Chapter 7: A Bit Of A Do

Ms Fulbright called me in to her office. “You do seem to be getting on famously with Mrs Braddock,” she said. “She was very pleased with how you were able to help Marcie.”

“I’d be happier if I could just keep my ‘services’ to the legal kind, to be frank.” I replied, although I was pretty sure what she would say. She didn’t surprise me.

“Oh well, we can’t always get what we want, can we?” Vivienne responded, leaving me as unhappy as I had expected to be. “Anyway, Mrs Braddock is hosting a dinner party and she would like you to attend.”

“Really?” I said. It seemed like a curiously normal sort of thing for her to be doing. “Why does she need legal support for a dinner party?”

“I don’t think its your legal skills she was looking for. I think it was more your social skills. You got on so well with her daughters, I believe. Frankly, if I can bill al little more of your time, that’s fine by me. Anyway, it’s tomorrow evening. 7:00 at her home. Black tie.”

Black tie? Who holds a dinner party at home in black tie these days, I thought. But as usual Mrs Braddock was a rule to herself. Vivienne Fulbright wouldn’t take any excuses from me over the event and insisted that I go, in the interests of good customer relations. My suggestion that, if I didn’t, it would be very much in the interests of good staff relations didn’t cut any ice.

I arrived at Mrs Braddock in full dinner suit, wing collar shirt and carefully knotted bow tie. Obeying social convention, I had brought flowers. I was greeted at the door by Andrea Braddock’s daughter Janice.

I was pleased to see that she had made as much effort as I had. She was wearing a tight, strapless, silver lamé evening dress with a long skirt. She looked more like she belonged on the red carpet of some awards ceremony than at a suburban dinner party, but I wasn’t complaining.

“Come in,” she said, “Mummy’s just finishing getting ready. She’ll be down in a minute. Let me take your coat. Oh, mummy said would you mind wearing this.” She held out what looked like a leather bag. “All the boys are wearing them.”

As I took the black leather bag, I realised that it was a gimp hood, the sort of thing worn by men in all the best femdom movies. I suppose I must have looked less than willing. “Oh don’t be a spoil sport.”

Reluctantly accepting that this, like every encounter with Mrs Braddock, was going to be anything but normal, I did as she asked. I put the hood on and caught site of myself in the hall mirror, thinking that if I looked ridiculous at least no one else would recognise me.

“There,” I said, “is that all right?”

“You’ve forgotten to do your zip up,” Janice reached up and closing the zip across my mouth. How that was going to work for a dinner party I couldn’t imagine. “I’ll bet you’re the same with your trousers,” she said with a laugh.

Janice showed me into the living room. Marcie was already there, as elegant as her sister in a high- necked scarlet gown that looked extremely proper until she moved and I saw the skirt was slit from hem to hip, providing arousing glimpses of calf and thigh, not to mention the red patent high-heeled pumps that she had on her feet. Marcie had a man dressed just as I was and hooded too alongside her. I wondered if this was the locked-in-chastity boyfriend that Marcie had mentioned before. I assumed it was, Marcie still had the key that she had shown me dangling provocatively from a chain about her neck. Beside them were two other couples, the men identically dressed to myself and Marcie’s boyfriend, and a woman of about Andrea Braddock’s age wearing a dark blue velvet creation that would have not looked out of place in an episode of ‘Poirot’.

“You’ve not met, have you?” Janice asked. I shook my head, uncertain of the protocol at such events and whether it was polite to mumble into my zipped mouthpiece. “This is my mother’s legal adviser,” Janice said pointing at me without bothering to give me a name. She turned to the woman in blue. It seemed none of the men were going to be dignified with a name, “This is Ellen Hanson.”

I had the distinct impression that I was supposed to remember the name and it did sound familiar but fortunately since Janice. Marcie and Ellen all made it plain that no conversational intervention was required from the men, it didn’t matter. It was only when Marcie said, “Tell us about your new book, Ellen,” that I remembered she was the author of ‘The Inner Drive’, the self-help book that Mrs Braddock had so extolled.

