Estate agent Mary Smith put the phone down and stared at it for a few seconds as if it were to blame.
Twenty-two years in the business had taught her everything: flats with debts, flats with relatives still registered, flats with leaking pipes, flats with a view of the cemetery. Once, there was a parrot that swore in three languages. But a cat being listed in the contract as a legal encumbrance? That was new.
‘Right, let’s recap the terms,’ she said to herself, flipping through her notebook. ‘Two-bedroom, Kensington High Street, third floor, sixty-two square metres. Owner died in January. Heirs – son and daughter in Manchester. Want a quick sale. Won’t take the cat, won’t give it to a shelter, won’t have it put down. Cat included.’
She sighed and added a line to the advert that would make any lawyer wince: ‘Cat comes with the flat. Offers welcome.’
The first viewing was on a Saturday.
Mary opened the door and let in a tall woman in her mid-fifties, wearing a grey coat. The woman stepped over the threshold and stopped. The flat smelled the way homes do when a solitary elderly person has lived there a long time: lavender soap, old books, a faint hint of valerian.
‘Gail Peterson,’ the woman said, not offering her hand. She looked around. ‘And where exactly is this… bonus?’
The cat sat on the windowsill in the living room – huge, ginger and white. He stared at Gail without blinking, and in that look there was neither fear nor curiosity. Only a tired, endless patience.
The look of someone who had been left before.
Gail walked through the flat in silence. She ran a finger along the spines of books on the shelf – Austen, Orwell, Wodehouse, all read to soft, worn covers. She glanced into the kitchen, where a tear-off calendar hung on the wall, frozen at the seventeenth of January. On the windowsill were three pots of dead geraniums. And a bowl. Clean, empty, sitting exactly in its place – by the left leg of the stool.
‘Does anyone feed him?’ she asked without turning.
‘The neighbour,’ Mary said. ‘Mrs Turner from flat thirty-six. She comes twice a day. The heirs pay her for it. Not much, but they pay.’
Gail returned to the living room. The cat hadn’t moved – still on the windowsill, paws tucked under, staring out at the street. Bare February plane trees swayed in the wind, and a woman with a pram wandered between them.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Marquis. That’s what the heirs said.’
‘Marquis,’ Gail repeated, without expression.
The cat didn’t turn his head.
She called three days later.
‘Mary, I’ve been thinking. The area’s good, close to the Tube. But the price is still above market, even with… the extra. And it needs work – those wallpapers, the lino. I’d take it if they knock off another three hundred.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
The heirs knocked off two hundred. Gail agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Gail came to the flat twice more – with a tape measure and a notepad. She measured walls, jotted things down, made plans. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window the second time, checking the radiator, he jumped off the windowsill, walked over and sat down about half a metre away. No closer.
‘Well, hello there,’ she said.
Marquis blinked. Once, slowly. Then looked away.
Mrs Turner from flat thirty-six turned out to be a small, thin woman with startled eyes. She was waiting for Gail by the door on the day of the handover.
‘You’re the new owner?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Let me tell you about Marquis. Nina Williams, the previous owner – God rest her – she found him ten years ago. He was sitting by the entrance, all torn up, in November. She nursed him back to health, fattened him up. After that he never left her side.’
Mrs Turner paused and added more quietly:
‘When she collapsed – a stroke, right there in the kitchen – he lay beside her. The ambulance came, they forced the door open, and he was there by her head. He wouldn’t leave.’
Gail listened, standing in the doorway, holding a set of new keys. Three keys. Two for the locks. One for the post box, which no one would check anymore.
‘He’s not naughty,’ Mrs Turner went on. ‘Doesn’t scratch, doesn’t damage furniture. Only… he won’t let you touch him. I’ve been feeding him two months, and he’s never once come near me. He eats when I leave. I put the bowl down, go out, 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 watches. Every evening, around six. That’s when Nina used to come back from her walk.’
Gail moved in on a Saturday. She didn’t have much – she was used to living lightly. Twenty years as a nurse in cardiology, then a ward sister role, then redundancy, downsizing, a rented room in Brixton that left her with sore knees and a sore soul. Her own flat had been a dream so old it had almost stopped being a dream and turned into just a plan. She had saved for nine years.
The removal men brought in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of dishes. Marquis vanished. Gail found him in the cupboard – he had squeezed behind the ironing board and sat there, ears flat, huge and still.
‘I understand,’ she said to him. ‘This is hard for you. For me too.’
