23rd October 2023
Dear Jemma
You won’t ever read this letter. Very soon, I hope, I’m going to do to you what you planned to do to me, but chickened out of doing.
I won’t be chickening out. I’ll be going through with it – or someone acting on my behalf will – and you will deserve it.
In due course, you’ll be a body, not a person any more, and your father and I will bury you in the grounds of Devey House with a great fanfare.
Your wake will, of course, be the party to end all parties.
And this letter will be buried alongside you, because that’s the closest I can get to what I want.
What I’d ideally like is for you to be able to read this before you die, but that can’t happen.
No, that’s wrong. What I’d like even more, but know is impossible, is for you to see the light in time to save yourself.
(A woman can dream, can’t she?) If only you could promise to change and start loving me …
God, you’ve no idea how often that passionate wish has passed through my mind over the years.
I’m not perfect, Jemma, but I did want to be your mum.
I was the only mum you had, and you rejected me over and over again.
I loved you and was ready to carry on loving you forever.
You were the one who ruined that with your endless, ongoing, year-after-year refusal to show me any affection or loyalty whatsoever.
You did one good thing, though: you found Ollie and brought him to our home, our family.
Then you stupidly ditched him in favour of Useless Paddy, but I forgave you for that – because I saw a different way forward.
Ollie and I would sort it all out, I thought, and you’d love it once you had what I knew you truly wanted deep down.
And once we were all together and everything was as it was supposed to be, you’d start to love me then – I was sure of it.
Why? Because Ollie did. That’s right, Jemm – Ollie really loved me, like the best possible son loves his mother.
He’d have persuaded you round to his point of view about me, given the chance.
Remember the brilliant time we had in the Cotswolds, Christmas 2005?
It really crushed me when you spoke so harshly about Ollie afterwards – him ringing to say we might be late when there was no need – because we were all so happy that week, you as much as anyone.
Later, I realised why you were so determined to trash Ollie in the immediate aftermath of you dumping him: you were trying to brainwash yourself, weren’t you?
You were already starting to worry you’d made the wrong choice, and it was you that needed propagandising as much as me.
Because you loved Ollie, and I did too, and that’s what would have made you love me too, eventually.
Except I messed it all up. I lied to Ollie about the DNA test, told him Lottie was his when I knew she was Paddy’s.
I shouldn’t have done any of that. I should have been completely honest with him and trusted him.
Most of all, I should never have assumed he’d be willing to kill Paddy.
It’s to his credit that he wasn’t, and I saw with blinding clarity, as I lay bleeding on my kitchen floor, that I should never have been willing to take it that far either.
I did everything I could to put right the catastrophic mistakes I’d made: wrote Ollie a long letter of apology, told the police I’d made a mistake when I’d named him, assured them it wasn’t him.
They would have charged him with attempted murder, which would have been too stupid for me to bear.
The whole awful mess had only happened because Ollie was so against the plan I’d made for him to kill Paddy.
What he did to me was a protest against murder – as I said to DC Brodigan, it was the opposite of murder.
(I had some fun, winding the police up with my cryptic comments.)
I cannot tell you how much I missed Ollie, once he stopped coming to the house.
I felt exactly like a mother who had lost her beloved son.
You can’t get over a loss like that. Many years later, when I became a Wordle fan, I risked making contact with him again, hoping enough time had passed.
I was delighted when he sent me his Wordle result in response to me sending him mine.
That became our new relationship. It wasn’t everything I wanted, but it felt like enough – for the time being at least. I’m a patient woman, Jemma.
And I never, ever stop believing I can get what I want.
(Oh – once I sent my Wordle score to you by mistake – you might remember. As I said, I’m not perfect.)
As compensation for the anguish I’d caused him, I changed my will to leave Ollie (who knew nothing about it – I decided it could be a nice surprise for him after my death) a lot of money – money I’d previously allocated to you and Paddy.
But you didn’t deserve it, Jemm, which meant that you certainly didn’t deserve Ollie.
In fact, that was the rather brilliant way I reconciled myself, quite genuinely, to the catastrophic boyfriend choice you made in 2006.
Here’s what I told myself: if Jemma was worthy of Ollie, she wouldn’t have rejected him.
Therefore she isn’t – so maybe she and Paddy actually deserve each other.
Maybe everything is exactly as it should be.
And Jemma will need to work on herself and improve her character and suffer rather a lot, probably, in order to learn her lesson.
Then, once she’s deserving, that’s when she and Ollie will be reunited.
I had it all worked out neatly, to my own satisfaction.
I wasn’t prepared for how devastated I’d feel when you told me about your one-night encounter with Ollie in 2010.
Remember how you cried on my shoulder, telling me you’d made a terrible mistake and that Ollie had been ‘the One’ all along?
But you couldn’t leave him because you were pregnant with Paddy’s child?
The injustice, the waste of it, combined with the shock – it just tore me apart.
The lost years! And now everything was just so utterly, tragically ruined!
That was how I felt at first, and it was unbearable.
Very soon afterwards, I rallied, of course, and made a much better plan.
Here is some invaluable life advice, Jemm (not that you’ll need it, as you’ll soon be dead): there is always a much better plan than sitting around feeling tragic and moping.
You just have to find it. If it doesn’t exist already, you have to make it.
That’s what I did, though, as I say, I got a few elements disastrously wrong.
I like to think I was, nevertheless, much less wrong and foolish than you were.
You stubbornly made yourself immune to learning any lessons at all, didn’t you?
You knew you’d made a mistake picking Paddy over Ollie, but you could see he and Lottie loved each other – playing happily together for hours, silly games of the sort that only entertain children and fools, people with no sense of adult responsibility.
You decided – a grave error on your part – that you owed it to Lottie to stay and suffer in your marriage to Paddy.
That was stupid, Jemma. Moronic. No child is ever better off with a parent who is visibly unhappy.
I’ll tell you something I’ve never told another living soul or even admitted to myself until now: your stubborn resistance, year after year, to accepting the inevitable, leaving Paddy, choosing Ollie, finally …
It all suited me rather well. As time went on, I started to wonder if I almost preferred having Ollie all to myself, as he and I planned and schemed and even as we exchanged Wordle results in secret.
I didn’t have to share his attention with you.
It was me and him, and no ungrateful Jemma around to spoil anything or take up his time and energy.
Just me and Ollie: bliss. And, of course, we also had the fantasy of our future happy family life, in which you were very much involved …
I discovered that I preferred my imagining of it to the reality.
The make-believe version allowed me to spend so much more time with Ollie than you ever would have, if you and he had got back together.
I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know, Jemma, for what I now know I have to do. Murder should never leap out of the list of available options as being the best way forward. Quite the opposite.
I love you. You should have let me.
Marianne xxx