After only a few moments talk, Andrea Braddock made her entrance. I hadn’t been sure what to expect – full on fetish glamour or Oscars red carpet kitch. In the end it was closer to the latter than the former. She was in a long strapless black gown worn with evening gloves and a black jet chocker. Her hair was piled high on her head which together with the heels on her shoes gave her an imposing height advantage over the entire assembly. “Good evening one and all,” she beamed. “I am so sorry to have kept you waiting. Goodness, have none of you got drinks? I apologise.”

She reached across to a small table, picked up a handbell and rang it three times.

Moments later, a waitress – hired for the evening I assumed – appeared in response. “Could you bring the drinks in now, please, Lucy,” Andrea said. It was only when I heard the name that I realised that the woman waiting to serve us in her black uniform dress with white apron and cap, was Mr. Braddock’s ex-secretary.

“Of course, Mrs Braddock,” Lucy responded in a quavering voice that told me she was hovering between feelings of humiliation and arousal. She went out and returned with a tray, offering drinks to each of the women in turn before leaving the room again making it plain that the men were not going to need to unzip their mouths.

The women carried on with their chatting. Much of it seemed to be around how much Ellen Hanson’s book had inspired each of them. Ellen Hanson seemed to take it in good part, not embarrassed by some of the fulsome praise but not glorying in it either. I found most of what was said so much gobbledygook. After all if you want to turn your life around, don’t you just decide to get on and do it? Then I realised. I wasn’t having too much success in doing that in my own situation with Mrs Braddock.

Eventually Lucy returned and waited politely until Mrs Braddock noticed her so that she could inform us that it was time to eat. Once in the dining room it seemed that the men were going to have no more success with food than they had with drink. The table was only laid with places for the women.

“Now,” said Andrea, “attached to each of your chairs is a leash, ladies. If you connect the free end to your escort’s collar there will be no danger of them wandering off while we eat.” Mrs Braddock demonstrated by getting me to stand behind her chair and fastening the leash to the ring on the collar of my hood. Seeing that I was tethered as she desired and that all my fellow men were compliantly allowing themselves to be treated the same way, she invited the women to take their seats and said, “Lucy, we’ll start now.”

As Lucy busied herself with the starters and filling the guests wine glasses, Andrea turned to Ellen and said, “It’s so good of you to come and join us, this evening. Ever since we heard that your new book was going to be for women who wanted to take the lead in their personal relationships, well, it was a sort of validation, I suppose.”

Ellen looked around the table at the group of successful, glamorously dressed women. “It’s good to have the chance to meet up with those that are trying to take the whole ‘Inner Drive’ philosophy to the next level. Of course, the first step is to gain control of your own state but once that is done, then of course true development comes with control of your surroundings. And for most of us, I suppose that means, the men in our lives. I was intrigued when you told me about this little group of yours. There is a surprisingly large number of similar groups springing up, with women aiming to lead in their relationships. Perhaps we shouldn’t find it odd. After all men have been paying for this sort of treatment for years, so it is obvious that it is needed. It’s only sensible for women to take advantage of what is an obvious flaw in the male sexual drive. Women have to establish their own agenda and then reach in to their relationships to reach up as a couple.”

As the conversations went on, it became clear that the women around the table, including Andrea’s daughters, all shared an interest in sexually dominating their men as a way of ‘growing in emotional security’ as Ellen Hanson would put it. In fact it became more and more obvious that what I had taken to be simply a self-help book for women was really a tract promoting the idea of women as sexual dominants. All of the men, me included, seemed quite content to stand quietly by while the women discussed corporal punishment and if was an essential element in such relationships and whether men’s own sexual interests should be catered for as a way of increasing a woman’s dominance or simply ignored as an irrelevance.