The Appointment
a story by Molesworth
Chapter One
It was the old-fashioned air of the advertisement that first caught my attention. It had been headed "Manservant required by English gentlewoman" and demanded that the successful applicant be "clean, courteous and respectful at all times". It went on to say that the position required flexibility, devotion to duty and unquestioning obedience. It finished with a polite but stern warning: "Time-wasters are strongly advised not to apply".
It was a lengthy advertisement. The expected qualities of the applicant were there in great detail but there was little suggestion as to what the manservant's duties would be. Just a simple statement that he would be expected to meet all of the lady's needs.
When I first read it, I sniggered. "Hoity-toity bitch!" I had muttered as I cast the magazine aside.
Something had caught my attention, though. Every time I walked past or sat near the coffee table where the magazine lay, I would find myself rereading that same advertisement. It was something that I could not help doing, a strange compulsion that just would not go away. It was a compulsion that was to grow stronger by the hour. I must have read that advertisement a dozen times that first day. The following morning, almost as soon as I had woken-up, I was back there scrutinising it.
I have no idea what I expected to achieve by looking at it so often. By now, I knew it word for word, of course. If kept on staring at it for long enough, perhaps some extra detail would reveal itself, resolving some of the ambiguity as to the unspecified duties.
And, the lady's "needs." What might they be? Perhaps ... No, that was a disrespectful thought and disrespect clearly wasn't on the menu.
For that day and the three that followed, I could think of little else. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't concentrate. I grew tired and listless. A few words in an increasingly dog-eared magazine seemed to be consuming my very being. It seemed such a ridiculous situation in which to find oneself. I spent almost every minute trying to imagine what this English gentlewoman might be like or what duties she might wish me to perform. Somehow, I felt sure that that I was the one that she was seeking. I knew it to be impossible that that was the case. I felt shamed by the glaring irrationality of my own thoughts. But, I knew! I knew deep down within myself, that the lady was calling to me and me alone.
The realisation that my application was all but inevitable had come quickly but still I could not bring myself to act.
I felt like a character in a cartoon, an angel perched on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each offering conflicting advice. "The lady calls you, how can you refuse?" asked one. "You are being irrational, throw the thing away and get on with your life" instructed the other. I had no idea, at the time, which voice belonged to the angel and which to the devil. It remains a question that I am unable to answer.
There was so much that could go wrong. So much danger. The whole thing had set my imagination reeling. Endless possibilities and permutations were racing through my mind. Some of these were rather pleasant. Some of them were anything but. I have never considered myself a coward but I cannot deny that dread was my constant companion through my days of uncertainty. That deep, growling, unsettling feeling at the bottom of the stomach became an all to frequent sensation. I was becoming unwell. A heart attack seemed an alarmingly real possibility if I did not end this torment. The only thing that I was sure of was that the time had come to make a decision. I could not go on living with this uncertainty.
It was simple; all I had to do was make a telephone call. If I didn't like the sound of it, I could hang up without leaving my details and forget all about it. Why did something so simple take three days of ceaseless fretting to occur to me? I have no idea, and neither can I explain why, having taken the decision, it took me four hours to pluck up enough courage to act upon it. I had never met the lady in question. Yet, somehow, already she had instilled both a terror and a fascination within me, which surpassed anything that I had known before.
Finally, I picked up the 'phone, my trembling hand held the receiver to my unshaved face. There were knots in my stomach, perspiration forming on my brow. My fingers stabbed at the buttons with an uncomfortable blend of deliberation and sheer clumsiness. As I heard the call connect, I gulped in a way that made me feel an emptiness inside. Something deep, cavernous and utterly devoid of light. The ringing tone grew louder and more menacing with every pulse.
And then, her voice: clear, strong and yet, supremely feminine. Her tone was majestically formal but beneath it, lay something altogether more playful and beguiling. The harsh overtones weaved their way around the gentle undertones. There was beauty in each, but together, they had a power to enrapture and to hypnotise. I found myself somewhere else, somewhere outside of space and time. It was with something of a start, that I found myself replacing the receiver as I finished writing down the address and the time of the appointment.
