The estate agent Margaret Clarke hung up and stared at her mobile for a few seconds as if the device itself were to blame.
For twentytwo years she had sold flats with arrears, with tenants on the lease, with outdated pipework and with a view of the local cemetery. Once she even had a parrot that cursed in three languages. But never before had she ever listed a cat as part of the encumbrance.
Alright, let me read the terms again, she muttered to herself, flipping through her notebook. Twobedroom, Baker Street, third floor, sixtyseven square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Bristol want a quick sale. The cat isnt being rehomed, they wont take it to a shelter, and they wont have it put down. The cat is included.
She sighed and added a line that would make any solicitors stomach turn: Price includes the cat. Negotiation possible.
The first viewing was scheduled for Saturday.
Margaret opened the door and let in the buyer a tall woman of about fiftyfive in a grey coat. She crossed the threshold and halted. The flat smelled exactly as a house lived in for years by a solitary old man does: lavender soap, dustcovered books, a hint of valerian.
Eleanor Whitmore, the woman announced without extending a hand, scanning the rooms. And wheres your bonus?
The cat lounged on the windowsill of the large room a massive, creamandginger beast. He stared at Eleanor without blinking, his gaze empty of fear or curiosity, only an endless, weary patience.
Thats how the abandoned look feels.
Eleanor walked through the flat in silence. She ran a finger down the spines of the books on the shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, their covers frayed to the point of crumbling. She peered into the kitchen, where a torn calendar was stuck on the seventeenth of January. On the sill sat three pots of withered geraniums and a bowl, pristine and empty, exactly where the left leg of a stool met the floor.
Does anyone feed him? she asked, not turning around.
The neighbour, Margaret replied. Mrs. Tamara Hughes from number36. She comes twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they do pay.
Eleanor returned to the living room. The cat had not moved his front paws tucked beneath him, eyes fixed on the courtyard. Outside, bare February poplars swayed in the wind, and a woman with a pram drifted between them.
Whats his name?
Marquis. Thats what the heirs called him.
Marquis, Eleanor repeated, expression unchanged.
The cat kept his head still.
Three days later she called.
Margaret, Ive thought it over. The area is nice, the tube is close. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. And it needs work the wallpaper, the linoleum. Id take it if you could shave off another three hundred pounds.
Ill see what I can do, Margaret said.
The heirs lowered the price by two hundred. Eleanor agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Eleanor returned to the flat twice more ruler in hand, notebook on her lap measuring walls, jotting notes, running calculations. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window on her second visit to check the radiator, he leapt down from the sill, padded over, and sat a halfmetre away. No closer.
Hello there, she said.
Marquis gave a slow blink, then turned his head away.
Mrs. Tamara Hughes turned out to be a small, wiry woman with startled eyes. She waited for Eleanor at the door on the day the handover was to be signed.
Are you the new owner? she asked.
Hopefully, Eleanor replied.
Ill tell you about Marquis, Tamara said. Nina Walsh, the previous owner, rescued him ten years ago. He was a scruffy thing sitting under the stairwell in November. She fed him, she gave him a home. He never left her side.
She paused, then lowered her voice.
When Nina collapsed from a stroke right in the kitchen, he was there, lying next to her head. The ambulance forced the door open, and he stayed put.
Eleanor stood in the doorway, a new set of three keys clutched in her hand two for the locks, one for the postbox that no one would ever check again.
Hes not a nuisance, Tamara continued. He doesnt scratch, he doesnt ruin furniture. He just wont come to you. Ive been feeding him for two months and he never once approached me. He eats when Im out. I place a bowl, he disappears behind the door. I come back its empty. But when Im there, not once.
Maybe hes scared, Eleanor suggested.
He isnt scared. Hes waiting. Every evening at six, he sits by the door and looks out. Nina used to return from her walks at six.
Eleanor moved in on Saturday. There wasnt much, but she was used to living compactly after twenty years as a cardiac nurse, a stint as a junior doctor, a redundancy, a shared flat in Hackney that made her knees ache and her spirit weary. Owning her own flat had been a dream for nine long years, a plan that finally stopped feeling like a fantasy and became a concrete goal.
