Heirs Cut the Price, Selling the Flat—Cat Included!

Dear diary,

I hung up the phone and stared at it for a few seconds, as if the device itself were to blame.

For twentytwo years Ive been a letting agent, moving flats that came with overdue mortgages, registered relatives, leaky pipes and, on one occasion, a parrot that swore in three languages. But never have I ever had to list a cat as part of the encumbrance.

Alright, lets run through the details again, I muttered to myself, leafing through my notebook. Twobed flat on Baker Street, third floor, sixtytwo square metres. The former owner passed away in January. The heirs a son and a daughter from Bristol are keen to sell quickly. They wont take the cat, wont hand it over to a shelter, and wont consent to euthanasia. The cat stays.

I inhaled sharply and added a line to the advert that would make any solicitors stomach turn: Price includes cat. Negotiation welcome.

The first viewing was scheduled for Saturday.

I opened the door and let the prospective buyer in a tall woman in her midfifties, wrapped in a grey coat. She crossed the threshold and paused. The flat smelled exactly as an old bachelors home does: lavender soap, the musk of wellworn books, a faint hint of valerian.

Ethel Whitmore, she announced without extending a hand, looking around. And wheres the bonus?

The cat lounged on the windowsill of the spacious living room a massive, tawnywhite beast. He stared at Ethel Whitmore without blinking, his gaze devoid of fear or curiosity, only a weary, endless patience.

Thats the look of animals that have been abandoned time and again.

Ethel Whitmore walked through the flat in silence. Her fingertip brushed the spines of books on a low shelf Chekhov, Paustovsky, Astafiev, their covers soft from countless readings. She peeked into the kitchen where a tearoff calendar hung on the wall, stopped on 17January. On the sill sat three pots of wilted geraniums and a bowl, pristine and empty, perched at the left leg of a stool.

Does anyone feed him? she asked, not turning around.

The neighbour does, I replied. June Collins from number36. She pops in twice a day. The heirs pay her a little, but they pay.

Ethel Whitmore returned to the living room. The cat hadnt moved still perched, paws tucked, gazing out at the courtyard where bare poplars swayed in the February wind and a woman with a pram trudged past.

Whats his name?

Marquis, the heirs had decided.

Marquis, Ethel repeated blandly.

The cat didnt lift his head.

She called three days later.

Rebecca, Ive thought it over. The area is nice, the tube is close. But the price is still above market, even with the extra. The place needs work new wallpaper, linoleum. Id take it if you could knock another three hundred pounds off.

Ill see what I can do, I said.

The heirs reduced the price by two hundred pounds. Ethel Whitmore agreed.

The paperwork took three weeks. Ethel returned twice more armed with a tape measure and my notebook measuring walls, jotting notes, doing the mental maths. Marquis watched. When she crouched at the window the second time to check the radiator, he leapt down, padded over, and sat half a metre away. No closer.

Good morning, she whispered to him.

Marquis flicked his ears once, slowly, then turned away.

June Collins turned out to be a slight, nervouslooking woman with frightened eyes. She waited for Ethel at the door on the day the handover act was signed.

Are you the new owner?

I hope so, Ethel answered.

Ill tell you about Marquis, June began. Nina Bennett, the previous owner, was a saint. She rescued him ten years ago. Hed been a stray, ragged, in November, and she took him in. She fed him, and he never left her side.

June fell silent, then lowered her voice.

When she collapsed from a stroke right there in the kitchen, he was by her head. The ambulance broke the door down, and he stayed there, not moving.

Ethel stood in the doorway, clutching a ring of fresh keys three of them: two for the locks, one for the postbox that now had no one to check it.

He isnt dangerous, June continued. He doesnt scratch, doesnt damage furniture. He just wont come near anyone. Ive fed him for two months and he never approaches me. He eats when Im out. I set a dish down, he darts to the door. I return its empty. He never comes when Im there.

Perhaps hes scared?

Hes not scared. Hes waiting. Every evening, around six, he perches by the door and watches. Nina used to come home from her walk at six, and hed be there.

Ethel moved in on Saturday. She had few possessions, accustomed to compact living. Twenty years as a cardiac nurse, then a stint as a junior doctor, then redundancy, a cheap room in Walthamstow that had taken a toll on her knees and spirit. Owning a home had been a dream for so long it had become a plan. Shed saved for nine years.

Movers hauled in a sofa, two wardrobes, boxes of crockery. Marquis vanished. Ethel found him later in the storage cupboard, curled behind the ironing board, ears flattened, gigantic and motionless.

