Dexter Mayhew's grief

Dexter Mayhew’s grief takes shape through two losses: his mother, Alison Mayhew, and then Emma Morley, his closest friend and later his wife. Rather than advancing cleanly toward acceptance, it returns through dependence, resentment, drinking, physical deterioration, solitude, and the objects Emma left behind. Its most revealing movement is from an attempt to make her anniversary a party to the quiet work of sorting her possessions and, eventually, speaking of her with their daughter, Jasmine Mayhew.

Loss, dependence, and estrangement

After Alison Mayhew dies, Dexter finds himself relying more and more on Emma, whom he has long treated as someone he can call on whenever he needs her. But Emma is less available: she takes longer to return his calls and spends time with Ian Whitehead. Dexter’s need for her therefore arrives at the moment she is becoming more independent, turning bereavement into a source of resentment as well as longing. He wonders about her life with Ian and why Ian has met her parents, Jim and Sue, when he has not.

That resentment is complicated by his awareness that he is behaving badly. He wants Emma at the studio for his live television broadcast and feels that he is better when she is near; he thinks of her as a talisman and lucky charm. Yet she has her own commitment, directing the school production of Oliver!, and refuses to cancel it for his appearance. Their argument exposes a painful imbalance: Dexter experiences her presence as necessary support, while Emma tells him that he cannot expect people to build their lives around him. His grief over his mother thus strains a friendship that had been a dependable source of comfort.

Alison’s death also changes Dexter’s relationship with his father. Since the bereavement, the older man’s phone calls have become more frequent, circular, and distracted. On visits home, Dexter sees him stare helplessly at a kettle, an ordinary task now seeming beyond him. Before Dexter’s television appearance, his father leaves a message wishing him luck and saying that Alison would have been proud, then falters over whether that is true. The call offers affection, but its awkwardness reveals two people struggling with loss in different ways.

The first anniversary and its failed celebration

On the first anniversary of Emma’s death, Dexter insists on treating the day as a celebration of her life and their good memories. He dismisses his manager Maddy’s objections, takes two hundred pounds from the café till, and invites Maddy, Jack, and Pete out for the night. In a Camden basement bar, already on his fifth martini and smoking, he presents the outing as a way to have fun rather than become morbid. His companions drink slowly and watch over him; he finds their care irritating and wants a more forceful release, so he proposes a strip club.

There, Dexter tells a dancer, Barbara, that it is his anniversary and explains that Emma had an accident exactly a year earlier. He speaks of Emma being only thirty-eight, their trying for a baby, the driver who walked away, and the injustice of what has happened. The memories emerge in a slurred, disconnected rush rather than as a composed account. When Barbara looks down to text on her phone, Dexter mistakes the gesture for emotional attention, then feels rage when he realizes she has not been moved by his story. His need to have Emma’s death witnessed collides with the indifference of a stranger at work.

The evening continues into a fight. Dexter provokes a man, recognizes that he wants to be hit, and is beaten and carried out by several men into an alley. Lying on the filthy ground with blood in his mouth, he returns to the thought that this is what Emma would have wanted. The repeated claim that the night is for her has become inseparable from self-harm: the celebration does not contain his grief but gives it a reckless form.

Aftermath and bodily decline

Dexter’s father takes him away from London. Dexter considers protesting that he is not a child, but is too exhausted to argue and falls asleep under a blanket in the car. At the family home, his father acts as if nothing unusual has happened, offering soup and opening the car door for him. Dexter is grateful for this pretense. In the bathroom mirror, however, he sees the injuries plainly: a cut, swollen lip, a large bruise, aching back muscles, and a bitten, ulcerous tongue.

The injuries belong to a wider deterioration. Dexter is drinking nightly and often during the day, has gained considerable weight, and has a slack face, red eyes, broken veins, and bad breath. Looking at himself, he concludes that bereavement has not made him grand or tragic; he feels stupid, banal, lonely, and without purpose. The scene connects grief to the material condition of his body, not only to what he can say about Emma. He remembers his father and ex-wife helping him into a bath and feels humiliated that, shortly before turning forty-one, he has again needed others to care for him.

Later, alone in the house, he eats supper with the television on and limits himself to the single beer that came with the delivery. That restraint does not prevent a sudden panic: grief feels like walking across a frozen river, safe until the ice begins to creak. He has to stand, cover his face, and catch his breath. Calling Maddy, he tells her it is only a little panic. Her voice calms him, but he asks to be alone and turns off his phone before going upstairs.

Emma’s belongings and continuing connection

In the spare room, an open suitcase and cardboard boxes include two marked Emma 1 and Emma 2 in Emma’s own handwriting. Dexter brings them downstairs and sorts their contents into things to discard, items to send to her parents, and things he wants to keep. He works practically and without tears, avoiding her youthful journals and plays because he imagines she would wince or try to snatch them away. The labor gives grief a concrete task, but each layer of the boxes also carries him backward through their shared history.

Among the papers, photographs, and Paris memorabilia, he discovers a Polaroid of Emma naked on a bed. It was taken after a drunken, amorous evening spent watching Titanic in French on a black-and-white television. Emma had taken the picture from him and insisted she would destroy it; finding that she kept it suggests she may have liked it more than she let on. The discovery briefly offers Dexter an intimate trace of her private feeling, then confronts him again with her absence. He puts the photograph back in its envelope and sits silently until he can continue.

The boxes preserve other measures of time: press cuttings and dummy covers for Emma’s novels, photographs of Paris, and old correspondence. Working backward, Dexter reaches her graduation certificate, dated 14 July 1988, almost eighteen years before the anniversary on which he is sorting her things. The objects make their shared past tangible without making it recoverable; he can hold the photograph and read the date, but cannot return to the life they record.

Memory within family life

Emma remains present in Dexter’s later conversations with Jasmine. When Jasmine asks whether he misses Emma, he answers that he does, every day, and calls her his best friend. Jasmine says that she thinks she misses Emma too, although she was only four and remembers her chiefly through pictures and the wedding. Dexter answers that Emma was very nice. The exchange gives his grief a form different from the anniversary’s drinking and violence: a direct acknowledgment shared with his daughter, who has her own partial memories of Emma.

Across these scenes, remembrance is neither a cure nor simply a relapse. Emma’s absence can provoke isolation and dangerous drinking, but her photograph, her handwriting, and the stories Dexter shares with Jasmine keep her connected to ordinary life. His grief persists because the relationship remains part of how he understands himself and his family, even as he struggles to live without the person he calls his best friend.