My Lies, Your Lies - Susan Lewis Page 0,111

and leave her … where?

Returning to the bundle she opened the next letter and saw that it was dated a month after the last one, so the baby would have been born by now.

My darling Marianne,

Thank you for bringing our beautiful son to meet me; and thank you for letting me choose his name. Are you sure you like James? Or Jamie if you prefer. As I said while you were here I didn’t want to name him after a relative or a favourite musician, I want his name to be completely his. I’m sorry I forgot to laugh when you suggested we call him Wolfgang in honour of Mozart, I was so overcome by him and by you that I seemed to lose a sense of everything else.

I didn’t think it was possible for you to be even more beautiful than I remembered, but you are. Perhaps it’s being a mother that has given you a deeper and more captivating radiance. I’m sure it is. I wish my family would agree to get to know you, they would understand then why I love you so much. They make me ashamed for the way they are turning their backs on their grandson – they are refusing to believe he is mine, but I know that he is. It is their loss and one I am sure they will come to regret.

All the time you were here you talked about our son’s little ways and how they made you think of me, and as I watched you laugh and pout and kiss him I kept thinking of how wrong it was for you to be somewhere like this. It’s no place for a baby, or for you, my darling girl. I know you must have heard the shouts and jeers, the awful things that were said and I need to protect you from that.

You have made me the happiest man in the world, don’t ever be in any doubt of that, but now I have to ask you not to come again. This isn’t how I want to get to know my son, nor is it how I want him to get to know me. We must create wholesome and beautiful memories for him untainted by images of his father in prison.

I know you are going to find this hard, Marianne, but I have decided for your sake, and for our son’s, not to send you any more visiting orders. Please understand my reasons, and please know that it is only because I love you so much that I am doing this.

If you continue to write I will, of course, write back and I will always cherish any news of our son, but I want you to think about this carefully. There is a wonderful and fascinating world out there for you to explore, one full of opportunities and hope, and so very different to the one I am in. I want to think of you embracing that world, taking all it has to offer and showing it all to James. I don’t want to picture you sitting at home writing to me, or taking long train journeys to this dreary part of our country to snatch an hour where we can.

Please think about this with your head and not your heart, Marianne, and try to put what’s best for Jamie first, and any time spent here will never be good for him. Or for you.

Tonight I shall fall asleep thinking of you in Paris and how happy we were there. I noticed you were wearing our ring when you came. Do you remember we chose it because the moonstone symbolizes love?

David

As Joely read through the next few letters it soon became apparent that Marianne had persuaded him to change his mind about visiting. In fact, she’d clearly made her way to Dartmouth with the baby at least once a month for the next several months, and seeing her and his son became, in David’s words, ‘the focus of my world, the reason to live’.

It surprised Joely to realize that her grandmother often drove Marianne all the way there and waited in the car for the single hour allowed for young Jamie to get to know his father. It was also her grandparents who’d paid for Jamie’s care while they worked and Marianne continued with her studies.

The letters were moving in so many ways, including their humour, which, though infrequent, was made all the more touching for its rarity. It mostly