The estate agent Margaret Collins hung up the phone and stared at the handset for a few seconds, as if the device itself were at fault.
For twentytwo years she had been selling flats with arrears, with relatives on the lease, with leaky pipes and a view of the old churchyard. Once, a flat came with a parrot that swore in three languages. But never before had a cat been listed as an encumbrance.
Alright, lets run through the terms again, she muttered to herself, turning the pages of her notebook. Twobedroom, Lenton Road, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. Owner passed away in January. Heirs a son and a daughter from Bristol. They want a quick sale. The cat isnt being reclaimed, it isnt going to a rescue, and they wont allow it to be put down. Cat included.
She sighed and added a line to the advertisement that would make any solicitors stomach flip: Price includes cat. Negotiation welcome.
The first viewing was scheduled for Saturday.
Margaret opened the door and let in the buyer a tall woman about fiftyfive, wrapped in a grey coat. She stepped over the threshold and halted. The flat smelled exactly as a house lived in for years by a solitary old person: lavender soap, ageing books, a hint of valerian.
Gillian Parker, the woman introduced herself without extending a hand, scanning the rooms. And wheres this bonus?
The cat perched on the windowsill of the spacious room a massive, gingerwhite beast. He stared at Gillian without blinking, his gaze stripped of fear or curiosity, carrying only a weary, endless patience.
Thats how those who have been abandoned look at you.
Gillian walked through the flat in silence. She traced a finger along the spines of books on a shelf Chekhov, Pasternak, Astafyev, their covers soft from countless readings. She peeked into the kitchen where a tearoff calendar clung to the wall, frozen on 17January. On the sill sat three pots of wilted geraniums and a bowl, pristine, empty, placed exactly where a lefthanded stool leg met the floor.
Does anyone feed him? she asked, not turning around.
The neighbour does, Margaret replied. Mrs. Tamsin Harrington from flat36. She drops by twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they do pay.
Gillian drifted back to the living room. The cat had not shifted still perched, front paws tucked, gazing out at the courtyard where barren February poplars swayed, and a woman with a pram paced between them.
Whats his name?
Marquis, the heirs had called him.
Marquis, Gillian repeated, flatly.
The cat did not turn his head.
She called three days later.
Margaret, Ive thought it over. The areas nice, the tubes nearby. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. And the place needs work the wallpaper, the linoleum. Id take it if you knock off another three hundred pounds.
Ill see what I can do.
The heirs reduced the price by two hundred pounds. Gillian agreed.
The paperwork stretched over three weeks. Gillian returned to the flat twice more with a tape measure and a notebook, measuring walls, noting figures, doing the math. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window on her second visit to check the radiator, the cat sprang down, padded over, and sat a halfmetre away. No closer.
Hello then, she said to him.
Marquis flicked his eyes once, slowly, and turned away.
Mrs. Tamsin Harrington turned out to be a petite, dryskinned woman with startled eyes. She waited for Gillian at the door on the day the handover deed was signed.
Are you the new landlord? she asked.
I hope so, Gillian answered.
Ill tell you about Marquis, Tamsin began. Mrs. Edith Whitfield, the previous owner, was a saint. She rescued him ten years ago. He was shivering on the landing in November, all torn up. She fed him, warmed him. Hes never left her side since.
She fell silent, then lowered her voice.
When she collapsed, stroke in the kitchen, he was right there beside her head. The ambulance broke in, and he stayed. He never moved.
Gillian stood in the doorway, holding a bundle of new keys three of them: two for the locks, one for the postbox that now gathered no letters.
Hes harmless, Tamsin continued. He doesnt scratch, he doesnt ruin furniture. He just wont come into anyones hands. Ive fed him for two months and he never came to me. He eats when I leave the bowl by the door, then its empty when I return. He never approaches me.
Maybe hes scared, Gillian suggested.
Hes not scared. Hes waiting. Hell sit by the door at six each evening. Mrs. Edith used to come back from her walk at six.
Gillian moved in on a Saturday. There was little, and she learned to live compactly. Twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then a junior doctor, then redundancy, a cheap room in Bexley where her knees ached and her spirit was thin. Owning her own flat had been a dream for so long it had turned into a plan. She had been saving for nine years.
