The realtor, Margaret Clarke, hung up the phone and stared at the receiver for a few seconds as if it were to blame for everything.
For twentytwo years she had been selling flats that came with overdue mortgages, registered relatives, ageing plumbing and, on occasion, a view of the local cemetery. Once shed even shown a flat with a parrot that swore in three languages. But never before had she ever had to list a cat as part of the encumbrance.
Right, lets run through the terms again, she muttered 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 allow it to be put down. The cat stays.
She sighed and added a line to the advertisement that would have made any solicitor recoil: Price includes cat. Negotiation welcome.
The first viewing was scheduled for a Saturday.
Margaret opened the door and let in the prospective buyer a tall woman of about fiftyfive, wrapped in a grey coat. She stepped over the threshold and halted. The flat smelled exactly as a house lived in by a solitary, elderly person does: lavender soap, old books, a faint hint of valerian.
Eleanor Peters, the woman said, without extending a hand. She looked around. And wheres this bonus you mentioned?
The cat sat on the windowsill of the spacious living room a massive, gingerwhite beast. He stared at Eleanor without blinking; there was no fear, no curiosity in his gaze, only a weary, endless patience.
Thats how one looks when youve been abandoned so often that you stop expecting anyone to notice.
Eleanor walked through the flat in silence. She ran a finger over the spines of books on a shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, all wellworn to the point of paperthin covers. She peeked into the kitchen, where a torn calendar was pinned to the wall, stuck on the seventeenth of January. On the sill were three pots of wilted geraniums and a bowl. It was clean, empty, and exactly where it had always sat at the left leg of a small stool.
Does anyone feed him? she asked, not turning around.
The neighbour, Margaret replied. Mrs. Doris Miller from number 36. 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 still perched on the sill, front paws tucked beneath him, gazing out at the courtyard where bare February poplars swayed in the wind and a woman with a pram shuffled by.
Whats his name? she asked.
Marquis, the heirs had said.
Marquis, Eleanor repeated, expression unchanged.
The cat did not lift his head.
She called three days later.
Margaret, Ive thought it over. 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 shave off another three hundred pounds.
Ill see what I can do, Margaret said.
The heirs knocked two hundred off. Eleanor agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Eleanor came back twice more armed with a tape measure and a notebook. She measured walls, jotted notes, ran the numbers. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window the second time to check the radiator, the cat leapt down, trotted over, and settled a halfmetre away, no closer.
Well, hello there, she said softly.
Marquis flicked his eyes once, slowly, then turned away.
Mrs. Doris turned out to be a slight, frail 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.
I hope so, Eleanor replied.
Ill tell you about Marquis, Doris began. Mrs. Agnes, the previous owner, was a saint. Ten years ago she rescued him, the very night she found him shivering on the landing, soaked through. She fed him, and he never left her side.
Doris lowered her voice.
When she fell, a stroke took her right in the kitchen, Marquis was lying beside her head. The ambulance broke down the door and found him there, never moving.
Eleanor stood in the doorway, a bundle of fresh keys in her hands three keys, two for the locks, one for the mailbox that no one would ever open again.
Hes not harmful, Doris continued. He doesnt scratch, he doesnt damage furniture. He just wont come near anyone. Ive been feeding him for two months and he never once approached me. He eats when I leave, I set a bowl down and the door slams, I return its empty. But when Im there, not a whisker moves.
Maybe hes scared, Eleanor suggested.
No, hes waiting. Every evening at six he sits by the door and watches. Mrs. Agnes always came back from her walks at six.
Eleanor moved in on a Saturday. She had few possessions; she was used to compact living after twenty years as a cardiac nurse, a stint as a junior doctor, a redundancy, a cramped flat in Bermondsey that had taken a toll on her knees and her spirit. Owning her own home had long been a dream, so long that it had stopped feeling like a dream and simply become a plan. It had taken nine years of scrimping to save enough.
The movers lugged in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis vanished. Eleanor found him later in the storage cupboard, tucked behind a drying rack, ears flattened, huge and motionless.
I understand, she whispered 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 stood, and left the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
In the morning the bowl was empty.
