Claire Bennett hangs up the phone and stares at it for a few seconds as if it were to blame for everything.
For twentytwo years she has been selling flats with arrears, with tenants on the lease, with old pipework and sometimes even a view of a cemetery. Once she sold one that came with a parrot cursing in three languages. But she has never had to list a cat as part of the encumbrance.
Right, let me run through the details again, she says to herself, flipping through her notebook. Twobedroom flat on Baker Street, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Sheffield want a quick sale. They wont take the cat, wont give it to a shelter, and they wont have it put down. The cat is included.
She sighs and adds a line to the advert that would make any solicitor cringe: Cat included in the price. Negotiation welcome.
The first viewing is scheduled for Saturday.
Claire opens the door and lets the buyer in a tall woman about fiftyfive, dressed in a grey coat. She steps over the threshold and stops. The flat smells exactly as a house lived in for years by a solitary old person does: lavender soap, old books, a faint hint of valerian.
Margaret Clarke, the woman says, not offering a handshake. She looks around. And wheres this bonus?
The cat is perched on the windowsill of the spacious living room a huge, orangewhite tom. He watches Margaret without blinking, his expression showing no fear, no curiosity, only weary, endless patience.
Thats how the ones who have been abandoned look.
Margaret walks through the flat in silence. She runs a finger along the spines of books on a shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, their covers softworn from years of reading. She peers into the kitchen, where a tearoff calendar is stuck on the seventeenth of January. On the windowsill sit three pots of withered geraniums and a bowl. The bowl is clean, empty, sitting exactly where a lefthanded stool leg meets the floor.
Does anyone feed him? she asks without turning.
The neighbour, Claire answers. Dorothy Hayes from number 36. She comes twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they do pay.
Margaret returns to the living room. The cat hasnt moved still perched, front paws tucked, staring out at the courtyard where bare February poplars sway in the wind and a woman pushes a pram.
Whats his name?
Marquis, the heirs told us.
Marquis, Margaret repeats, expression flat.
The cat doesnt turn his head.
She calls three days later.
Claire, Ive thought about it. The areas good, the tubes close. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. And the flat 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 drop the price by two hundred pounds. Margaret agrees.
The paperwork takes three weeks. Margaret visits the flat two more times with a tape measure and a notebook. She measures walls, jots down notes, does the maths. The cat watches. The second time she crouches at the window to check the radiator, the cat leaps from the sill, pads over and sits half a metre away, no closer.
Hello there, she says.
Marquis blinks, slowly, then looks away.
Dorothy Hayes turns out to be a small, wiry woman with startled eyes. She waits for Margaret at the door on the day the handover deed is signed.
Are you the new owner? she asks.
I hope so, Margaret replies.
Ill tell you about Marquis, Dorothy begins. Evelyn Hart, the previous owner, took him in ten years ago. He was shivering on the landing in November, all ragged. She fed him, looked after him, and he never left her side.
Dorothy lowers her voice.
When she collapsed from a stroke right in the kitchen, he was lying right by her head. The ambulance broke down the door and he stayed there.
Margaret stands in the doorway, holding a fresh set of three keys two for the locks, one for the postbox that no one checks any more.
Hes harmless, Dorothy continues. He doesnt scratch, doesnt ruin furniture. The only problem is he wont come near anyone. Ive fed him for two months and he never comes to me. He eats when I leave the room. I set a bowl down, and he disappears behind the door. He never comes while Im watching.
Maybe hes scared?
Hes not scared. Hes waiting. Every evening, around six, he sits by the door and watches. Evelyn used to come home from her walk at six.
Margaret moves in on Saturday. There isnt much furniture; shes used to compact living. Twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then a junior doctor, then a redundancy, a cheap room in Birchfield that made her knees ache and her spirit wilt. Owning a home had become a dream so old it almost felt like a plan. She had saved for nine years.
Movers bring in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis disappears. Margaret finds him later in the storage cupboard, wedged behind an ironing board, ears pressed back, massive and motionless.
I understand, she says to him. Its hard for you. Its hard for me too.
She puts a bowl where the old one was, by the left leg of the stool, and leaves, closing the kitchen door.
In the morning the bowl is empty.
