Dexter Mayhew’s dismissal from the language school in Rome turns a secret affair with his student, Tove Angstrom, into a professional consequence he will alternately defend and recast as good fortune. The book does not show the school’s decision being made; instead, it assembles the circumstances and Dexter’s changing explanations through an intimate scene, a letter from India, and a later confrontation with Emma Morley.

Circumstances and the relationship

In Rome, Dexter and Tove lie together in his small room after abandoning its inadequate single bed for cushions on the terracotta floor. Their affair has begun after a college party, when Tove sat on the edge of his bed and unzipped her knee-length boots. Dexter recognizes that sleeping with a student raises a moral question, but the recognition comes after the decision: amid wine and desire, he has already constructed a defence that she is an adult and that he is not really a teacher.

The circumstances make that defence uneasy. Tove is a student, and the hostel where she stays strictly forbids overnight visitors; her boots are left in the corner as Dexter lies beside her. He also thinks of what Emma might say, even as he tells himself that Emma is far away and that the affair has nothing to do with her. The scene connects the professional boundary he has crossed with a more personal awareness that he would not welcome Emma’s judgment.

Dismissal and Dexter’s account

The firing itself remains offstage. In a letter to Emma from Bombay, Dexter says that he has been banned from teaching English as a foreign language and calls this turn of events the best thing that ever happened to him. He presents India as an extraordinary experience, but immediately qualifies his account: he still thinks the school overreacted, and resists the description of him as morally unfit. The letter therefore makes the dismissal both a real restriction on his work and a story he is already trying to tell on his own terms.

Dexter’s letter does not establish the school’s precise reasoning or describe the process by which it dismissed him. Set beside the Rome scene, however, it gives the consequence a clear context: his relationship with a student and his own recognition that it poses an ethical problem. His account shifts attention from that boundary to the opportunities that followed, without showing that the dismissal itself caused his later prospects.

Recollection and disputed justification

The episode resurfaces when Emma asks Dexter why he was sacked from the language school. He answers that Tove was twenty-three, whereas in the Rome scene his private defence had described her as nineteen; in his letter from India he had put her age at twenty-one. The accounts do not settle Tove’s age. Their inconsistency instead exposes how unstable Dexter’s justification is, and how readily the detail changes as he tries to minimize the significance of the affair.

Emma’s question returns the dismissal to the moral ground Dexter’s letter had partly displaced. His insistence that the school overreacted sits beside the intimacy in Rome, the forbidden overnight visit, and his own momentary concern about the ethics of sleeping with a student. The firing thus marks more than a lost teaching post: it becomes a measure of the gap between Dexter’s self-exculpating version of events and the circumstances that make his conduct difficult to dismiss.