I had shared a flat with Rob for a couple of years when we were both students together. We'd both left behind girlfriends, to whom we were quite attached, in our separate home towns a long way from the university and to whom we continued to write letters. This is many years ago, long before emails and mobile phones, a time when people still wrote letters to each other.

Rob always had trouble expressing himself in the ways he really wanted to with Cath, his girlfriend. He was that familiar tongue tied British male in matters of the heart and just could not bring himself to write a proper love letter to her. As a result his letters were full of the minutiae of everyday life at the university but said little about his feelings for her whilst away.

I on the other hand had no such inhibitions about my girlfriend Sue though now, some thirty years later, my older more cynical self would probably find my stuff a little cringeworthy. But in those days I could write pages of adoring prose about missing her, about the most intimate things we had done and I would like to do to her when we met and so on. And she would respond in like fashion so that our correspondence became like the chapters in our own personalised, very romantic and highly sexually charged serialised novel.

We were good mates so that Rob knew I liked to write these love letters and he knew that I knew that his letters to Cath were rather more prosaic. He wanted to write like me to her but couldn't bring himself to do it. As far as I recall, one day after a couple of drinks he asked me to write a proper love letter to Cath but of course appearing to be written by him.

"Wouldn't she notice something was odd if she received a letter in a totally alien style?" I queried.

"Well course she would " Rob confirmed, "but I'm hoping that she'd be so overcome with the emotion of it that she would not even dream that it wasn't me."

I dictated, he wrote and posted the letter.

Cath responded and Rob was so overjoyed that he showed me her letter. She was knocked out and Rob had scored big time. She couldn't believe that he could express himself that way and she replied in kind with similar powerful sentiments.

This continued for at least a year. I even met Cath a few times when she came to visit Rob. After the first time I asked him how it was with them when they met, given the letter situation and that she might be expecting something different from the old, duller, genuine Rob. I was very curious how he managed to keep up the image of the letters when confronted by the real thing but he said that there was never a problem, the letters actually improving their live relationship.

Eventually I lost touch with Rob after leaving university but someone who knew him told me that he had married Cath not long after graduating. When I heard that I wondered, naturally, if he'd ever told her the truth about the letters. I then thought little more about him for the next thirty odd years until recently.

A reunion was being organised for my university year. These events had been put on before but I never went. However this was the thirtieth from graduation, a nice round number, and so when somebody who was organising the occasion got hold of my number and phoned to invite me I decided to go.

It was pleasant enough, good to meet some old friends and acquaintances, but Rob was not there. I found someone whom I recalled to have been friendly with him in those days, had kept in touch with him, and enquired what had happened. Turns out that Rob had died just a few months earlier leaving his widow Cath. I got hold of her phone number and a couple of days later gave her a call to express my condolences, wondered if she remembered me after all these years. She did and invited me over to her house, a couple of hours drive away from where I now live.

I hardly recollected what she'd looked like, had met her only briefly for a few times, so it was little more than a stranger who answered the door. She was pleasant, quietly spoken and from the sound of it had had a good marriage with Rob over all those years. Not a very common thing these days, in my experience, to find a happy marriage lasting that long and I felt pleased that perhaps in a small way I had contributed to the fact that they had become married, though there was a trace of guilt in my mind at the deception of the letters.

I'd eventually, after doing various dead end jobs and struggling at it for some years, experienced a modest amount of success as a writer so that Rob and Cath had known about me through the publicity I had gained.

"I've read your first book" Cath told me, "enjoyed it very much but you know, certain bits of it reminded me of letters that Rob wrote me from university."

"Well yeah" I squirmed, "it maybe seems odd now but Rob missed you very much whilst we were away together there. He knew I liked to write, so occasionally he would read out parts of his love letters to you for me to hear, just to get my views on his style and so on. I hope you don't mind. I guess some of that stuck in my brain, quite subconsciously, so that when I wrote that book it came up as material for it. Writers are influenced by even small events in their lives, often without realising it I guess."

"No problem" she smiled "I'm glad that Rob was able to help you out in some small way with your career. He would have been pleased to know that, but I never mentioned it to him and although he read your book, he didn't realise it. I'd expect he'd forgotten the wonderful way he wrote to me all those years ago."

I thought of it before I left but decided to say nothing to Cath about the truth. And maybe, though she could not have known, Cath was correct in that Rob had helped me out in my career by my writing those letters for him in the first pace, giving me my earliest appreciative audience which perhaps encouraged me to continue. Perhaps.