She put the bowl by the left leg of the stool, exactly where the old one had been, and left the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
In the morning the bowl was empty.
A month passed. They lived in parallel – in the same walls, but in different worlds.
Gail got up at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, went off to her shift. She had found a job at a GP practice on Oxford Street – not cardiology, of course, but after a year out of work you couldn’t be picky.
Marquis only appeared in the kitchen after the lock clicked. She knew because she left a hair – a long, greying one – 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 very books from the shelf that had belonged to Nina Williams. Austen was full of pencil marks – fine, neat handwriting in the margins: exclamation points, sometimes a single word: ‘yes’, ‘exactly’, ‘me too’. Gail read those notes and felt a strange sensation – not sadness, exactly. Recognition. As though the woman she had never met thought the same way she did.
During this time Marquis sat in the hallway. Not in the room – in the hallway. By the front door. Every evening, at exactly six o’clock. Waiting.
At the end of March Gail fell ill. Flu hit overnight – temperature of thirty-nine, sore throat, every joint aching. She called in sick, took paracetamol and went to bed. She didn’t have the strength to get up and eat. Or to feed the cat.
‘Marquis,’ she called from the bedroom, her voice hoarse. ‘Sorry. I can’t right now.’
Silence.
She fell into a heavy, sticky sleep, head throbbing. She woke because something was pressing on her feet. Not hard. Just weight – warm, steady, alive.
Marquis lay at the foot of the bed. Curled up, watching her without blinking, serious, attentive. For the first time in a month, he wasn’t in the hallway, the cupboard, or behind the ironing board. He was here.
Gail didn’t move. She was afraid – if she moved, he’d leave. She just looked at him, and he at her, and between them was that silence in which words aren’t needed, because everything’s already been said.
‘You already know this,’ she whispered.
Marquis flattened his ears, put his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
He didn’t leave.
Three days she was ill, and three days he lay at her feet. He only left to go to his bowl – she forced herself to get up, pour some food, and he came back. On the third day, when the fever broke and Gail sat in the kitchen wrapped in a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis jumped onto the stool. Sat beside her. And purred.
Softly, with a rasp, as if he had forgotten how and was remembering now.
Gail put down the mug. She took off her glasses. Slowly, palm up, she reached out her hand.
Marquis sniffed her fingers. Then pressed his forehead into her palm.
She cried. Not from tenderness – she wasn’t the type to cry from tenderness. She cried because she suddenly understood something simple and clear: she had bought another person’s life – another person’s books, another person’s cat – because her own hadn’t been enough. And he had stayed in another person’s life with another person’s woman because there was nowhere else for him to go. Two encumbrances. Two extras. Two surplus beings thrown into the price.
And here they sat, side by side in the kitchen – one fifteen cat years, the other fifty-six human years – and together they were warm.
Marquis purred, and Gail kept her hand on his big, heavy head and thought that maybe this was it – when you don’t wait, don’t search, don’t ask. And it comes.
By May, Gail had stripped the old wallpaper – the one with the tiny brown floral pattern that made the flat darker than it was. She painted the walls a warm cream. The lino stayed for now – she couldn’t afford everything at once – but that no longer mattered. The flat had stopped feeling like someone else’s. She hadn’t noticed exactly when.
Nina Williams’s books stayed on the shelf. Gail added her own – not many, maybe fifteen. Austen, with its pencil marks, stood in its old place. Sometimes in the evenings she opened it and read not the story, but the margins – the other woman’s ‘yes’, ‘exactly’, ‘me too’. And she nodded.
She had thrown out the geraniums when she first moved in – dead as dead, no saving them. And only now did she plant new ones. She put them on the same windowsill where Marquis had sat on that first viewing day. Now he sat there less often. More often it was on the armchair, next to her. Or on her lap, if the evening was long and the book good.
At six o’clock he no longer went to the door.
In June, Mary Smith, the estate agent, bumped into her at the Tesco on Kensington High Street. Gail was standing in the checkout queue with a bag of cat food and a carton of milk.
‘How’s the flat?’ Mary asked. ‘No regrets?’
‘No.’
‘And the cat?’
Gail paused. She shifted the cat food from one hand to the other.
‘You know, Mary,’ she said, ‘they should have raised the price, not lowered it.’
Mary laughed. But Gail didn’t. She wasn’t joking.
At home, Marquis was waiting. He sat in the hallway, by her slippers. That was his new spot. And when the lock clicked, he lifted his head and blinked once, slowly.
That’s how you greet someone you’ve been waiting for very much.