Mary Thompson put down the receiver and stared at the phone for a few seconds as if it were to blame.
In twenty-two years in the business she had sold flats with unpaid debts, with relatives still registered, with leaking pipes, and with views of cemeteries. Once there was a parrot that swore in three languages. But never before had a cat been included in the contract as an encumbrance.
“Right, let’s go over the terms,” she muttered to herself, flipping through her notebook. “Two-bedroom, Kensington, third floor, sixty-two square metres. Owner died in January. Heirs – a son and daughter from Manchester. Want a quick sale. Won’t take the cat, won’t hand it to a shelter, 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 wince: “Price includes cat. Offers considered.”
The first viewing was on Saturday.
Mary opened the door and let in a buyer – a tall woman around fifty-five in a grey coat. She stepped over the threshold and stopped. The flat smelled the way homes do where an elderly person has lived alone for a long time: lavender soap, old books, a faint hint of valerian.
“Helen Clarke,” the woman said without offering her hand. She looked around. “So where is this … bonus of yours?”
The cat sat on the windowsill in the living room – huge, ginger and white. He stared at Helen without blinking, and there was no fear or curiosity in his gaze. Only a weary, endless patience.
That’s how those who have already been abandoned look.
Helen walked through the flat in silence. She ran a finger along the spines of books on the shelf – Chekhov, Orwell, Tolkien, read until their covers were soft. She glanced into the kitchen, where a tear-off calendar hung on the wall, stopped at the seventeenth of January. On the windowsill – three pots of dried-out geraniums. And a bowl. Clean, empty, sitting exactly in its place – by the left leg of the stool.
“Has anyone been feeding him?” she asked without turning around.
“The neighbour,” Mary said. “Tina Jenkins from number thirty-six. She comes twice a day. The heirs pay her for it. Not much, but they pay.”
Helen returned to the living room. The cat hadn’t moved – he sat on the windowsill, paws tucked, staring out at the courtyard. The February trees swayed bare in the wind, and a woman with a pushchair walked between them.
“What’s his name?”
“Marquis. That’s what the heirs said.”
“Marquis,” Helen repeated flatly.
The cat didn’t turn his head.
She called three days later.
“Mary, I’ve thought it over. Good area, tube station nearby. But the price is still above market, even with the … extra. And it needs work – those wallpapers, the linoleum. I’d take it if they knock off three hundred.”
“I’ll try to talk to them.”
The heirs knocked off two hundred. Helen agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Helen came to the flat twice more – with a tape measure and a notepad. She measured walls, wrote things down, planned. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window the second time to check the radiator, he jumped off the sill, walked over, and sat half a metre away. No closer.
“Well, hello,” she said to him.
Marquis blinked once, slowly. Then he turned away.
Tina Jenkins from number thirty-six turned out to be a small, thin woman with frightened eyes. She was waiting for Helen at the door on the day the transfer of keys was signed.
“Are you the new owner?”
“I hope so.”
“Let me tell you about Marquis. Nina Williams, 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.”
Tina paused and added more quietly:
“When she fell – a stroke, right there in the kitchen – he lay next to her. The ambulance came, they broke the door open, and he was at her head. He wouldn’t leave.”
Helen listened, standing in the doorway, holding a set of new keys. Three keys. Two for the locks. One for the letterbox that no one would check anymore.
“He’s not bad-tempered,” Tina went on. “Doesn’t scratch, doesn’t ruin the furniture. But … he won’t let himself be touched. I’ve been feeding him for two months, and he’s never once come near me. He eats when I leave. I put the bowl down and go out. 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 and stares. Every evening, around six. Nina used to come back from her walk at six.”
Helen moved in on Saturday. She had few belongings – she was used to living compactly. Twenty years as a nurse in cardiology, then a registrar post, then redundancy, downsizing, a rented room in Brixton that made her knees and her soul ache. Her own flat had been a dream so old it had almost stopped being a dream and become a plan. She had saved for nine years.
The movers brought in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of dishes. Marquis disappeared. Helen found him in the storage cupboard – he had squeezed behind the ironing board and sat there, ears flattened, huge and motionless.
