The estate agent, Margaret Sinclair, hung up the phone and stared at it a moment longer, as if the device itself were to blame.
For twentytwo years she had been selling flats with arrears, with tenants still on the lease, with outdated plumbing and a view of the cemetery. Once she even had a parrot that swore in three languages. But never before had she ever listed a cat as a burden attached to the property.
Right, lets run through the terms again, she muttered to herself, turning the pages of her notebook. Twobedroom flat, High Road, Cambridge, 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 hand it over to a shelter, and wont have it put down. The cat stays.
She sighed, then added a line to the advert that would make any solicitor shudder: Cat included in the price. Negotiation welcomed.
The first viewing was on a Saturday.
Margaret opened the door and let in the buyer a tall woman of about fiftyfive, wrapped in a drab grey coat. She crossed the threshold, paused, and took in the flats scent: the lingering perfume of lavender soap, the musty smell of old books, a faint hint of valerian.
Eleanor Whitby, the woman introduced herself, not extending a hand. She surveyed the room. And where is this bonus?
The cat perched on the windowsill of the large room a massive, gingerwhite beast. He fixed Eleanor with an unblinking stare, his eyes showing neither fear nor curiosity, only a weary, endless patience.
Thats how those who have been abandoned look.
Eleanor moved through the flat in silence. She ran a finger over the spines of books on a shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, all read to the point where the covers were dogeared. She peered into the kitchen, where a tearoff calendar clung to the wall, its page stuck on 17January. On the sill were three pots of wilted geraniums and a bowl, pristine and empty, sitting exactly where a stools left leg met the floor.
Is anyone feeding him? she asked without turning.
The neighbour, Margaret replied. Tammy 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 still perched, front paws tucked, gazing out at the courtyard where bare February poplars swayed in the wind and a woman with a pram walked between them.
Whats his name?
Marquis, the heirs had called him.
Marquis, Eleanor repeated, expression unchanged.
The cat did not turn his head.
Three days later she called.
Mrs. Sinclair, Ive thought about it. The area is decent, 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 pounds off. Eleanor agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Eleanor returned to the flat twice more with a tape measure and a notebook measuring walls, jotting notes, making calculations. Marquis watched. When she crouched by the window the second time to check the radiator, the cat leapt down, padded over, and sat a halfmetre away. Not closer.
Well, hello there, she said.
Marquis blinked once, slowly, then looked away.
Tammy Hughes, the petite, nervous neighbour, turned out to be a wiry woman with frightened eyes. She waited for Eleanor at the door on the day the handover act was to be signed.
So youre the new owner? she asked.
I hope so, Eleanor replied.
Ill tell you about Marquis, Tammy began. Nina Walters, the previous owner, a kind soul, rescued him ten years ago. He was a stray, ragged, in November. She fed him, gave him a home. He never left her side.
She fell silent, then lowered her voice.
When Nina had a stroke, right in the kitchen, he was lying right beside her head. The ambulance broke down the door, and he stayed there, never moving.
Eleanor stood in the doorway, a fresh set of three keys in her hand two for the locks, one for the postbox that now went unchecked.
Hes harmless, Tammy continued. He doesnt scratch, doesnt ruin furniture. The only problem is he wont come to you. Ive fed him for two months and he never once approached me. He eats when Im out. I put a bowl down, he darts away. I come back its empty. But when Im there, he never comes.
Maybe hes scared, Eleanor suggested.
Hes not scared. Hes waiting. Every evening at six, he sits by the door and watches. Nina always returned from her walk at six.
Eleanor moved in on a Saturday. She had few possessions, accustomed to a compact life. Twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then a junior doctor, then redundancy, a cramped rented room in Walthamstow that left her knees sore and her spirit tired. Owning a home had been a dream for so long it had become a plan. She had scraped together savings over nine years.
The movers hauled in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of dishes. Marquis disappeared. Eleanor found him later in the cupboard, wedged behind an ironing board, ears flattened, massive and motionless.
I get it, she said to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me.
