June 3
I hung up the phone and stared at the screen a moment longer, as if the device itself might have been at fault.
For twentytwo years Ive been brokering flats in London, most of them with overdue mortgages, longstanding tenants, ageing plumbing, and a view of the local cemetery. Once there was a parrot that swore in three languages. But never before have I had to list a cat as a fixture.
Okay, lets run through the details again, I muttered to myself, flipping through my notepad. Twobed flat on Regents Park Road, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. Owner died in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Camden want a quick sale. They wont take the cat, wont surrender it to a shelter, and wont allow it to be put down. The cat comes with the property.
I sighed, then added a line to the advert that would make any solicitors stomach turn: **Price includes the cat. Offers welcome.**
The first viewing was scheduled for Saturday.
I opened the door and let in the buyer a tall woman, about fiftyfive, wrapped in a grey coat. She stepped over the threshold and paused. The flat smelled exactly as an old bachelors flat does: lavender soap, musty books, a faint hint of valerian.
Ethel Hartley, she announced without extending a hand, scanning the rooms. And wheres this bonus?
The cat perched on the windowsill of the spacious living room a massive, gingerwhite beast. He stared at Ethel without blinking, his gaze neither fearful nor curious, simply exhausted patience.
Thats the look you get from a creature thats been abandoned time and again.
Ethel walked around in silence, trailing a finger over the spines of wellworn books on the shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, their covers softened by years of handling. In the kitchen hung a torn calendar stopped on 17January. On the sill sat three pots of wilted geraniums and a clean, empty bowl perched beside the left leg of a stool.
Does anyone feed him? she asked, not turning around.
The neighbour does, I replied. Tamara Ilyich from flat 36 comes twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they do pay.
Ethel returned to the living room. The cat hadnt moved still perched, front paws tucked, looking out at the courtyard where bare February poplars swayed and a woman with a pram trudged past.
Whats his name? she asked.
Marquis, the heirs had decided.
Marquis, Ethel repeated flatly. The cat didnt turn his head.
She called three days later.
David, Ive thought it over. The areas good, the tubes close, but the price is still above market even with the extra. The place needs work new wallpaper, linoleum. Id take it if you knock off another £300.
Ill see what I can do, I said.
The heirs reduced the price by £200; Ethel accepted.
The paperwork took three weeks. Ethel returned twice more armed with a tape measure and a notebook, scribbling dimensions, calculating. Marquis watched from his perch. The second time she crouched by the window to check the radiator, the cat leapt down, trotted a halfmetre over, and sat beside her.
Hello there, she whispered.
Marquis flicked his eyes once, slowly, and looked away.
On the day of signing, Tamara Ilyich turned out to be a frail, nervous woman with darting eyes. She waited for Ethel at the door.
Are you the new owner? she asked.
I hope so.
Ill tell you about Marquis. The previous owner, Nina Vasily, a retired nurse, rescued him ten years ago. Hed been shivering on the stairwell in November. She fed him, loved him. He never left her side.
Tamaras voice softened.
When Nina fell, she suffered a stroke right in the kitchen. Marquis lay at her head, didnt move even when the ambulance forced the door open.
Ethel stood in the doorway holding a set of three new keys two for the locks, one for the postbox that now gathered dust.
Hes harmless, Tamara continued. He doesnt scratch, doesnt damage furniture. He just wont come near anyone. I feed him for two months and he never approaches. He eats when I leave, drops the bowl by the door, then its empty when I return. He only ever comes when Im not there.
Maybe hes scared.
Not scared. Hes waiting. Every evening, around six, he sits by the door and watches. Nina used to return from her walks at six.
Ethel moved in on Saturday, bringing only a few belongings shed spent nine years as a cardiac nurse, then a junior doctor, then faced redundancy, a cramped flat in Bexley where her knees ached, and a dream of owning a home that had become more a plan than a hope.
The movers shoved in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of china. Marquis disappeared. Ethel found him later in the pantry, curled behind an ironing board, ears flattened, huge and motionless.
