My favourite journalist writes:

I found the address of the Party Susan Club in a magazine and sent away for a brochure. Of course, it’s not called the Party Susan Club but one of the club rules states, ‘Members shall not annoy or bring discredit to the club or its members and shall be discreet about all matters…’ After all, they still have my address.

The club was started in 1988 after the directors, Adam and Moira, had sampled the British swinging scene and found it wanting. It, according to the brochure, immediately became the couples club to join. The brochure went on, ‘What makes it work is the proven combination of contact listings, magazines, newsletters and social events plus the genuine, active, enthusiastic membership. They’re discreet. They’re selective. They’re very special, fun-loving people’. I can now tell you they are also the kind of people who can spot the difference between ‘Muffin’ and ‘Misty Buff’ on a paint chart at fifty paces.

I know that now, but when I was filling in my application to join, I indulged in a fantasy where this particular area of bedroom Britain would be the one to really set me on fire. I imagined semis in Surbiton filled to their add-on porches with glamorous and groaning cost analysts licking honey of the thighs of their wives. So I wanted to present myself on the form as the kind of woman equally at home with leaded lights or troilism.

Of course, I needed a partner. I asked Ben [the alternatively persuaded friend of the author] as I felt resisting the temptations of the flesh and maintaining a professional detachment would be a lot harder if Dominic [the author’s husband] accompanied me to an orgy.

Ben wasn’t too happy when, filling in the application form, I gave his occupation as painter and decorator and mine as secretary. He thought that it sounded too down-market and that we’d only be matched up to swap with couples of a similar ilk. I had to keep reminding him that we weren’t a couple and we were definitely not going to swap. If anybody was to ask, he was to tell them we were strictly voyeurs.

As part of my introduction to the Party Susan Club, I got to place an ad in their ‘Contact Masterlist’. After much deliberation I came up with the following: ‘He, twenty-eight, submissive; she, thirty-four, dominant, both bi-sexual. We are a fun-loving, attractive couple who would like to swap horny letters with photos if possible and meet like-minded couples and singles who are truly bi-sexual’. We felt that there was something for everyone in that list. I picked ‘dominant’ as it would allow me to hit anybody who came on too strong and the ‘horny letters with photos’ would give us some indication of what we were letting ourselves in for before going to any parties. With hindsight, I would have made one important change. Never give any indication that you are open to suggestions from single men – there is normally a good reason why they’re single. Flushed with the feeling that my description fitted us to a tee I sent off our Ł40 six-month membership fee and waited for the invites to parties, trips and discos (and let’s not forget the horny letters) to come flooding in.

To be continued…

A few days later, I received a letter from the club containing the Masterlist and a run down of the activities planned for the coming months. I scoured the contact ads to find ours and was embarrassed to find that it was by far the most explicit. Some of the others were so vague that they could have been advertising for a fourth hand at bridge. I was perturbed by so many people describing themselves as ‘clean’ as it had the effect of suggesting exactly the opposite. Picking ‘clean’ as one of your most distinguishing attributes speaks volumes about your lack of others.

Of course, all the men advertising were Well Endowed (WE) or indeed VWE. It would be a brave man who admitted to being NVWE amongst those stallions. Likewise, a lot of people mentioned that they had a GSOH. I spent ages plumbing my sexual lexicon looking for words to fit that acronym until Ben pointed out that it meant Good Sense of Humour. These things are all relative of course and I was pretty positive that the majority of men on offer had dicks like shoelaces and ANSOHAA (Absolutely No Sense Of Humour At All).

One advert did get me going, though. It read, ‘Very attractive couple with luxury lifestyle seek truly bisexual female who, once relationships have formed, would like to move into their large country house and share a life of worldwide travel, horses, socialising and blissful sexuality…’ I could quite easily put out for a stately home and regular trips to the Easter Islands. But I decided against replying. There was something very suspicious about mentioning horses and blissful sexuality in the same sentence.

To be continued…

If I were to apply for the luxury lifestyle, I would make sure that I followed the helpful hints on replying to other swingers thoughtfully provided by the club. When the replies started pouring in, I began to wonder if maybe not everybody had read them thoroughly enough:

Hint No.1. ‘Look for shared interests as indicated in each personal advertisement.’

Just where in our advert did we indicate that we would be interested in watching ‘adult baby videos’ with a nightwatchman from Cleethorpes.

Hint No.2. ‘Don’t be too put off by geography. That special meet could be well worth the journey.’

Dear Harry from Hampshire, It wasn’t the geography that put me off: I wouldn’t touch your beautifully photographed ‘quite WE cock’ if it was only a few yards away.

