Mary Smith put down the phone and stared at it for a few seconds as if it were the one at fault.
In twenty-two years in the business, she had sold flats with unpaid debts, with relatives still registered on the property, with leaking pipes, and with views overlooking a cemetery. Once, there was a parrot that swore in three languages. But to include a cat in the contract as an encumbrance – that had never happened before.
“Right, let me repeat the terms,” she said to herself, flipping through her notebook. “Two-bedroom flat on Baker Street, third floor, sixty-two square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs are a son and a daughter living in Manchester. They want a quick sale. They won’t take the cat, won’t send it to a shelter, and won’t have it put down. The cat comes with the flat.”
She sighed and added a line to the listing that would make any lawyer cringe: “Cat included in the price. Offers considered.”
The first viewing was on a Saturday.
Mary opened the door and let in a potential buyer – a tall woman in her mid-fifties wearing a grey coat. She stepped over the threshold and stopped. The flat smelled the way homes do after a solitary elderly person has lived in them for years: lavender soap, old books, a faint hint of valerian.
“Gail Peterson,” the woman said, not offering her hand. She looked around. “And where is this… bonus of yours?”
The cat was sitting on the windowsill in the living room – huge, ginger-and-white. He stared at Gail without blinking, and there was no fear or curiosity in his gaze. Only a weary, endless patience.
That is the look of someone who has been abandoned before.
Gail walked through the flat in silence. She ran her finger along the spines of the books on the shelf – Austen, Dickens, Hardy, all read so often the covers were soft and worn. She glanced into the kitchen, where a tear-off calendar hung on the wall, stopped on the seventeenth of January. On the windowsill stood three pots of dead geraniums. And a bowl. Clean, empty, placed exactly in its spot – by the left leg of the stool.
“Is anyone feeding him?” she asked without turning around.
“The neighbour,” Mary said. “Tamara Jenkins from number thirty-six. She comes twice a day. The heirs pay her for it. Not much, but they do pay.”
Gail went back to the living room. The cat hadn’t moved – he sat on the windowsill with his front paws tucked under him, looking out into the courtyard. Outside, bare February poplars swayed in the wind, and a woman with a pushchair wandered between them.
“What’s his name?”
“Marquis. That’s what the heirs told me.”
“Marquis,” Gail repeated flatly.
The cat didn’t turn his head.
She called three days later.
“Mary, I’ve been thinking. The area is good, close to the Tube. But the price is still above market, even with… the extra. And the place needs work – those wallpapers, the lino. I’ll take it if you knock off another three thousand.”
“I’ll try to talk to them.”
The heirs agreed to knock off two thousand. Gail accepted.
The paperwork took three weeks. Gail came to the flat twice more – with a tape measure and a notebook. She measured the walls, jotted things down, made plans. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window the second time to check the radiator, he jumped off the windowsill, walked over, and sat down half a metre away. No closer.
“Well, hello,” she said to him.
Marquis blinked. Once, slowly. Then he turned away.
Tamara Jenkins from number thirty-six turned out to be a small, wiry woman with frightened eyes. She was waiting for Gail by the door on the day of the handover.
“Are you the new owner?”
“I hope so.”
“Let me tell you about Marquis. Nina Davis, the previous owner – God rest her soul – she found him ten years ago. He was sitting by the entrance in November, all torn up. She nursed him back to health, fattened him up. He never left her side after that.”
Tamara paused, then added more quietly: “When she fell – a stroke, right in the kitchen – he lay down next to her. The ambulance came, they broke the door open, and he was there by her head. He wouldn’t leave.”
Gail listened, standing in the doorway, holding the set of new keys. Three keys. Two for the locks. One for the mailbox that no one would check anymore.
“He’s not mean,” Tamara went on. “He doesn’t scratch or damage the furniture. It’s just… he won’t let you touch him. I’ve been feeding him for two months, and he’s never come near me. He eats when I leave the room. I put the bowl down and step out. When I come back, it’s empty. But never while I’m there.”
“Maybe he’s scared.”
“He’s not scared. He’s waiting. He sits by the door every evening around six. Nina used to come back from her walk at six.”
Gail moved in on a Saturday. She didn’t have much – she was used to living compactly. Twenty years as a nurse in cardiology, then a junior doctor’s position, then redundancy, downsizing, a rented room in Brixton that made her knees and her soul ache. A place of her own had been a dream so old it had almost stopped being a dream and turned into just a plan. She had been saving for nine years.
The removal men brought in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of dishes. Marquis disappeared. Gail found him in the storage cupboard – he had squeezed behind the ironing board and sat there, ears flat, huge and motionless.