I get it, she said softly. Its hard for you. Its hard for me.
She placed a bowl at the same spot by the stools left leg and left the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
By morning the bowl was empty.
A month passed. They lived side byby same walls, different worlds.
Ethel rose at six, brewed coffee, headed off to her shift at the community health centre on Union Street not cardiology any more, but the best she could find after a year of unemployment.
Marquis only appeared after she turned the lock. She knew because she left a long, silvering strand of hair across the bowl each night; if it was there in the morning, hed eaten.
In the evenings she settled into the armchair by the window, reading the same books Nina had left. Chekhovs pages were littered with tiny pencil notes in the margins exclamation points, single words: yes, exactly, and me. Reading them, Ethel felt a strange recognition, as if a woman shed never met was thinking aloud in her own voice.
Marquis spent those evenings in the hallway, not the living room, not the pantry, but right by the front door, waiting exactly at six.
At the end of March Ethel fell ill. A flu knocked her out in a single night fever of thirtynine, sore throat, aching joints. She called in, took paracetamol, and lay down. Rising to eat or to feed the cat was beyond her.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She drifted into a heavy, buzzing sleep. When she awoke, something pressed against her legs. Not heavy, just warm, alive.
Marquis lay curled at the foot of the bed, eyes open, serious, attentive. For the first time in a month he wasnt in the hallway or the pantry or behind the ironing board he was right there.
Ethel didnt move, fearing that any motion would send him away. She stared at him; he stared back, a wordless communion filling the space between them.
You already know, she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears against his paws, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.
He stayed.
For three days she was ill; for three days Marquis kept vigil at her feet, only leaving to the bowl when she forced herself to fill it. On the third day, when her temperature finally fell and she curled up in the kitchen with a bowl of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, settled beside her, and began to purr a low, hoarse rumble, as if hed forgotten how to purr and was relearning it.
Ethel set down her mug, lifted her glasses, and reached out slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingers, nudged his forehead into her hand.
She wept. Not from sentimentality she never cried over tender moments but because a simple, stark truth settled in her chest: she had bought a life that wasnt hers, with strangers books and a strangers cat, because her own life felt empty. And the cat had remained in a life that wasnt his, because there was nowhere else for him to go. Two encumbrances, two extras, two beings tacked onto a price.
Now they sat together in the kitchen a cat approaching fifteen cat years, and a woman of fiftysix human years sharing warmth.
Marquiss purrs filled the room while Ethel rested her hand on his massive head, realizing that sometimes you dont seek, you dont ask, you dont expect and it simply arrives.
By May she stripped the old floral wallpaper, the drab brown pattern that made the flat look darker than it was, and painted the walls a warm, milky cream. She left the linoleum for now money was still tight but the apartment no longer felt foreign. She hadnt even noticed the exact moment it shifted.
Ninas books stayed on the shelf. Ethel added a handful of her own about a dozen titles. Chekhov remained where it always had, marginalia still there. Occasionally she opened it at night, reading not the stories but the scribbled notes: foreign yes, exactly, and me. She nodded in agreement.
She threw away the dead geraniums shortly after moving in, and finally planted fresh ones on the same windowsill where Marquis had first surveyed the view. He still perched there now and then, but more often he chose the armchair beside her, or her lap on long evenings when a good book kept her company.
He stopped visiting the door at six.
In June, I ran into Ethel at the local Tesco on Regents Park Road. She was in line, a bag of cat food and a bottle of kefir in her hands.
Hows the flat? I asked. Happy with the purchase?
She shrugged. No regrets.
And the cat?
She paused, shifting the catfood bag from one hand to the other.
You know, David, she said, they shouldve kept the price higher. We overdiscounted because of the cat.
I laughed. She didnt.
When I got home, Marquis was waiting by the shoes, his new favourite spot. The moment the lock clicked, he lifted his head, blinked once, slowly.
Thats how you greet someone youve been waiting for.
*Lesson*: When life adds unexpected burdens to a bargain, you may discover that those very burdens become the very things that make a house feel like a home.