Hint No.3. ‘Do use good quality paper. Try typing if your handwriting is not that good.’

Judging from some of the scrawl we received, not using a typewriter does leave a hand free for masturbation.

Hint No. 4. ‘Do not send full-frontal pictures with your first letter.’

Rita from Wolverhampton craftily got round this rule by sending only photocopies of full frontal pictures. Though, from the murky quality of the reproductions, I wasn’t actually sure if I was looking at a fully frontal Rita. It could just as easily have been some snaps of the Chunnel.

Hint No.5. ‘Write fully about yourselves and how you think you match the desires of the advertisers.’

Does a letter that says little more than, and I quote, ‘Please write back to me as nobody else ever does’, suggest someone who could fully match your desires?

One of the most important pieces of advice the guide gave was, ‘Avoid brown envelopes. We know its cheaper but it makes you look cheap too!’ Sending off letters detailing your desires to have every orifice plugged won’t make you look cheap unless you send them in brown envelopes.

Shortly after the first batch of letters came an invite to a swingers buffet to be held in a Kensington hotel. I RSVPed that I’d be delighted to attend their ‘Finger Food and Fondle’ affair and could they please send me their information pack on ‘What Happens At A Couples Get Together Evening’?

This hadn’t arrived by the day of the party but I took things in my stride. Adam and Moira were probably far too busy piping Philadelphia into vol-au-vent cases to attend to their correspondence. Ben, on the other hand, was feeling the strain. He had spent the day trying to procure Valium and when that had failed he settled for a six-pack and his most passion-killer knickers.

I, on the other hand, was going for sexy. Adam had written on the invite that it was fine for the ladies to dress sexily as long as they didn’t frighten the hotel staff on the way in. As I sat on my bed doing up my suspenders, Ben walked into the room and threw the Chunnel pictures at me. I took a long hard look at Rita’s aperture and swapped the stockings for something with a reinforced gusset.

To be continued…

We arrived at the hotel an hour late after repeatedly stopping the cab for Ben to go for a wee. At the reception desk, I felt myself redden as I asked for Adam Brown’s suite. I was sure the receptionist thought I was a slut and I wanted to flash him my gusset to prove that I wasn’t.

I knocked on the door of Suite 209. The door flew open and a bald man in his late fifties in cream slacks and white shoes, slapped a name tag on my left breast. I could see I would be spending all evening fending off enquiries as to what the other one was called. I guessed from his lack of name tag that this must be Adam. He ushered us into the bedroom of the suite and introduced us to a small, elegant woman in her early sixties whose left breast was named Kath.

‘Hello,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Have you been to a Harvester’s before?’

We both looked blank.

‘It’s your first time, isn’t it?’

‘We haven’t got a baby sitter,’ burbled Ben.

Kath looked blank.

Sensing that we had reached an impasse, Kath showed us into the suite’s living room, reached by passing through the bedroom. The presence of two double beds unnerved Ben so much he grabbed hold of my waist from behind and was stuck to my back like a limpet. As we Flanagan-and-Allened our way into the living-room, I kept my head bowed in case the other guests had already started.

Adam and Moira hadn’t pushed the boat out laying on a spread. There were three boxes of sweet vinegar, a bottle of Blue Nun and two plates of artfully arranged Twiglets. Knocking back a glass of wine, I asked Kath, ‘What happens at a couples get together evening?’

‘Didn’t you get the information sheet?’

‘No.’

‘Well, nothing happens usually.’

I felt Ben loosen his grip on my stomach.

‘Not for a few hours anyway. People take a long time to get going.’

Ben’s fingers jabbed my intestines.

To be continued…

Loosened by the drink, I felt able at last to look around the room. There were about fifteen other couples present, mostly in their early thirties and all thankfully clothed, not a Chunnel in sight. They all seemed fairly respectable. The snatches of conversation I heard centred on jobs and cars. On the surface it could have been your average office party. The normality of it did little to calm Ben’s nerves and he pushed me into the bathroom, unwilling to be left alone for even a second to relieve his bladder.

When we came out, somebody had hit the dimmer switch and most of the swingers were smooching to soft rock classics. We stood against a wall and watched. Next to us, a woman called Sue was smooching with her partner, Beppe. At first, I suspected Sue was a transvestite but Ben, who has an amazing eye for hairpieces, assured me that if she was, she would be wearing a better wig. Wiggy, as we cleverly dubbed her, was wearing large glasses which assured her a clearer view of Beppe, who, a foot shorter, was nestling somewhere in her cleavage.

