The estate agent, Martha Sinclair, hung up the phone and stared at the handset for a few seconds, as if it were to blame.
In twentytwo years of business she had sold flats riddled with arrears, occupied by relatives on the title, with leaky pipes and views that looked out over a burial ground. Once she even had a parrot that swore in three languages. But she had never had to list a cat as a burden in the contract.
Alright, lets run through the terms again, she murmured to herself, flipping through her notebook. Twobedroom flat on Baker Street, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Bristol want a quick sale. They wont take the cat, wont surrender it to a shelter, and wont agree to euthanasia. The cat stays.
She sighed and added a line to the advertisement that would make any solicitors stomach turn: Cat included in the price. Negotiation welcomed.
The first viewing was scheduled for Saturday.
Martha unlocked the door and let the buyer in a tall woman of about fiftyfive, wrapped in a grey coat. She crossed the threshold and paused. The flat smelled exactly as a longterm solitary seniors home does: lavender soap, ageing paperbacks, a faint hint of valerian.
Mrs. Helen Parker, the woman introduced herself without extending a hand. And wheres that bonus of yours?
The cat perched on the windowsill of the spacious living room a massive, gingerwhite beast. He stared at Helen without blinking, his gaze free of fear or curiosity, weighted only with weary, endless patience.
Thats how those who have been abandoned look.
Helen walked around the flat in silence. She ran a finger over the spines of books on a shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, all read down to the frayed covers. She peered into the kitchen, where a tearoff calendar was stuck on the seventeenth of January. On the sill sat three pots of withered geraniums and a bowl, spotless and empty, perched exactly at the left leg of a stool.
Does anyone feed him? she asked, not turning around.
The neighbour, Martha replied. Maggie Thomson from number 36. She comes twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they do pay.
Helen returned to the living room. The cat hadnt moved still perched, front paws tucked, watching the yard where bare February poplars swayed in the wind, and a woman with a pram passed by.
Whats his name?
Marquis, the heirs had called him.
Marquis, Helen repeated, expressionless.
The cat didnt lift his head.
She called three days later.
Martha, Ive thought about it. The area is nice, the tube is close. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. The place needs work new wallpaper, linoleum. Id take it if you could knock off another three hundred pounds.
Ill see what I can do.
The heirs reduced the price by two hundred pounds. Helen agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Helen came back twice more armed with a tape measure and a notebook, measuring walls, jotting notes, doing the maths. Marquis observed. When she squatted by the window on her second visit to check the radiator, he leapt down from the sill, walked over and sat a foot away no closer.
Well, hello there, she said.
Marquis flicked his ears once, slowly, and turned away.
Maggie Thomson turned out to be a small, wiry woman with startled eyes. She waited for Helen at the front door on the day the handover was to be signed.
Youre the new owner?
I hope so.
Ill tell you about Marquis. She lowered her voice. Dorothy Clarke, the previous owner, was a saint. She rescued him ten years ago. Hed been shivering on the landing in November when she took him in and fed him. He never left her side.
Maggie paused, then whispered softer:
When she collapsed from a stroke right in the kitchen, he was lying beside her head. The ambulance broke in, but he stayed right there.
Helen stood in the doorway, a fresh set of three keys in her hand two for the locks, one for the post box, now empty of any letters.
Hes not a troublemaker, Maggie continued. He doesnt scratch, he doesnt damage furniture. The only problem is he wont come to you. I feed him for two months and he never approaches me. He eats when Im out. I put his bowl down, he darts to the door. I come back its empty. He never comes when Im there.
Maybe hes scared?
Not scared. Hes waiting. Every evening at six hell sit by the door, watching. Dorothy used to come back from her walks at six as well.
Helen moved in on Saturday. She owned very few possessions; compact living suited her. She had spent twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then a junior doctor, then faced redundancy, a cramped flat in Birchfield where her knees and spirit ached. Owning her own home had been a dream for so long it had become a plan. She had saved for nine years.
