I hung up the phone and stared at the handset for a few seconds, as if it were the one at fault.
For twentytwo years Id been selling flats with outstanding mortgages, inherited tenants, aging pipework and, on occasion, a view of the local cemetery. Once I even had a parrot that swore in three languages. But never before had I ever listed a cat as an encumbrance in a contract.
Alright, lets run through the details again, I muttered to myself, leafing through my notebook. Twobedroom, 12Baker Street, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Brighton want a quick sale. They wont take the cat, wont hand it over to a shelter, and wont consent to euthanasia. The cat stays.
I sighed, then added a clause that would make any solicitors stomach turn: The price includes the cat. Negotiation permitted.
The first viewing was scheduled for Saturday.
I opened the door and let the buyer in a tall woman, about fiftyfive, wrapped in a grey coat. She crossed the threshold and halted. The flat smelled exactly as a longterm solitary elders home does: lavender soap, old books, a faint hint of valerian.
Eleanor Whitfield, she introduced herself, not extending a hand. She glanced around. And wheres your bonus?
The cat lounged on the windowsill of the spacious living room a massive, orangeandwhite beast. He stared at Eleanor without blinking, his gaze neither fearful nor curious, just exhausted, endless patience.
Thats the look you get from animals that have been abandoned too often.
Eleanor walked through the flat in silence. She ran a fingertip over the spines of books on the shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, their covers softened by years of reading. In the kitchen a torn calendar was stuck to the wall, frozen on 17January. On the sill sat three pots of wilted geraniums and a bowl, spotless and empty, positioned precisely at the left leg of a small stool.
Is anyone feeding him? she asked, not turning around.
The neighbour, I replied. MrsDorothy Hargreaves from number36. She drops by twice a day. The heirs give her a modest allowance for it. Small, but its something.
Eleanor returned to the living room. The cat hadnt moved still perched on the sill, front paws tucked, eyes fixed on the courtyard where bare poplars swayed in the February wind and a woman with a pram trudged by.
Whats his name?
Marquis, the heirs had called him.
Marquis, Eleanor repeated, expression unchanged.
The cat gave no sign of recognition.
She called three days later.
Margaret, Ive thought it over. The areas nice, the tubes close. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. The place needs work the wallpaper, the linoleum. Id take it if you knocked another three hundred pounds off.
Ill see what I can do, I said.
The heirs reduced the price by two hundred pounds. Eleanor agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Eleanor returned twice more armed with a tape measure and a notebook. She measured walls, jotted figures, ran mental calculations. The cat observed her. The second time she crouched by the window to check the radiator, Marquis leapt down, padded over and settled a halfmetre away, not any closer.
Alright, hello there, she said to him.
Marquis gave a slow blink and turned his head away.
MrsDorothy turned out to be a slight, nervous woman with startled eyes. She waited for Eleanor at the front door on the day the handover deed was to be signed.
Are you the new owner? she asked.
I hope so, Eleanor answered.
Ill tell you about Marquis, Dorothy began. Nina Whitaker, the previous owner, was a saint. She rescued him ten years ago when he was a scrap of a cat, shivering in the buildings stairwell in November. She fed him, gave him a home, and he never left her side.
Dorothy lowered her voice.
When she collapsed from a stroke in the kitchen, he lay right there, on her head. The ambulance burst the door open, and he stayed put, refusing to move.
Eleanor stood in the doorway, a fresh set of three keys in her hand two for the locks, one for the postbox that now had no one to check it.
He isnt destructive, Dorothy continued. He doesnt scratch, he doesnt ruin furniture. The only problem is he wont come near you. Ive fed him for two months, and he never approaches me. He eats when Im out, but as soon as I set a bowl down he darts off. I never see him while Im there.
Maybe hes scared, Eleanor suggested.
Hes not scared. Hes waiting. Every evening, around six, he sits by the door and watches. Nina used to return from her walks at six, and hed be there.
Eleanor moved in on a Saturday. She had very few possessions; she was used to living compactly after twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then an assistant registrar, then a redundancy, a stint in a shared flat in Wimbledon where her knees and spirit both ached. Owning a home had been a dream for so long it had ceased to be a dream and become a plan. Shed been saving for nine years.