I get it, she said softly. Its hard for you. Its hard for me too.

She placed a bowl at the same leftleg spot of the stool where the old one had stood and left, shutting the kitchen door behind her.

In the morning the bowl was empty.

A month passed. They existed side by side under the same roof but in different worlds.

Ethel rose at six, brewed coffee, and headed off to her night shift. She had taken a post at the community health centre on Union Street, not cardiology, but after a year of unemployment there were no other options.

Marquis only appeared in the kitchen once the lock clicked. She knew this because she always left a long, silvergrey strand of her hair across the bowl. Each evening the hair lay on the floor, a sign hed eaten.

In the evenings she sank into the armchair by the window and read the same books left on the shelf by Mabel Bennett Chekhov, his pages filled with tiny pencil notes in the margins: exclamation marks, occasional single words like yes, exactly, me too. Reading those annotations gave her a strange sense of recognition, as if a woman shed never met was thinking exactly as she did.

Marquis waited not in the bedroom but in the hallway, by the front door, precisely at six each night, waiting.

By the end of March Ethel fell ill. A flu hit her hard in a single night thirtynine degrees, sore throat, aching joints. She called in sick, took paracetamol, and lay down. She had no strength to get up, not even to feed the cat.

Marquis, she croaked from the bedroom, Im sorry. I cant.

Silence.

She drifted into a heavy, buzzing sleep. When she awoke, something pressed against her feet. Not heavy, just a warm, steady weight.

Marquis lay at the foot of the bed, curled like a loaf, eyes fixed on her, unblinking, serious. For the first time in weeks he was not in the hallway, not in the cupboard, not behind the ironing board. He was there.

Ethel didnt move. She feared that any motion would send him away. She simply stared, and he stared back, the quiet between them saying everything that words could not.

You already know this, she whispered.

Marquis pressed his ears against his paws, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.

He didnt leave.

She spent three days bedridden; for three days Marquis remained at her feet, only venturing to the bowl when she mustered the strength to pour food. On the third day, when her fever broke and she curled up on the kitchen floor under a blanket with a mug of broth, Marquis hopped onto the stool, sat beside her, and began to purr.

Soft, raspy, as if hed forgotten how to purr and was relearning it.

Ethel set her mug down, took off her glasses, and extended a hand slowly, palm up.

Marquis sniffed her fingers, then nudged his forehead against her palm.

She wept. Not out of sentimentalityshe never cried over cutenessbut because a simple, clear truth unfolded inside her: she had bought a life that wasnt hers, with books that werent hers and a cat that wasnt hers, because she had nothing left of her own. And the cat had stayed in a life that wasnt his, with a woman who wasnt his, because there was nowhere else for him to go. Two burdens, two addons, two extra beings folded into the price.

Now they sat together in the kitchen, fifteen cat years on his side, fiftysix human years on hers, sharing warmth.

Marquis purred, and Ethel rested her hand on his massive, heavy head, realizing perhaps this was what it felt like when you dont look for something, dont ask for it, yet it arrives.

In May she stripped the old floral wallpaper the tiny brownflowered pattern that had made the flat seem darker than it was and painted the walls a warm, creamy ivory. She left the linoleum for now; the money wasnt enough to redo everything, but it no longer mattered. The flat stopped feeling foreign. She didnt notice the exact moment it happened.

Mabel Bennetts books stayed on the shelf. Ethel added a handful of her own about a dozen or fifteen. Chekhov, still marked with those pencilled notes, occupied the same spot. Occasionally she opened it in the evenings and read not the story but the marginal scribbles: strangers yes, exactly, me too, and she nodded.

She tossed the dead geraniums out as soon as she moved in beyond rescue. Only now shed planted a new pot, the same windowsill where Marquis had first watched her view. He now lounged there less often, preferring the armchair beside her or her lap if the evening stretched long and the book was good.

At six oclock he no longer padded to the door.

In June, I, Rebecca Harper, happened to run into her at the local Tesco on Baker Street. Ethel stood in the queue, a bag of cat food in one hand, a bottle of kefir in the other.

Hows the flat? I asked. Any regrets?

She smiled thinly. No.

What about the cat?

She hesitated, shifting the food between her fingers.

You know, Rebecca, she said, they should have kept the price up. Wed have gotten more.

I laughed. Ethel didnt.

When she got home, Marquis was waiting at the hallway, beside the shoes. The lock clicked, his head lifted, and he gave a slow, single blink.

Thats how you greet someone youve been waiting for all your life.