The estate agent Margaret Sutherland hangs up the phone and stares at it for a few seconds as if it were to blame.
For twentytwo years she has been selling flats with arrears, with tenants on the lease, with outdated plumbing and even a view of a cemetery. Once she sold a flat that came with a parrot swearing in three languages. But she has never had to list a cat as part of the encumbrance.
Alright, Im reading the terms again, she says to herself, flipping through her notebook. Twobedroom, Baker Street, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Manchester want a quick sale. They wont take the cat, they wont surrender it to a shelter, and they wont have it put down. The cat stays.
She sighs and adds a line to the advert that would make any solicitors stomach turn: Price includes cat. Negotiable.
The first viewing is on Saturday.
Margaret opens the door and lets the buyer in a tall woman about fiftyfive in a grey coat. She steps over the threshold and stops. The flat smells exactly as a longterm solitary elderly tenants home does: lavender soap, old books, a hint of valerian.
Eleanor Whitby, the woman introduces herself without extending a hand. She scans the rooms. And wheres your bonus?
The cat perches on the windowsill in the large room a massive, gingerwhite beast. He fixes his gaze on Eleanor without blinking, his eyes showing no fear or curiosity, only a tired, endless patience.
Thats how those who have been abandoned look.
Eleanor walks through the flat in silence. She runs a fingertip over the spines of books on a shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, their covers softened by years of reading. She glances into the kitchen, where a tearoff calendar hangs on the wall, stopped at 17January. On the sill sit three pots of withered geraniums and a bowl. The bowl is clean, empty, sitting exactly where the left leg of the stool meets the floor.
Does anyone feed him? she asks without turning around.
The neighbour, Margaret replies. Tammy Irving from number36. She drops by twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they pay.
Eleanor returns to the living room. The cat hasnt moved still perched, front paws tucked, staring out at the street where bare February poplars sway and a woman with a pram walks by.
Whats his name?
Marquis. Thats what the heirs called him.
Marquis, Eleanor repeats, expressionless.
The cat does not turn his head.
Three days later she calls.
Margaret, Ive thought about it. The area is nice, the tube is close. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. And the place needs work new wallpaper, new flooring. Id take it if you knock off another three hundred pounds.
Ill try, Margaret says.
The heirs reduce the price by two hundred pounds. Eleanor agrees.
The paperwork takes three weeks. Eleanor returns to the flat twice more with a tape measure and a notebook. She measures walls, notes figures, does the maths. The cat watches. The second time she crouches by the window to check the radiator, he jumps down, pads over, and sits half a metre away. No closer.
Hello there, she says to him.
Marquis blinks once, slowly, then looks away.
On the day the contract is signed, Tammy Irving turns out to be a slight, nervouslooking woman with wide eyes. She waits for Eleanor at the door.
Are you the new owner? she asks.
I hope so.
Ill tell you about Marquis. Nina Lawson, the previous owner, took him in ten years ago. He was shivering on the doorstep in November, covered in mud. She fed him, gave him a home. He never left her side.
Tammy pauses, then lowers her voice.
When she collapsed, stroke in the kitchen, he was lying right beside her. The ambulance broke down the door, and he stayed at her head, never moving.
Eleanor stands in the doorway, clutching a fresh set of three keys two for the locks and one for the postbox that nobody checks anymore.
Hes not a troublemaker, Tammy continues. He doesnt scratch, he doesnt ruin furniture. He just wont come into my hands. Ive fed him for two months and he never once approached me. He eats when Im out, but as soon as I return and set a bowl down, he walks away. He never comes to me.
Maybe hes scared, Eleanor suggests.
Hes not scared. He waits. Every evening at six he sits by the door and watches. Nina always got home at six from her walk.
Eleanor moves in on Saturday. She has few possessions, accustomed to living compactly after twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then a junior doctor, then a redundancy, then a cramped flat in Burnt Oak that left her knees and spirit aching. Owning a home had been a dream for nine years, almost a plan rather than a fantasy.
The movers haul in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis disappears. Eleanor finds him later in the storage cupboard, wedged behind an ironing board, ears folded, massive and still.
I get it, she says to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me too.
She places a bowl at the same spot where the old one stood, by the left leg of the stool, and walks out, closing the kitchen door behind her.