Movers hauled in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis vanished. Eleanor eventually found him in the pantry, curled up behind the ironing board, ears flat, huge and motionless.
I get it, she whispered to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me too.
She placed a bowl where the old one had stood, by the left leg of the stool, and left the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
In the morning the bowl was empty.
A month later they lived side by side the same walls, but different worlds.
Eleanor rose at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, and went off to her night shift at the health centre on Union Street, not cardiology this time, but a general practice after a year of unemployment left her with few options.
Marquis only appeared after the lock clicked. She knew this because she left a long, greying strand of hair across the bowl each night. If the hair lay on the floor, she assumed he had eaten.
In the evenings she sank into the armchair by the window and read the books left on the shelf by Nina Chekhov, his pages filled with fine pencilled notes in the margins: exclamation points, single words yes, exactly, I too. Eleanor read those marginalia and felt something odd, not sadness but a strange recognition, as if a woman shed never met were thinking exactly as she did.
While she read, Marquis sat in the hallway, not in the room but at the front door, waiting each night at precisely six.
In late March Eleanor fell ill. The flu hit her like a hammer thirtynine degrees, a sore throat, every joint aching. She called in sick, swallowed a paracetamol, and crawled back to bed. She didnt have the strength to get up, not even to feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She slipped into a heavy, sticky dream where her head buzzed. She awoke to something pressing on her legs not heavy, just a warm, steady weight.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled into a loaf, eyes fixed on her, serious, unblinking. For the first time in a month he was not in the hallway, not behind the ironing board, not in the pantry. He was here.
Eleanor didnt move. She feared that if she shifted, he would disappear. She simply stared, and he stared back, a silence between them in which no words were needed because everything had already been said.
You already know this, she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears forward, rested his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
He didnt leave.
For three days she lay sick, and for three days he stayed at her feet, only getting up to the bowl when she mustered the strength to pour food. On the third day, when her fever fell and she was wrapped in a blanket on the kitchen floor with a mug of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, settled beside her, and began to purr.
Softly, with a rasp, as if he were relearning a voice hed forgotten.
Eleanor set her mug down, removed her glasses, and extended a hand, palm up, slowly.
Marquis sniffed her fingers, then nudged his forehead against her palm.
She wept. Not from sentimentality she never cried for that but because she suddenly grasped a simple, clear truth: she had bought a life that wasnt hers, with books that werent hers and a cat that wasnt hers, because there was no room for her own. And the cat had stayed in a life that wasnt his, with a woman who wasnt his, because there was nowhere else for him to go. Two extra burdens, two added clauses, two unwanted beings bundled into the price.
Now they sat together in the kitchen, fifteen cat years to her fiftysix human years, sharing a quiet warmth.
Marquis purred, and Eleanor rested her hand on his large, heavy head, thinking perhaps this was what they called destiny when you stop searching, stop asking, stop demanding, and it simply arrives.
By May Eleanor stripped the old brownflowered wallpaper that had made the flat seem darker than it was. She painted the walls a soft milkwhite. She left the linoleum for now money was still tight but it no longer mattered. The flat no longer felt foreign; she hadnt even noticed when the change took place.
Ninas books remained on the shelf. Eleanor added a handful of her own a dozen or so. Chekhov, still annotated, stayed in its place. Occasionally she opened it at night and read not the stories but the margins the stray yes, exactly, I too and she nodded.
The geraniums were tossed, dead beyond rescue. She planted fresh ones on the same sill where Marquis had first perched during the viewing. He now visited the sill less often, preferring the armchair beside her, or her lap when the evening stretched long and the book was good.
At six he no longer trotted to the door.
In June, Margaret Clarke, the realtor, happened upon Eleanor in the checkout line at the Sainsburys on Baker Street, a bag of cat food and a bottle of kefir in her hands.
Hows the flat? Margaret asked. Happy choice?
Absolutely not, Eleanor replied, shifting the cat food from one hand to the other.
You know, Margaret said, they should have kept the price up. They cut it for nothing.
She laughed, but Eleanor didnt.
At home, Marquis waited by the entryway, next to the slippers his new favourite spot. When the lock clicked, he lifted his head and gave a slow, single blink.
Thats how you greet the ones who have waited for you all their lives.
