Dexter Mayhew’s Close Relationship with His Mother, Alison Mayhew

Dexter Mayhew’s close relationship with Alison Mayhew combines easy affection with a frankness that unsettles him. He admires her magnetism and takes pleasure in being her son, but she is not merely an approving audience: she jokes about his ambitions, probes his love life, and urges him to prepare for a less protected adulthood. Their bond is affectionate enough to make such criticism intimate, and candid enough to leave its implications unresolved.

Alison’s Presence and Dexter’s Admiration

In Rome, Dexter watches Alison Mayhew before approaching her at a café in the Piazza della Rotunda. Seated in the afternoon sun with a novel in hand, she flirts with a waiter in Italian that he cannot understand; the waiter responds in kind. Dexter smiles at the scene. To him, the ease with which people are drawn to her is a familiar part of family life, and he feels fortunate to like his father, Stephen Mayhew, as well as to love his mother.

That attraction reaches beyond Dexter. At parties, he remembers, accomplished men gathered around Alison Mayhew as if they had become boys again. Stephen Mayhew, fifteen years older than her, watched her with quiet adoration. Dexter also recalls her dancing to early Roxy Music while the other wives looked on, and his school friends becoming conspicuously flirtatious in her company. His mother’s attention is not simply a family possession: it shapes the atmosphere around her, and Dexter grows up watching other people respond to it.

Her public appeal sits alongside a life that has changed direction without apparent regret. Alison Mayhew studied fashion in London and retains an aura of her earlier, more glamorous life, visible to Dexter in old photographs and magazine clippings. She has since built a successful village antiques shop, selling expensive rugs and chandeliers to Oxford’s genteel customers, and settled into secure family life. Dexter suspects she may have had occasional affairs, but the suspicion does not make him angry. What others say he inherited from her is difficult to define: looks and energy, certainly, but also the confidence to occupy the centre of a room and feel part of the winning side.

Intimacy Through Teasing

The Rome meeting gives their closeness a comic, conversational shape. Alison Mayhew is forty-five minutes late, and Dexter has spent the time watching her charm the waiter. She smokes despite his criticism; when he asks why, she answers that it makes her look sensational, then declares the cigarette her last. With a match supplied by Dexter, she turns the conversation towards his love life, explaining that she must live vicariously through her children. Her curiosity is playful, but it also assumes a familiar access to his private affairs.

She is not above embarrassing him. When Dexter says that everyone likes him, his self-mocking line sounds better in his head than it does aloud. He feels foolish, recalling childhood parties where Alison Mayhew let him sit with the adults and his attempts to show off disappointed her. Yet the moment ends not in rebuke but in a smile and a squeeze of his hand. Her affection cushions his embarrassment without pretending it has not happened.

Her teasing also reaches back into his romantic history. When Dexter says there is nothing to report, Alison Mayhew recalls a pretty, earnest Northern woman who had stayed with them, become drunk, and shouted at Stephen Mayhew about the Sandinistas. The episode lets her make light of his evasions while showing how closely she has observed the people who pass through his life. Later, she advises him to be nice, but not to make niceness into a religion. The advice is delivered as a small correction within a warm exchange, not as a formal lesson.

Warning Against a Sheltered Adulthood

Beneath the banter, the walk through Rome turns towards Dexter’s uncertain future. He says he may stay until October, and Alison Mayhew asks whether he will then come home and settle down to something. When he mentions photography, she initially laughs at the prospect, including the photographs he has taken of gravel. She recognises that her laughter has hurt him, apologises, and tells him to pursue the work if it is what he wants. She also accepts that teaching is a respectable profession while questioning whether teaching Beatles songs to students is his vocation.

Her concern is not simply that Dexter should choose the right career. She tells him that he has had good fortune and has been protected from responsibility and money worries; he is now an adult, and life may not remain as serene as the pleasant street they are walking through. She wants him better equipped for that change. Dexter reduces the point to a question about a career, and she agrees that it is partly about work, leaving the larger warning in place. The contrast is sharp: the son who has inherited her ease and confidence has also, in her view, been allowed to rely on too much good luck.

Affection and Unfinished Conversation

At the hotel, Alison Mayhew mocks Stephen Mayhew’s undignified habit of picking at his feet in the lobby, then takes Dexter’s hand and asks him to lunch the next day. She proposes somewhere expensive, with white tablecloths, on her own account, and invites him to bring his photographs of interesting pebbles. The joke preserves their lightness, but the request for time alone marks the lunch as more than another opportunity to tease him. When Dexter asks why, she says she wants to talk with her handsome son and is too drunk to do so properly that evening.

His question carries anxiety: he wonders if she is leaving his father, and she reassures him that she is not. Still, she does not explain what she wants to discuss. On the street, she gives him a consoling smile, places a hand at the back of his neck, draws him down until their foreheads touch, and postpones the proper conversation until tomorrow. Their closeness is expressed in this small physical gesture, while the subject of the promised talk remains open. The scene therefore holds affection and concern together: Alison Mayhew can joke with Dexter and reassure him, yet her insistence that he grow up and be prepared gives their intimacy a serious edge.