The movers hauled in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis disappeared. Helen found him later in the storage cupboard, curled behind an ironing board, ears flattened, huge and unmoving.
I get it, she said to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me too.
She placed a bowl at the left leg of the stool, exactly where the old one had been, and left the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
In the morning the bowl was empty.
A month passed. They lived parallel lives sharing walls but inhabiting different worlds.
Helen rose at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, and went on duty. She took a job at the community health centre on Union Street, not cardiology, but after a year of unemployment she had no choice.
Marquis only appeared in the kitchen after the lock clicked. She knew this because she always left a strand of her long, greying hair across the bowl. Each evening the hair lay on the floor, meaning he had eaten.
In the evenings she sank into the armchair by the window and read the books left on the shelf by Dorothy Chekhov, annotated in delicate pencil, exclamation marks and single words inked in the margins: yes, exactly, and I too. Helen read those notes and felt a strange, not sad, but familiar recognition, as if a woman shed never met thought exactly like her.
Marquis waited in the hallway, not in the living room, right by the front door, every evening at six, waiting.
At the end of March Helen fell ill. Flu hit her hard in one night thirtynine degrees, sore throat, every joint aching. She called in sick, took paracetamol and lay down. She had no strength to get up for food, nor to feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom. Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She slipped into a heavy, sticky sleep, her head buzzing. She awoke to a weight on her legs not heavy, just warm and alive.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled like a loaf, staring at her without blinking, solemn and attentive. For the first time in a month he was not in the hallway, not in the cupboard, not behind the ironing board. He was there.
Helen didnt move. She feared that if she did, he would slip away. She simply gazed at him, and he gazed back; between them was a silence that needed no words, because everything had already been said.
You already know this, she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears against his paws, lowered his head and closed his eyes.
He didnt leave.
She stayed ill for three days; he stayed at her feet for three days. He only left to the bowl when she finally forced herself up, poured food, and then returned. On the third day, when her fever broke and she sat on the kitchen floor wrapped in a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, sat beside her and began to purr.
Softly, with a rasp, as if he were learning the sound anew.
Helen set her mug down, lifted her glasses, and reached out slowly, palm upward.
Marquis sniffed her fingers, then nudged his head against her hand.
She wept. Not from sentimentality she never cried that way but because a simple, clear truth settled over her: 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 burdens, two addons, two extra beings folded into a price.
Now they sat together in the kitchen, a fifteenyearold cat and a fiftysixyearold woman, sharing warmth.
Marquis purred, and Helen rested her palm on his massive head, realizing perhaps this was what it meant to be waited for, not sought, not begged for, but simply arrived.
In May she stripped the old floral wallpaper the small brown blossoms that had made the flat feel darker and painted the walls a warm, milky cream. She kept the linoleum for now; the money wasnt there to replace everything at once, but it no longer mattered. The flat no longer felt foreign. She didnt even notice when the change happened.
Dorothys books remained on the shelf. Helen added a handful of her own about a dozen and a half titles. The Chekhov with pencil notes stayed in its place. Occasionally shed open it at night and read not the stories but the marginal whispers foreign yes, exactly, and I too and shed nod.
She tossed the dead geraniums after moving in; they were beyond rescue. Only later did she plant fresh ones on the same windowsill where Marquis had first perched. He now sat there less often, preferring the armchair next to her, or her lap when the evening stretched long and the book was good.
At six oclock he no longer shuffled to the door.
In June, Martha Sinclair, the estate agent, happened to see Helen in the checkout line at Tesco on Baker Street, clutching a bag of cat food and a bottle of kefir.
Hows the flat? Martha asked. Regretting anything?
No.
And the cat?
Helen paused, shifting the food from one hand to the other.
You know, Martha, she said, they lowered the price for nothing. They should have kept it higher.
Martha laughed. Helen didnt.
When she got home, Marquis waited by the shoes. It was his new spot. As the lock clicked, he lifted his head and gave a slow blink.
Thats how you greet the ones who have been waiting for you all along.
