, but it is this meeting that offers a route into television.

Photography soon gives way to a more immediate dream. On Primrose Hill, sleeping in the evening sun beside a half-empty bottle of white wine, Dexter imagines a television career. He has decided that becoming an exceptional photographer would require the struggle and rejection he doubts he can tolerate; television, by contrast, seems ready for him now. He recasts the medium as a force that reaches people and shapes opinion, even as its attractions include visibility and the chance to be on camera. The profession is both an ideal he can describe in generous terms and a stage on which his existing appetite for attention can flourish.

Fame feels natural to him once it arrives. Dexter has always wanted to be successful, and he assumes success should be public; presenting on camera seems to come as easily as discovering a talent already waiting to be used. His programme offers live bands, video exclusives and celebrity interviews, and he understands that much of his role is to look into the camera and urge the audience to make noise. He does that with swagger and charm. Yet he is aware of how easily confidence becomes prattishness, and privately works out what to do with his face when people recognize him. His carefully practiced expression of casual indifference reveals the effort beneath the supposedly effortless persona.

That persona fails on the night of his major live television opportunity. Drunk on vodka, Dexter climbs the studio gantry beside Suki Meadows, who is loudly energizing the audience, and realizes that he is unsteady and wants to lie down. He attempts to speak into a dead-feeling microphone while millions are watching. The public breakthrough he has anticipated becomes an exposure of the habits that make the breakthrough dangerous: the charm remains part of the show, but intoxication has taken away his control of it.

Addiction, Work and Friendship

By 1993, Dexter’s nights and mornings have begun to bleed into each other. On 15 July, the sun rises at 5:01 a.m. as he returns from a stranger’s flat in Brixton in a minicab. The encounter is part of a nightlife that has made him new acquaintances, including Tara and a graphic designer whose name he cannot settle on. Later that morning, he searches for milk, discovers the carton is unopened, and leaves the flat under the pretext of getting some. On Electric Avenue he finds a minicab office; the narration marks the sunrise again as a threshold into what he experiences as hell. His movement through the night ends not in glamorous freedom but in an attempt to get away from the people with whom he has spent it.

Emma becomes the clearest witness to the repetition. She tells Dexter that he is drunk or on something whenever she sees him, and that she has not seen him sober for three years. His attention keeps drifting toward his own stories, his new acquaintances and the next trip to the loo; she cannot tell whether his excuses involve illness or cocaine, but the effect is the same: he is not present with her. She also resents his habit of looking beyond her as though a better option might appear. Her anger names the relational cost of his excess. His drinking and drug use do not remain private indulgences; they make a friendship feel one-sided and turn his public success into a subject she can no longer admire on his behalf.

The cancellation of Game On, announced on 15 July 1997, marks another reversal. The television career that made visibility seem like a natural reward is no longer secure. By July 1998, Dexter has fallen in love with Sylvie Cope, whose beauty and sternness seem to him to demand a different, more serious life. The intensity of the new relationship does not itself establish that he has changed, but it shifts his hopes toward partnership and family. His later history will test whether the desire to be a good husband and father can withstand the old attractions of escape and gratification.

Love, Fatherhood and a New Working Life

At the wedding where Dexter and Emma meet again, the two find each other through the crowd and begin with the uncertain exchange of people who share an immense past but do not yet know how to speak from it. Dexter is still with Sylvie, and Emma catches him exchanging a tender moment with her during the vows. Their reunion nevertheless opens a new chapter in their relationship. The awkwardness of the encounter matters: they are not meeting as the young people who once assumed that affection could be held apart from consequence, but as adults whose lives have taken separate routes.

The birth of Jasmine Alison Viola Mayhew makes Dexter’s wish to change unusually explicit. Jasmine is born in the late evening of the third day of the new millennium, weighing 6 pounds 6 ounces. Holding her in a hospital chair, Dexter resolves to do the right thing: he will act as though his daughter might always be watching and will avoid causing her pain, anxiety or embarrassment. The promise is absolute, an ideal rather than proof of a settled transformation. Its force comes from the contrast with the younger Dexter, who wanted an exciting life without complications. Fatherhood makes another person’s vulnerability central to the future he imagines.

After he and Emma have reunited in Paris, Dexter travels to see her with no suitcase, only a small overnight bag. He waits until the other passengers have left the train and keeps a copy of Emma’s children’s novel, Big Julie Criscoll Versus the Whole Wide World, beside him. He has finished it on the journey and studies the photograph of its author on the back cover, recognizing her expression and gesture. The book is more than a reason for the visit: it shows him attending to Emma’s work and to the person behind it, with a carefulness absent from his earlier self-absorption. Their later life together takes shape around a deliberate attempt not to repeat conventional arrangements that neither has managed to make work. They plan separate homes and separate social lives while remaining faithful and committed to one another.

Dexter’s working life also becomes smaller in scale and more tangible. His café opens in April, but for its first six weeks customers walk in, look around and leave. Gradually word spreads; he hires staff, gains regulars and begins to enjoy the work. He is no longer a television figure with a broad public audience. His local reputation rests partly on his selection of herbal teas, and the café’s success is modest beside his earlier dreams. Yet he takes pride in opening the shutters and welcoming customers. The work asks him to return, attend to a place and deal with ordinary business rather than rely on the charisma that once seemed sufficient.

Grief, Responsibility and the Ending

The later café routine does not make Dexter immune to relapse. On wet Tuesdays, he imagines closing the shutters and methodically drinking all the red wine. On one morning after an argument, he sits in the stock room among the smell of cheese, unable to concentrate on the quarterly VAT return, and phones Emma. Once it was Emma who made conciliatory calls; in the eight months since their marriage, Dexter has become the one unable to work while she is unhappy. He leaves a message proposing that they view a house and mentions its breakfast bar, something she has always wanted. The modest domestic detail sits beside their former decision to keep separate homes: their arrangement is not presented as simple certainty, but as a negotiation that can change as they do.

Emma’s death leaves a division in Dexter’s life that no new routine can repair. After a drinking collapse, Sylvie finds him on the floor of his flat, trapped between the sofa and a table, sick on himself and unable to get up. He is appalled and ashamed, and apologizes for having failed again. Later, looking at his swollen, bruised face in a bathroom mirror, he recognizes that grief has not made him grand or noble. He thinks of himself as stupid, banal and without purpose, and remembers his father and former wife helping him into a bath after another drunken episode. The mirror gives him no heroic version of bereavement, only the physical evidence of deterioration and the humiliating dependence he once might have assumed he could avoid.

That self-condemnation is not the end of his relationships. In the café, he has work; at home, he has a daughter; and he is able to love Emma without pretending that she is still present. When Jasmine asks whether he misses her, Dexter says that he does, every day, and calls Emma his best friend. Jasmine remembers her mother only imperfectly, through photographs and the wedding, and asks whether she was nice. Dexter answers simply that she was. Their exchange holds two different kinds of memory together: a daughter’s fragmentary recollection and a widower’s enduring daily absence.

Dexter’s life therefore does not resolve into a clean conversion from irresponsibility to virtue. He makes promises he cannot keep perfectly, builds a working life after professional decline, and finds meaning in being a father and Emma’s partner without escaping his capacity for self-destruction. The recurring July 15 structure places his changing fortunes against the return of the same calendar date, making time both ordinary and charged with accumulated consequence. At the end, his bond with Emma persists not as a claim that grief can be overcome, but as a fact he can tell his daughter: Emma was his best friend, and he misses her every day.