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 passed. They lived side by side under the same roof, in different worlds.
Eleanor rose at six, coffee in hand, and went off to her night shift. She took a post at the community health centre on Union Street, not cardiology, of course, but after a year of unemployment she had no other choice.
Marquis appeared in the kitchen only after the lock clicked. She knew this because she left a long, greying hair on the table, across the bowl. Every evening the hair lay on the floor that meant hed eaten.
In the evenings she settled into an armchair by the window and read the very books left on the shelf by Nina: Chekhov, his pages filled with fine pencil notes in the margins, exclamation marks, a single word here and there yes, exactly, and me. Eleanor read those scribbles and felt something strange, not sorrow but recognition, as if a woman she had never met was thinking just as she did.
Marquis at those times sat in the hallway, not the room, by the front door. Every evening, precisely at six, he waited.
At the end of March Eleanor fell ill. The flu hit her in a single night temperature thirtynine, sore throat, every joint aching. She called in sick, took paracetamol, and lay down. Getting up to eat was impossible, and getting up to feed the cat was impossible as well.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She drifted into a heavy, sticky sleep, her head buzzing. She awoke to something pressing on her feet a light, warm weight. Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled like a loaf, eyes fixed on her, unblinking, solemn, 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.
Eleanor didnt move. She feared that any shift would send him away. She just stared at him, he stared back, and between them was a silence that needed no words because everything had already been said.
You already know this, dont you? she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears back, rested his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
He didnt leave.
She was ill for three days, and for three days he lay at her feet. He only left to the bowl when she forced herself to rise, scooped out some food, and returned. On the third day, when her temperature finally fell and she sat in the kitchen wrapped in a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis leapt onto the stool, sat beside her, and began to purr.
Softly, with a hoarse rumble, as if hed forgotten how, and now was recalling.
Eleanor set her mug down, removed her glasses, and extended a hand slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingers, then nudged his forehead against her palm.
She wept. Not from sentimentality she wasnt the sort to weep at sweet moments but because a simple, clear truth struck her: she had bought another persons life, with anothers books and anothers cat, because there wasnt enough of her own. And the cat had remained in anothers life with another woman, because there was nowhere else for him. Two encumbrances. Two addons. Two extra beings folded into a price.
Now they sat together in the kitchen: a cat fifteen catyears old, a woman fiftysix human years old, both warm in each others company.
Marquis purred, and Eleanor rested her hand on his large, heavy head and thought perhaps this was what they called a miracle when you dont wait, dont look, dont ask, and it simply arrives.
By May Eleanor stripped the old wallpaper the tiny brown floral pattern that made the flat feel darker than it was and painted the walls a soft, milky cream. She kept the linoleum for now she didnt have the money to do everything at once, but that no longer mattered. The flat ceased to feel foreign. She didnt notice when that shift occurred.
Ninas books stayed on the shelf. Eleanor added a handful of her own about a dozen. Chekhov, still bearing his pencil notes, remained in its former spot. Occasionally she opened it in the evenings and read not the story but the margins those foreign yes, exactly, and me. She nodded.
She threw away the dead geraniums as soon as she moved in beyond rescue. Only now did she plant fresh ones, on the same windowsill where Marquis had first perched during the viewing. He now sat there less often, preferring the armchair beside her, or her lap on long evenings when the book was good.
At six oclock he no longer trotted to the door.
In June, Margaret Sinclair, the estate agent, happened upon Eleanor in the local Tesco on High Road. Eleanor stood in line, clutching a bag of cat food and a carton of kefir.
So, hows the flat? Margaret asked. Any regrets?
No, Eleanor replied.
And the cat?
Eleanor hesitated, shifting the cat food from one hand to the other.
You know, Margaret, she said, they should have kept the price up. We lowered it for nothing.
Margaret laughed. Eleanor did not. She was earnest.
At home, Marquis waited by the entryway, near the slippers his new spot. When the lock clicked, he lifted his head, gave a slow blink.
Thats how you greet those you have truly been waiting for.