A month passes. They live side by side in the same walls but in different worlds.
Margaret rises at six, drinks coffee in the kitchen, heads off to her night shift. She lands a job at the community health centre on Union Street not cardiology, of course, but after a year of unemployment there were no other options.
Marquis only appears in the kitchen after the lock clicks. Margaret knows this because she leaves a long, silvering strand of hair across the bowl each night. When the hair is on the floor, she knows hes eaten.
In the evenings she settles into an armchair by the window and reads the same books left on the shelf by Evelyn Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafyev, all with their covers softened by time. Chekhov is covered in pencil marginalia: thin, neat handwriting in the margins, exclamation marks, occasional single words yes, exactly, and me. Margaret reads those notes and feels a strange recognition, not sadness but a sense of having known the mind of a woman she never met.
Marquis sits not in the bedroom but in the hallway, by the front door, exactly at six each evening, waiting.
In late March Margaret catches the flu. Within a day her temperature spikes to thirtynine Celsius, her throat burns, every joint aches. She phones work, pops a paracetamol, and collapses back into bed. She cant get up to eat, cant get up to feed the cat.
Marquis, she croaks from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant right now.
Silence.
She drifts into a heavy, sticky sleep, a buzzing in her head. She wakes to a pressure on her feet not heavy, just warm, steady, alive.
Marquis is curled at the foot of the bed, a loaf, his eyes fixed on her, unblinking, serious. For the first time in a month he is not in the hallway, not in the cupboard, not behind the ironing board. He is right there.
Margaret doesnt move. She fears that any shift will send him away. She simply looks at him, and he looks back, and between them lies a wordless communion where nothing needs to be said because everything already is.
You already know all this, she whispers.
Marquis presses his ears against his paws, drops his head on his forelegs, and closes his eyes.
He stays.
She is ill for three days, and for three days he lies at her feet, only leaving to the bowl when she finally forces herself to get up and pour food. On the third day, when her fever finally drops and she sits at the kitchen table wrapped in a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis hops onto the stool, settles beside her and purrs.
Softly, breathy, as if he had forgotten how to purr and is now relearning it.
Margaret sets down her mug, removes her glasses, extends a hand slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffs her fingers, then nudges his forehead into her palm.
She cries. Not from sentimentality she does not usually cry from sweetness. She cries because she suddenly understands something simple and crystal clear: she bought another persons life with another persons books and another persons cat because she didnt have enough of her own. And the cat remains in someone elses life with someone else, because there was nowhere else for him. Two encumbrances, two addons, two extra beings rolled into the price.
Now they sit together in the kitchen: a cat fifteen catyears old, a woman fiftysix human years, both warm.
Marquis purrs, and Margaret rests her hand on his large, heavy head, thinking this might be it the moment you dont look for, you dont ask for, you dont expect, yet it arrives.
In May Margaret strips the old floral wallpaper the small brownflowered pattern that made the flat feel darker and paints the walls a soft milkwhite. She keeps the linoleum for now the cash isnt there for a full refit, but it no longer matters. The flat no longer feels foreign. She doesnt even notice the exact moment it changes.
Evelyns books stay on the shelf. Margaret adds a handful of her own about a dozen or so. Chekhov with the pencil notes stays in its place. Sometimes she opens it in the evening and reads not the story but the margins those foreign yes, exactly, and me and nods.
She discards the dead geraniums as soon as she moves in theres no point trying to revive them. She buys new ones and puts them on the same windowsill where Marquis first sat during the viewing. He now sits there less often, preferring the armchair next to her, or her lap when the night stretches long and the book is good.
At six he no longer patrols the doorway.
In June Claire Bennett, the realtor, runs into Margaret at the local Tesco on Baker Street. Margaret is in line, juggling a bag of cat food and a tub of yoghurt.
Hows the flat? Claire asks. No regrets?
No regrets, Margaret replies.
And the cat?
Margaret pauses, shifting the cat food from one hand to the other.
You know, Claire, she says, they should have kept the price up. They cut it too much.
Claire laughs. Margaret does not. She isnt joking.
At home, Marquis waits by the shoe rack. The lock clicks, he lifts his head and blinks once, slowly.
Thats how you greet the ones youve been waiting for.