“I understand,” she told him. “It’s hard for you. It’s hard for me too.”
She placed a bowl by the left leg of the stool, exactly where the old one had stood, and left the kitchen, closing the door.
In the morning the bowl was empty.
A month passed. They lived side by side – in the same walls, but in different worlds.
Helen got up at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, and left for her shift. She had found a job at a clinic on Victoria Street – not cardiology, but after a year of unemployment you don’t pick and choose.
Marquis appeared in the kitchen only after the lock clicked. Helen knew this because she left a strand of her own hair – long, greying – across the bowl. Every evening the hair lay on the floor. So he had eaten.
In the evenings she sat in the armchair by the window and read – the same books from Nina Williams’s shelf. Chekhov turned out to be full of pencil marks: in a thin, neat hand, exclamation points in the margins, sometimes a single word: “yes,” “exactly,” “me too.” Helen read these marks and felt a strange sensation – not sadness, no. Recognition. As if the woman she had never met thought the same way she did.
During these hours, Marquis sat in the hallway. Not in the room – in the hallway. By the front door. Every evening, exactly at six. Waiting.
At the end of March, Helen fell ill. The flu knocked her flat overnight – a temperature of thirty-nine, sore throat, ache in every joint. She phoned work, took paracetamol, and lay down. She didn’t have the strength to get up and eat. Or to feed the cat.
“Marquis,” she called from the bedroom in a hoarse voice. “I’m sorry. I can’t right now.”
Silence.
She fell into a heavy, sticky sleep with a buzzing head. She woke because something was pressing on her legs. Not hard. Just a weight – warm, steady, alive.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed. Curled up, staring 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.
Helen didn’t move. She was afraid that if she stirred, he would leave. She just looked at him, and he at her, and between them was that silence where words are not needed because everything has already been said.
“You already know this,” she whispered.
Marquis flattened his ears, rested his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
He didn’t leave.
For three days she was ill, and for three days he lay at her feet. He left only for his bowl – she forced herself to get up, pour food, and came back. On the third day, when the fever dropped and Helen sat 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, a little raspy, as if he had forgotten how and was remembering.
Helen put down the cup. She took off her glasses. She reached out her hand – slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingers. Then he pressed his forehead into her palm.
She cried. Not from sentimentality – she was not the sort who cried from sentimentality. She cried because she suddenly understood a simple, clear thing: she had bought someone else’s life with someone else’s books and someone else’s cat because she didn’t have enough of her own. And he had stayed in someone else’s life with someone else’s woman because he had nowhere else to go. Two encumbrances. Two extras. Two unwanted beings included in the price.
And there they sat, side by side in the kitchen – one with fifteen cat years, the other with fifty-six human years – and together they were warm.
Marquis purred, and Helen kept her hand on his big, heavy head and thought that perhaps this was it – when you don’t wait, don’t search, don’t ask. And it comes.
By May, Helen stripped the old wallpaper – the one with the small brown flowers that made the flat seem darker than it was. She painted the walls a warm milky white. She left the linoleum for now – she didn’t have enough money to do everything at once – but that no longer mattered. The flat had stopped being someone else’s. She couldn’t even say when it happened.
Nina Williams’s books stayed on the shelf. Helen added her own – a small number, maybe fifteen. Chekhov with the pencil marks stood in its old place. Sometimes in the evenings she opened it and read not the stories but the margins – the other woman’s “yes,” “exactly,” “me too.” And nodded.
She had thrown out the geraniums right after moving in – they were dried to nothing, beyond saving. Only now did she plant new ones. She put them on the same windowsill where Marquis had sat on the day of the first viewing. Now he sat there less often. 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 Thompson, the estate agent, ran into her at the Tesco on Kensington High Street. Helen stood in the queue with a bag of cat food and a carton of milk.
“How’s the flat?” Mary asked. “No regrets?”
“No.”
“And the cat?”
Helen paused. She shifted the cat food from one hand to the other.
“You know, Mary,” she said, “they were wrong to drop the price. They should have raised it.”
Mary laughed. Helen didn’t. 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 raised his head and blinked once, slowly.
That’s how you greet someone you have been waiting for very much.