“You lied to me," I said. “Over all those years. Why?”
She said nothing, concentrating on the work in hand. I could see why: cats can be tricky customers when they’re annoyed, and they’re seldom more annoyed than when they’re being de-flead. Hers was making a determined and squirmy bid for freedom. Still, cat or no cat, I wanted an answer. I waited.
“Well?” I said, after an interval. But still no reply: only the silence of focus. I persisted. “You could – should - have told me the truth a long time ago,” I said. “Years. Decades. Why didn’t you? What did you gain by keeping it from me?“
Suddenly she pounced, like a hunter spearing a fish, and another tiny victim of the genus Ctenocephalides felis re-joined its maker. At last, she looked up.
“I had no choice,” she said simply, a shrug in her voice. “The truth would have hurt you too much.” She applied some powder to her feline captive’s tail. It smelled like something you could use in trench warfare.
“That’s not the point,” I said. “At least I’d have known. Instead, I spent all those years deluding myself, hoping, wondering - and I find out only now. Now! When I’m in my 40s? Don’t you think that that hurts, too? To learn something like this after so long? Jesus! You’re supposed to be my friend!”
“Friend?” She said, and I thought I could hear a sneer in her voice. “You want to know what a friend is? A friend is someone who stabs you from the front. Wilde. His point was that, either way, you get stabbed. You’ve just been stabbed.”
It was my turn to be quiet for a moment. I watched, as she extended her scorched-earth policy to the cat’s belly.
“Look,” I said, finally. I felt tired. Tired of all the lies. “I didn’t come here to listen to a treatise on bloody ethical relativism. Just to know why you hid something so…so fundamental from me for so long. How you could be so cruel. You must have known I’d learn the truth one day.”
At last, she released her bundle of now flealess furriness. “The truth is a fruit which can only be picked when it is very ripe.“ she said, with a sort of gnomic finality.
Suddenly, I knew I was beaten. This would get us nowhere. I knew I’d have to let the matter rest: leave it behind me. I’d just have to hope that time would dull the pain; mend the hole punched in my heart by the cruise missile of Truth. And it wasn’t just the pain, the almost crippling sense of loss, that time would have to heal: it was the overwhelming feeling of waste, too - senseless waste, year in, year out. Christ! All that care, all that worry about doing the right thing for Him. All pointless. But I had to let it go.
Yet a couple of things still puzzled me.
“So,” I said, as she stood, post cat-release, picking clementine-coloured hairs from her pinny. “Who did eat all the milk and cookies we left by the tree, then?”
“Your father,” she said. “Who else?”
She was right. Who else? Everything’s obvious, when you know.
“And the stockings? I suppose it was you who filled them.” It was a guess, but – I suspected - an accurate one.
She said nothing. But her smile was confirmation enough.
“Thanks,” I said, though my tone was bitter.
“A pleasure, dear” she said, heading kettlewards. “After all, what are mothers for? Tea?”