A month passed. They lived side by side in the same walls but in different worlds.
Eleanor rose at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, and went off to her night shift. She had taken a post at the community health centre on Union Street not cardiology, but something, after a year of unemployment left her no choice.
Marquis only appeared in the kitchen after the lock clicked. Eleanor knew this because she left a long, greying hair strand across the bowl each night. When the strand lay on the floor, she knew he had eaten.
In the evenings she would settle into the armchair by the window and read the same books that had belonged to Mrs. Agnes. Chekhovs volume was covered in pencil notes tiny, precise scrawls in the margins: exclamation points, a solitary yes, exactly, and me. Reading those marginal comments gave Eleanor a strange feeling, not grief but recognition, as if a woman she had never met thought exactly as she did.
Meanwhile Marquis sat in the hallway, not in the living room, but by the front door. Every evening, precisely at six, he waited.
At the end of March Eleanor fell ill. A night of flu left her with a fever of thirtynine, a sore throat, and aching joints. She called in sick, took some paracetamol and lay down. She was too weak to get up, even to feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She drifted into a heavy, sticky sleep, the kind that buzzes in the ears. She awoke to a weight pressing on her feet not heavy, just warm and steady.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled like a bun, staring at her without blinking, serious and attentive. For the first time in a month he was not in the hallway, not in the cupboard, not behind the drying rack. He was there.
Eleanor did not stir. She feared that any movement would send him back to the hallway. She simply looked at him, and he looked back, and between them there was a silence where words were unnecessary because everything had already been said.
You already know this, she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears against his paws, lowered his head onto his forelegs, and closed his eyes.
He did not leave.
She was ill for three days, and for three days he lay at her feet. He only left to go to his bowl when she finally forced herself up, poured some food, and he shuffled back. On the third day, when her fever broke and she sat at the kitchen table wrapped in a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, sat beside her and began to purr.
It was a soft, hoarse rumble, as if he were relearning the sound.
Eleanor set her mug down, removed her spectacles, and reached out slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingers, then nudged his forehead against her hand.
She wept. Not from sentimentality she never wept at sweet things but because she finally grasped a simple, clear truth: she had bought anothers life, anothers books, anothers cat, because she had none of her own. And the cat had stayed in anothers world with another woman, because there was nowhere else for him. Two encumbrances, two addons, two extra beings bundled into one price.
Now they sat together in the kitchen, a cat of fifteen feline years and a woman of fiftysix human years, both sharing the same warmth.
Marquis purred while Eleanor rested her palm on his massive, heavy head, and she thought perhaps this was what it meant to be waited for, to be found without seeking or asking.
In May Eleanor stripped the old, brownflowered wallpaper that had made the flat feel darker than it was. She painted the walls a warm, milky cream. She left the linoleum for now she didnt have enough money to do everything at once, but that mattered less now. The flat no longer felt foreign; she hadnt even noticed when the change happened.
Mrs. Agness books remained on the shelf. Eleanor added a handful of her own a dozen or so. Chekhov, still covered in marginal scribbles, sat in its place. Occasionally she would open it in the evenings and read not the stories but the little notes foreign yes, exactly, and me and she would nod.
She threw away the dead geraniums as soon as she moved in; they were beyond rescue. Only now had she planted fresh ones, placing them on the same sill where Marquis had first perched during the viewing. He still used it, but more often he chose the armchair next to her, or her lap on long evenings when the book was good.
At six oclock he stopped going to the door.
In June, Margaret Clarke, the realtor, happened to meet Eleanor in the local Sainsburys on Baker Street. Eleanor stood in line with a bag of cat food and a tub of kefir.
Hows the flat? Margaret asked. No regrets?
No, Eleanor replied.
And the cat?
She paused, shifting the food from one hand to the other.
You know, Margaret, she said, they should have kept the price up. They cut it too much.
Margaret laughed. Eleanor did not. She was serious.
At home, Marquis waited by the entryway, beside the slippers his new spot. When the lock clicked, he lifted his head, gave a slow blink.
Thats how you greet someone youve been waiting for all your life.