The movers hauled in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of kitchenware. Marquis vanished. Eleanor found him later in the storage cupboard, curled behind an ironing board, ears pinned, huge and unmoving.
I get it, she said to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me, too.
She placed a fresh bowl at the left leg of the stool, exactly where the old one had sat, and closed the kitchen door behind her.
By morning the bowl was empty.
A month later they were living parallel lives under the same roof, but in different worlds.
Eleanor rose at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, and went off to her night shift at the community health centre on Union Street. It wasnt cardiology, but after a year of unemployment she hadnt the luxury of choice.
Marquis only appeared in the kitchen after the lock clicked. Eleanor knew this because shed left a long, greying strand of hair across the bowl each evening. If the hair lay on the floor, it meant hed eaten.
In the evenings she sank into the armchair by the window and read the books left on the shelf by Nina Chekhov, annotated in a tiny, neat hand with exclamation marks, occasional single words: yes, exactly, me too. The notes made her feel a strange recognition, not sadness but an uncanny familiarity, as if a woman shed never met were thinking exactly as she did.
Marquis spent his time in the hallway, not the bedroom, but by the front door, waiting precisely at six each night.
In late March Eleanor fell ill. A flu hit her hard in one night temperature thirtynine, sore throat, every joint aching. She called in sick, swallowed some paracetamol and lay down. She couldnt get up to eat, let alone to feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She drifted into a heavy, sticky sleep, her head buzzing. She woke to a weight on her feet not heavy, just a warm, steady pressure.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled like a loaf, eyes fixed on 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 there.
Eleanor didnt move. She was afraid that any motion would send him back to the hallway. She simply stared, and he stared back, the kind of silence where words are unnecessary because everything has already been said.
You already know this, she whispered.
Marquis pressed his ears flat, rested his head on his paws and closed his eyes.
He stayed.
For three days she lay ill, and for three days he lay beside her. He only left to the bowl when she mustered the strength to pour food, and then returned. On the third day, when her fever finally fell and she was wrapped in a blanket on the kitchen floor with a mug of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, sat beside her and began to purr.
A soft, hoarse rumble, as if hed forgotten how to purr and was relearning it.
Eleanor set down her mug, took off her glasses, extended her hand slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingers, nudged his forehead against her palm.
She wept. Not out of sentimentality she never cried from that but because she suddenly grasped a simple, clear truth: she had bought a life that wasnt hers, with books that werent hers and a cat that wasnt hers, because her own life lacked space. And the cat remained in a life that wasnt his, with a woman who wasnt his, because there was nowhere else for him to go. Two liabilities, two addons, two extra beings bundled into the price.
And there they sat, in the kitchen, fifteen cat years for him, fiftysix human years for her, sharing warmth.
Marquis purred, and Eleanor pressed her hand to his massive, heavy head, thinking perhaps this was exactly what it meant to be waited for, not sought, not asked for, but simply to arrive.
By May she ripped out the old floral wallpaper, the tiny brownflower pattern that made the flat seem darker than it was, and painted the walls a warm, milky cream. She left the linoleum for now she didnt have enough cash to redo everything at once, but it no longer mattered. The flat no longer felt foreign; she hadnt even noticed when that shift happened.
Ninas books stayed on the shelf. Eleanor added a few of her own about a dozen or so. Chekhov, still with his marginal notes, kept its place. Occasionally shed open it in the evenings and read not the stories but the side notes the foreign yes, exactly, me too and nod.
She discarded the dead geraniums as soon as she moved in, unable to revive them, and only later bought fresh ones, placing them on the same windowsill where Marquis had first perched. He now sat there less often, preferring the armchair beside her, or her lap when the night stretched long and the book was good.
He stopped going to the door at six.
In June, I, Margaret the estate agent happened to run into Eleanor at the local Tesco on Baker Street. She was in line, juggling a bag of cat food and a tub of kefir.
Hows the flat? I asked. Happy with it?
No regrets, she replied.
And the cat?
She paused, shifting the cat food from one hand to the other.
You know, Margaret, she said, they shouldve kept the price up. We lowered it for nothing.
I laughed, but Eleanor didnt. She was serious.
At home, Marquis waited by the entryway, perched on a pair of slippers his new favourite spot. When the lock clicked, he lifted his head, gave a slow blink.
Thats how you greet someone youve been waiting for.