My Lies, Your Lies - Susan Lewis Page 0,107

man, tolerant, understanding and never unkindly judgemental. He’d brought Jamie up as his own and Joely knew how deeply attached her brother had always been to him.

She continued to look at David and as the ghost of her father receded she began to feel as though this stranger wanted her to know him; that he was here or close by as she read his letters. She’d never felt such a powerful connection to someone who was dead before, and she presumed he was dead since both Freda and her mother spoke about him in the past tense.

Going back to the letter she unfolded it carefully, awkwardly owing to her injuries, and studied the handwriting first, thin and slanted to the right with oddly blunt notes in amongst the more artful script. This, she thought to herself, is his handwriting, these words were composed by him for her mother, and with the photograph right there in front of her it felt bizarrely as though she was actually meeting him.

March 1969

My dear Marianne,

It seems strange to call you by that name, but it is a beautiful name that suits you well. I have spoken it to myself several times and I hear its music as I picture your face. Marianne, Marianne.

I think this letter will surprise you, for I’m sure you must have given up hope of hearing from me by now. My lawyer assures me that he has passed on my messages asking you to forget me and to stop waiting. My sentence is a long one, cherie, and you are still so young. Yet you continue to write.

You say you regret telling your parents what happened between us the last time we were together, but it is I who must bear the burden of my actions. You should have no regrets, Marianne, for what you did was right. I could say that I don’t know what came over me that day, but I have had much time to think about it, and I have come to realize something I wish I’d known at the time.

The simplest way to explain what I did is to say that I couldn’t bear to let you go, but that makes it far from simple. I was trying to make myself let you go, for your sake much more than my own – by then Dinah meant nothing to me. I wish I’d never told you about her, it was foolish to think that you would accept her presence in my life as a reason for us to say goodbye. When I saw how hurt and confused you were I wanted to comfort you, to tell you what was in my heart, but I knew if I did that I would be unable to stop myself from making love to you. As we know, I was unable to stop myself anyway but once I’d begun and you struggled I told myself that I must let you go. I tried, but it wasn’t what either of us wanted so we continued.

However we want to look at it now, whatever we tell ourselves, you were in that position because I’d forced you to be, and if I hadn’t it wouldn’t have happened.

By the time the police came to arrest me I’d already made up my mind that I must pay for what I’d done to you. I didn’t want anyone to doubt your word, not even for a minute. You didn’t deserve to have your honesty questioned, or to be put through the shattering experience of a trial. I simply couldn’t let it happen. There were those who wanted me to fight, my lawyer, and my family who refused to believe I’d done it even when I told them I had.

You have said in your letters that you are in no way traumatised by what I did to you, only by my failure to write. My fear, Marianne, is that the effects will make themselves known at a later date, perhaps when you meet someone else. Please keep this in mind, and if you do feel at any time that something is wrong, you must seek help.

I want you to stop writing to me now. For both our sakes please move on with your life and try to put what we shared behind you. You have so much to offer this world with your beauty and intellect, your passion and your love. Don’t let what happened between us hold you back.

David

As she finished reading Joely could feel