Estate agent Mary Stevens put down the phone and stared at it for a few seconds as if it were to blame.
In twenty-two years in the business, she had sold flats with debts, with registered relatives, with leaking pipes, and with a view of a cemetery. Once – with a parrot that swore in three languages. But to have a cat included in the contract as a burden – that had never happened.
“Right, repeating the terms,” she said to herself, flipping through her notebook. “Two-bedroom, High Street, Kensington, second floor, sixty-two square metres. The owner died in January. The heirs – a son and daughter from Manchester. They want a quick sale. They won’t take the cat, won’t give it to a shelter, won’t let it be put down. The cat comes with it.”
She sighed and added a line to the advert that would make any solicitor wince: “Price includes cat. Offers considered.”
The first viewing was on Saturday.
Mary Stevens opened the door and let in the buyer – a tall woman in her mid-fifties 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 hint of valerian drops.
“Helen Parker,” said the woman, not offering her hand. She looked around. “And where is this… bonus of yours?”
The cat sat on the windowsill in the living room – huge, ginger-and-white. He stared at Helen Parker without blinking, and there was no fear or curiosity in his gaze. Only weary, endless patience.
That is how those who have already been abandoned look.
Helen Parker walked through the flat in silence. She ran a finger along the spines of the books on the shelf – Chekhov, Hemingway, Orwell, worn to soft covers. She glanced into the kitchen, where a tear-off calendar hung on the wall, stopped on the seventeenth of January. On the windowsill – three pots of dried-up geraniums. And a bowl. Clean, empty, sitting exactly in its place – by the left leg of the stool.
“Is anyone feeding him?” she asked without turning.
“A neighbour,” said Mary Stevens. “Tamara White from number thirty-six. Comes twice a day. The heirs pay her for it. Not much, but they pay.”
Helen Parker returned to the living room. The cat hadn’t moved – he sat on the windowsill, paws tucked in, looking out into the courtyard. Bare February poplars swayed in the wind, and a woman with a pram walked between them.
“What’s his name?”
“Marquis. That’s what the heirs said.”
“Marquis,” Helen Parker repeated without expression.
The cat did not turn his head.
She called three days later.
“Mary Stevens, I’ve been thinking. The area is good, the Tube is close. But the price is still above market, even with the… add-on. And it needs work – the wallpaper, the lino. I’d take it if they knocked off another three hundred.”
“I’ll try to talk to them.”
The heirs knocked off two hundred. Helen Parker agreed.
The paperwork took three weeks. Helen came to the flat twice more – with a tape measure and a notebook. She measured walls, jotted things down, made plans. The cat watched. When she crouched by the window the second time to check the radiator, he jumped down from the windowsill, came over, and sat half a metre away. No closer.
“Well, hello,” she said to him.
Marquis blinked. Once, slowly. And turned away.
Tamara White from number thirty-six turned out to be a small, thin woman with worried eyes. She was waiting for Helen Parker at the door on the day of the handover.
“Are you the new owner?”
“I hope so.”
“I’ll tell you about Marquis. Nancy Brown, 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, fattened him up. He never left her side after that.”
Tamara paused and added more quietly:
“When she fell – a stroke, right in the kitchen – he lay next to her. The ambulance came, they broke the door down, and he was by her head. He wouldn’t leave.”
Helen Parker listened, standing in the doorway, holding a bunch of new keys. Three keys. Two for locks. One for the letterbox that no one had any reason to check anymore.
“He’s not bad-tempered,” Tamara went on. “Doesn’t scratch, doesn’t damage the furniture. Only… he won’t let himself be touched. I’ve been feeding him for two months, and he’s never once come up to me. He eats when I leave. I put the bowl down and go out. When I come back, it’s empty. But never in front of me.”
“Maybe he’s scared.”
“He’s not scared. He’s waiting. He sits by the door and stares. Every evening, around six. Nancy used to come back from her walk at six.”
Helen Parker moved in on Saturday. She didn’t have much – 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 soul ache. Her own flat had been a dream so old that it had almost stopped being a dream and turned into just 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 flat, huge and motionless.
“I understand,” she said to him. “It’s hard for you. For me too.”
She put a bowl by the left leg of the stool, exactly where the old one had been, and left the kitchen, closing the door.
In the morning, the bowl was empty.
A month passed. They lived in parallel – within the same walls, but in different worlds.
Helen got up at six, drank coffee in the kitchen, went to her shift. She had found a job at a health centre on Baker Street – not cardiology, of course, but after a year of unemployment you don’t pick and choose.
Marquis only appeared in the kitchen after the lock clicked. She knew this because she left a hair from her head – long, greying – across the bowl. Every evening the hair was on the floor. So he was eating.
In the evenings she sat in the armchair by the window and read – the very books from the shelf that had belonged to Nancy Brown. Chekhov turned out to be full of pencil marks: thin, neat handwriting in the margins with exclamation points, sometimes a single word: “yes,” “exactly,” “me too.” Helen read those notes and felt a strange – not sadness, no – recognition. As if the woman she had never met had thought the same way.
Marquis at that time sat in the hall. Not in the room – in the hall. By the front door. Every evening, exactly at six. Waiting.
At the end of March, Helen fell ill. The flu hit overnight – temperature of thirty-nine, sore throat, every joint aching. She called in sick, took paracetamol, and lay down. She had no strength to get up and eat. Or to feed the cat.
“Marquis,” she called from the bedroom in a hoarse voice. “Sorry. I can’t right now.”
Silence.
She fell into a heavy, sticky sleep with a pounding 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, looking at her without blinking – serious, attentive. For the first time in a month, he was not in the hall, not in the cupboard, not behind the ironing board. He was here.
Helen did not 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, put his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
He did not leave.
She was ill for three days, and for three days he lay at her feet. He left only for his bowl – she forced herself to get up, pour the food, and he 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, with a rasp, as if he had forgotten how and was now remembering.
Helen put down the cup. She took off her glasses. She reached out her hand – slowly, palm up.
Marquis sniffed her fingers. And pressed his forehead into her palm.
She cried. Not from sentiment – she was not the sentimental type. 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 hadn’t had enough for her own. And he had stayed in someone else’s life, with someone else’s woman, because there was nowhere else for him to go. Two burdens. Two add-ons. Two surplus creatures thrown into the price.
And here they sat in the kitchen together, one fifteen cat years old and the other fifty-six human years, and together they were warm.
Marquis purred, and Helen held her hand on his large, 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 had stripped the old wallpaper – that small brown floral pattern that made the flat seem darker than it was. She painted the walls a warm milky white. The lino stayed – she didn’t have enough money for everything at once – but it no longer mattered. The flat had stopped being someone else’s. She hadn’t even noticed when.
Nancy Brown’s books remained on the shelf. Helen added her own – not many, a dozen and a half. Chekhov with the pencil marks stood in the same place. Sometimes in the evenings she opened it and read not the story, but the margins – someone else’s “yes,” “exactly,” “me too.” And nodded.
The geraniums she had thrown out right after moving in – dried to death, beyond saving. And 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 on the armchair, next to 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 Stevens, the estate agent, ran into her at Tesco on High Street. Helen was standing in line with 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 lower 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 lifted his head and blinked once, slowly.
That is how those who are very much awaited are greeted.
