Dexter invites Emma to meet him in India

Dexter Mayhew’s invitation to Emma Morley to join him in India turns a sudden feeling of missing her into an elaborate plan for escape, companionship, and a possible shared life. Its importance lies as much in its fate as in its promises: Dexter writes eleven pages, but the letter is misplaced before it can reach Emma, leaving the invitation vivid on the page and unrealized in practice.

The impulse behind the invitation

The letter takes shape after Dexter has been out in warm rain, drinking and thinking about Emma’s absence. He imagines how she might have shared the experience with him and arrives at the conclusion that she should be there. The revelation is spontaneous, but his appeal is directed at the constraints he knows to be part of her London life: a badly paid job melting cheese onto tortilla chips and a room without a window in the flat she shares with Tilly Killick. He presents leaving both as an immediate act of liberation, urging Emma to walk out rather than deliberate over the consequences.

Dexter is aware that his enthusiasm may outrun his judgment. He describes himself as drunk, admits that he may have said too much, and considers the possibility that Emma will be annoyed. That self-consciousness does not stop the letter; it sharpens its impulsive character. He even turns his proposal into a joke about their supposed sexual attraction and the possibility of locking her in her room at night. The humor lets him frame intimacy as banter, even as the scale of the invitation suggests that he wants Emma close to him for far more than a visit.

A meeting mapped out at the Taj Mahal

Dexter gives Emma a specific itinerary. She is to book an open-return flight to Delhi, arriving near 1 August, his birthday; the night before the meeting, she is to travel to Agra. At noon on 1 August, he proposes that they meet beneath the Taj Mahal’s central dome. His imagined staging is deliberately theatrical: Emma will carry a red rose and her copy of Nicholas Nickleby, while he will bring a white rose and his copy of Howards End. In his version, he will identify her, approach, and throw the book at her head.

The precise instructions make a fantasy of reunion feel briefly like a practical appointment. Dexter specifies the date, the hour, the journey, the flowers, and the books, while treating the grandeur of the Taj Mahal with irreverent humor. He also anticipates Emma’s likely objection that the scheme costs money. He offers to wire her fare and pay her expenses, calling the arrangement a kind of socialism: he has money he has not earned, while she works hard without having enough. He imagines that they might travel on to Kerala or Thailand, or stay awake all night at a full-moon party, and proposes that the trip could last three months before he must return in autumn.

From a visit to a shared life

The invitation quickly extends beyond travel. Dexter suggests that Emma leave Tilly Killick’s flat and stay with him when he returns to what he calls the real world. She could visit temporarily or, if she wished, live with him permanently as a flatmate. His promised flat is an expression of the economic ease he recognizes in himself: he calls himself an over-privileged capitalist and offers to spend money he has not earned so Emma can escape work and housing she resents.

That proposed domestic arrangement is hedged with jokes, but its terms are unusually open-ended. The trip is not simply a holiday with a fixed end; Dexter suggests months of travel, a home together afterward, and the possibility that Emma need not pay him back until she becomes a famous playwright or earns money from poetry. At the same time, he states that he must come home because his mother has been unwell. He says the operation went well, while acknowledging that he does not know whether this is the full truth or reassurance intended to spare him worry. He also promises to tell Emma his mother’s theory about the two of them if she comes to the Taj Mahal. The letter thus makes room for a subject Dexter withholds, turning the proposed meeting into the condition for another disclosure.

The letter’s material afterlife

Dexter writes the letter rapidly, filling eleven pages, then places it in an airmail envelope inside his copy of Howards End, beside Emma’s handwritten dedication. After leaving the bar, he and Renee van Houten jostle Heidi Schindler, a German student who has arrived with a large backpack and is exhausted and unwell. Heidi later settles on a decrepit rattan sofa and feels a hard object beneath its cushions: Dexter’s book, with the letter tucked inside.

Although the message is meant for someone else, Heidi reads it twice. Her English is imperfect, but she understands that it is an intimate invitation and imagines Emma reading it, perhaps exasperated yet pleased, and acting on its advice. She pictures Emma waiting at the Taj Mahal for Dexter. The imagined meeting makes Heidi feel happier, and she decides that Emma ought to receive the letter. But the envelope has neither Emma’s address nor a return address for Dexter. Heidi searches the pages for useful clues and resolves to ask at the hostel reception across the road; the evidence does not show that she succeeds in delivering it.

The later account confirms the letter’s long survival but not its arrival. Heidi, now Heidi Klauss, is forty-one, lives near Frankfurt with her husband and four children, and is reasonably happy. The paperback remains on a shelf in the spare bedroom, forgotten and unread, with Dexter’s letter still inside. Emma’s 1990 dedication to Dexter remains beside it, wishing him a safe journey and saying that she will miss him. The two pieces of writing occupy the same book, but the invitation and the earlier farewell are never shown reaching their intended exchange.

Travel, possibility, and interruption

Dexter’s plan treats travel as a break from the daily settings that restrict Emma: paid work, a windowless room, and the familiar routes of London. Emma later experiences travel with Dexter on an island journey, where the clear sea and the distance from the launderette, the night bus, and Tilly’s room make the point of going away newly tangible to her. That later experience gives the invitation’s imagined escape a striking echo, without proving that Emma ever received or acted on this particular letter.

The novel also places such hopes beside the vulnerability of ordinary movement. On a later July day, after work, lunch, and a swim, Emma listens to a message from Dexter and sets out by bicycle across North London toward Lexington Road. Warm rain intensifies as she rides through residential streets; a blur of movement comes from a side road, and she is hurled onto the verge. Her first thought is to find the missing bicycle, and then she realizes that she is badly hurt and that Dexter will be waiting. The contrast does not make the India invitation a cause of what follows. Instead, it places its promised mobility within a wider story in which travel can mean freedom and shared possibility, while movement through an ordinary city can be abruptly and irreversibly interrupted.