Movers lugged in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis vanished. Gillian found him later in the storage cupboard, jammed behind an ironing board, ears flattened, huge and unmoving.
I understand, she whispered to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me too.
She placed a bowl at the same lefthanded stool leg where the old one had stood, and closed the kitchen door behind her.
In the morning the bowl was empty.
A month slipped by. They lived parallel within the same walls but in different worlds.
Gillian rose at six, sipped coffee in the kitchen, went off to her 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 choice.
Marquis appeared in the kitchen only after the lock clicked. She knew this because she left a long, greying strand of hair across the bowl each night. When the hair lay on the floor, he had eaten.
In the evenings she sank into the armchair by the window and read the same books left by Edith: Chekhov, now covered in pencil notes, thin, tidy script in the margins, exclamation marks, occasional single words: yes, sure, me too. Gillian read those marginalia and felt a strange, unnamed recognition, as if a woman shed never met thought exactly as she did.
Marquis, meanwhile, sat in the hallway, not the bedroom, but right by the front door. Every evening, precisely at six, he waited.
At the end of March Gillian fell ill. A flu knocked her out in a single night temperature thirtynine, sore throat, aching joints. She called in sick, took paracetamol, and lay down. She couldnt summon the strength to get up for food, let alone to feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She slipped into a heavy, sticky dream, buzzing in her head. She awoke to a weight pressing on her feet not a burden, but a warm, measured, living pressure.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled like a loaf, eyes unblinking, seriousness in his stare. For the first time in weeks he was not in the hallway, not in the cupboard, not behind the ironing board. He was here.
Gillian didnt move. She feared that if she shifted, he would slip away. She simply watched him, and he watched her, and between them was a wordless hush where nothing needed saying because everything was already known.
You already understand, she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears to his paws, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.
He didnt leave.
For three days she was ill, and for three days he lay at her feet. He only ventured to the bowl when she forced herself up, scooped the food, and returned. On the third day, when the fever broke and Gillian curled on the kitchen floor under a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, sat beside her, and purred.
Softly, with a hoarse timbre, as if hed forgotten how and was now relearning it.
Gillian set her mug down, slipped off her glasses, and reached out slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingertips, then nudged his forehead against her hand.
She wept. Not from sentimentality she never wept from that but because a clear, simple truth settled in her chest: she had bought a life that werent hers, with books that werent hers and a cat that wasnt hers, because there wasnt enough room for her own. And the cat remained in someone elses world with a woman who had nowhere else to put him. Two encumbrances. Two addons. Two extra beings folded into the price.
Now they sat together in the kitchen: fifteen cat years for him, fiftysix human years for her, and together a shared warmth.
Marquis purred, and Gillian rested her palm on his heavy head, sensing perhaps the moment when nothing is sought, nothing is asked, nothing is expected, and yet it arrives.
In May Gillian stripped the old wallpaper those tiny brownflowered bits that had made the flat feel darker than it was and painted the walls a warm milkwhite. She left the linoleum for now; she didnt have the cash to replace everything at once, but it no longer mattered. The flat stopped feeling foreign. She didnt even notice the exact moment it happened.
Ediths books stayed on the shelf. Gillian added a dozen of her own, a few more. Chekhov with the pencil notes remained in its place. Sometimes she opened it in the evenings and read not the story but the margins those foreign yes, sure, me too and nodded.
She threw away the dead geraniums as soon as she moved in they were beyond rescue and only now planted fresh ones on the same windowsill where Marquis had first perched during the viewing. He now chose that spot less often, preferring the armchair next to her, or her lap when the night stretched long and the book was good.
At six oclock he no longer drifted to the door.
In June Margaret Collins, the estate agent, happened upon Gillian in the local Tesco on Lenton Road. Gillian stood in the queue, a bag of cat food in one hand, a bottle of kefir in the other.
Hows the flat? Margaret asked. Happy with it?
Fine, Gillian replied.
And the cat?
She paused, shifting the food from hand to hand.
You know, Margaret, she said, they should have kept the price up. We overdiscounted.
Margaret laughed. Gillian did not. She was deadserious.
At home Marquis waited by the shoe rack. It was his new spot. When the lock clicked, he lifted his head and blinked once, slowly.
Thats how you greet those youve waited for a lifetime.