“I understand,” she said to him. “It’s hard for you. It’s hard for me too.”
She put his bowl by 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 side by side – within the same walls but in different worlds.
Gail got up at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, and left for her shift. She had found a job at a GP surgery on Oxford Street – not cardiology, of course, but after a year of unemployment, you don’t get to pick.
Marquis would only appear in the kitchen after the lock clicked shut. Gail knew that because she left a strand of her long, greying hair across the bowl every morning. Each evening, the hair was on the floor. So he was eating.
In the evenings, she sat in the armchair by the window and read – the same books from the shelf that had belonged to Nina Davis. Austen was full of pencil markings: in a small, neat hand, exclamation points in the margins, sometimes a single word: “yes,” “exactly,” “me too.” Gail read those notes and felt a strange sensation – not sadness, no. Recognition. As if the woman she had never met thought the same way she did.
Marquis, meanwhile, sat in the hallway. Not in the room – in the hallway. By the front door. Every evening, at exactly six o’clock. Waiting.
At the end of March, Gail fell ill. The flu hit her overnight – a temperature of thirty-nine, sore throat, aches in every joint. She called in sick, took paracetamol, and went to bed. She didn’t have the strength to get up and eat. Or to get up and feed the cat.
“Marquis,” she called from the bedroom in a raspy voice. “I’m sorry. I can’t right now.”
Silence.
She drifted into a heavy, sticky sleep, her head throbbing. She woke because something was pressing on her legs. Not hard. Just a weight – warm, steady, alive.
Marquis was lying at the foot of the bed. Curled into a ball, looking at her without blinking – serious, 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 here.
Gail didn’t move. She was afraid that if she did, he would leave. She just looked at him, and he looked at her, and between them was that silence where words aren’t needed because everything has already been said.
“You already know that,” she whispered.
Marquis flattened his ears, rested his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
He did not leave.
For three days she was ill, and for three days he lay at her feet. He only got up for his bowl – she forced herself to get up, pour his food, and then he returned. On the third day, when her temperature dropped and Gail was sitting in the kitchen wrapped in a blanket with a cup of broth, Marquis jumped onto the stool. He sat beside her. And began to purr.
Quietly, with a slight rasp, as if he had forgotten how and was now remembering.
Gail put down her cup. Took off her glasses. Slowly, palm up, she reached out her hand.
Marquis sniffed her fingers. Then he pressed his forehead into her palm.
She was crying. Not from sentiment – she was not the sort of person who cried from sentiment. She was crying because she had suddenly understood something simple and clear: she had bought someone else’s life – someone else’s books and someone else’s cat – because her own life hadn’t been enough. And he had stayed in someone else’s life with a stranger because he had nowhere else to go. Two encumbrances. Two extras. Two unwanted things that had been included in the price.
And now they sat together in the kitchen, one fifteen in cat years, the other fifty-six in human years, and both of them felt warm.
Marquis purred, and Gail kept her hand on his big, heavy head, thinking that maybe this was it – the thing you don’t wait for, don’t search for, don’t ask for. And it comes anyway.
By May, Gail had stripped off the old wallpaper – the one with the tiny brown flowers that made the flat seem darker than it was. She painted the walls a warm milky colour. The lino stayed for now – she couldn’t afford to do everything at once – but that no longer mattered. The flat had stopped feeling like someone else’s. She couldn’t even say exactly when that had happened.
Nina Davis’s books remained on the shelf. Gail added her own – a few, maybe fifteen. Austen with its pencil markings stayed in its old place. Sometimes in the evenings she would open it and read not the story, but the margins – the “yes,” “exactly,” “me too” of a stranger. And she would nod.
She had thrown out the geraniums as soon as she moved in – dead beyond saving. Only now did she plant new ones. She put them on the same windowsill where Marquis had sat on the first day of the viewing. He sat there less often now. More often he was on the armchair beside her. Or on her lap, if the evening was long and the book was good.
He no longer went to the door at six.
In June, Mary Smith, the estate agent, ran into her at the Tesco on Baker Street. Gail was standing in the queue with a bag of cat food and a carton of milk.
“How’s the flat?” Mary asked. “Any regrets?”
“No.”
“And the cat?”
Gail was quiet for a moment. She shifted the cat food from one hand to the other.
“You know, Mary,” she said, “they should have raised the price, not lowered it.”
Mary laughed. Gail did not. She wasn’t joking.
At home, Marquis was waiting for her. He sat in the hallway, by her slippers. That was his new spot. And when the lock clicked, he lifted his head and blinked once, slowly.
That is how you greet someone you have been waiting for.