In the morning the bowl is empty.
A month passes. They live parallel lives under the same roof, in different worlds.
Eleanor rises at six, drinks coffee in the kitchen, heads off to her shift. She lands a job at the community health centre on Trade Union Street, not cardiology, of course, but after a year of unemployment there were no choices.
Marquis appears in the kitchen only after the lock clicks. She knows this because she leaves a long, greying lock of hair across the bowl each night. When the hair lies on the floor, she knows hes eaten.
In the evenings she settles into an armchair by the window and reads the same books left by Nina Chekhov, annotated in tiny pencil notes on the margins: exclamation marks, single words like yes, exactly, and me. Eleanor reads those marginalia and feels a strange, notsad recognition, as if a woman she never met thought exactly as she does.
Marquis spends those moments in the hallway, not the bedroom, but at the front door. Every evening, precisely at six, he waits.
At the end of March Eleanor catches the flu. A fever spikes to thirtynine, her throat aches, every joint hurts. She calls in sick, pops a paracetamol, collapses into bed. She cant summon the strength to get up, let alone feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaks from the bedroom, sorry, I cant right now.
Silence.
She drifts into a heavy, sticky sleep, her head buzzing. She awakens to a pressure on her legs, a warm, steady weight.
Marquis is curled at the foot of the bed, rolled up like a loaf, staring at her without blinking, serious, attentive. For the first time in a month he isnt in the hallway or the cupboard or behind the ironing board. Hes here.
Eleanor stays still, fearing that any movement will send him away. She looks at him, he looks back, and between them hangs a wordless understanding that needs no voice because everything has already been said.
You already know this, she whispers.
Marquis presses his ears against his paws, drops his head and closes his eyes.
He doesnt leave.
Eleanor spends three days ill, and Marquis lies at her feet the whole time, only venturing to the bowl when she forces herself up to pour food. On the third day, when her fever finally drops and she sits on the kitchen bench wrapped in a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis hops onto the stool, sits beside her and purrs.
A low, husky rumble, as if hes relearning a voice.
Eleanor sets her mug down, removes her glasses, extends her hand slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffs her fingers, then nudges his forehead against her palm.
She weeps. Not from tenderness shes never the type to cry from sentiment but because she suddenly grasps a simple, clear truth: she bought a life that wasnt hers, with books that werent hers and a cat that wasnt hers, because there wasnt enough room in her own. And the cat remains in a life that isnt his, with a woman who isnt his, because there was nowhere else for him. Two encumbrances. Two addons. Two extra beings rolled into the price.
Now they sit together in the kitchen, a fifteenyearold cat and a fiftysixyearold woman, sharing warmth.
Marquis purrs while Eleanor rests her hand on his heavy head, thinking perhaps this is what it feels like when you dont expect, dont seek, dont ask, and it simply arrives.
By May Eleanor strips the old floral wallpaper the tiny brownflower pattern that made the flat look darker and paints the walls a warm, milky cream. She leaves the linoleum for now; she doesnt have enough money to do it all at once, but it no longer matters. The flat stops feeling foreign. She doesnt notice when that shift happens.
Ninas books stay on the shelf. Eleanor adds a handful of her own about a dozen or fifteen. Chekhov, still with his pencil notes, remains in its old spot. Occasionally she opens it in the evenings, not to read a story but to read the marginal yes, exactly, and me. She nods.
She tosses the dead geraniums as soon as she moves in theyre beyond rescue and later plants fresh ones on the same windowsill where Marquis first watched her. He now sits there less often, preferring the armchair beside her, or her lap when the night drags on and the book is good.
At six he no longer walks to the door.
In June Margaret Sutherland, the estate agent, bumps into Eleanor in the local Tesco on Baker Street. Eleanor is in line, holding a bag of cat food and a bottle of kefir.
So, hows the flat? Margaret asks. Happy with it?
No regrets, Eleanor replies.
And the cat?
She pauses, shifts the cat food from one hand to the other.
You know, Margaret, she says, they shouldve kept the price up. They lowered it for nothing.
Margaret laughs. Eleanor does not. Shes serious.
At home Marquis waits by the entryway, beside the shoes. Its his new spot. When the lock clicks, he lifts his head, blinks once, slowly.
Thats how you greet the ones youve been waiting for.