I scoured the room looking for possible talent as Eric Clapton launched into ‘Wonderful Tonight’. Eric obviously hadn’t seen the trouser on offer at the Party Susan Club. Castro-clone moustaches and Burton ‘fun’ shirts seemed to be the order of the day; there was a hint of the chip shop about all of them. There were more white shoes on show than in ‘Emergency Ward Ten’. Their ladies were mostly bottle blondes (the preferred shade L’Oreal’s ‘Myra’, I think) approximating ‘sexy’ in leatherette skirts and plunging necklines. One brunette stood out from the crowd. This was because she was of a height that made Beppe look like Meadowlark Lemon. I found her a reliable gauge as to the mood of the crowd: slowly, throughout the evening, her clothes seemed to melt away.

The swingers were not the slightest bit interested in me. I felt snubbed. I dragged Ben on to the dance floor and we bumped and ground like pros. Not a dickie bird. Perhaps these people knew that we hadn’t put ‘clean’ in our advert.

The music came to a stop. Adam was in charge of the DJ-ing and he couldn’t find his Beverley Craven tape in the dark. A new couple had come into the room. They were first timers. I could tell that from their Underneath the Arches body posture. Stopping only to drain off the last of the vinegar, I went over and introduced myself, that is to say I pointed to my breast and smiled. Ben assumed his position jammed up against my back.

To be continued…

I was right. It was Paula and Steve’s first time. They had walked round the block several times before plucking up the courage to come in. Paula was a secretary and Steve was a cab driver. I asked them why they had come.

‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘we’ve been together six months now and we thought this might make a change.’

Six months? Six months into an affair, I’m still doing it with the lights off. God knows what Steve had up his sleeve for the seven-year itch. Trying not to betray my surprise I ploughed on with the questions. It was hard to concentrate when I knew that they were thinking, ‘This women wants to shag us’.

‘Do you go both ways?’ I asked Paul.

‘Definitely not,’ he said, eyeing Ben suspiciously.

‘Do you think swinging is about desiring another person, or will any old body do? Is it just about orifices?’

Paula looked confused and then piped up with, ‘You should be a journalist, all those questions you ask.’

My mouth fell open but Ben stepped in with, ‘She used to be in telephone sales. She never stops when we’re at home.’

His ‘let’s indulge wifey’ tone was too convincing and I elbowed him in the stomach.

‘Our baby-sitter didn’t turn up,’ he gasped.

The conversation seemed to dry up. They had given us the once over and Steve was obviously terrified by the idea that Ben wanted to penetrate him. Fortunately the silence was broken by Adam joining us to ask how we were enjoying the party.

‘Who’s Victor Meldrew?’ Paula whispered, pointing to Adam.

I introduced Adam to the debutants. Struggling for something to say I came up with, ‘And where is the lovely Moira this evening?’

He choked back a Twiglet and said, ‘She left me six months ago. She’s gone to the States and she’s not coming back. But all the hurt and anger have gone now.’

My, emotions fly fast on the swinging scene. Six weeks to get over a five-year relationship? Paula and Steve nodded sympathetically at Adam. It was the kind of timescale they were working to.

‘I’m ready for a new relationship,’ affirmed Adam. He looked at me with a glint in his eye. ‘Do you want to dance?’

Round and round the room I twirled with Adam’s thigh twanging my gusset. I looked over my shoulder imploringly at Ben but he was still involved in a stand off with Steve.

‘I think this is a Gentleman’s Excuse Me,’ said Ben, finally coming to my rescue. He led me away and I toasted his manliness with another glass of Blue Nun.

To be continued…

By now, I was decidedly squiffy. There still didn’t seem to be any sex going on but I knew the crowd was warming up as the petite brunette barometer was down to her stockings and suspenders. I say stockings but I doubt if her little legs could accommodate much more than a pop sock. The anticipation was getting unbearable. Why didn’t somebody just go ahead and do it? Well somebody did go ahead and do it. Me. To the complete horror of Paula and Steve, I took my breasts out. This is a real problem I have. Something happens to me at parties. As soon as things seem to be getting dull, out come my bosoms. I think my breasts have Pavlovian relationship to boredom.

It was like somebody had fired a starting pistol. Ben reacted with speed in returning my breasts to their rightful place but Paula and Steve shot out on to the hotel balcony to hide. Wiggy also saw my bosoms as a sign and had removed her knickers. She was sitting on the settee with one leg hooked over Kath whilst some moustache, not Beppe, got her glasses steamed up with some digital loveplay. I felt the Leibfraumilch churn inside me.

Ben pleaded with me to go home. Ten more minutes, I promised him.

‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing into the bedroom.

On one of the beds I could see Wiggy’s bottom bouncing up and down atop the prone body of a fingering moustache. Beppe was not perturbed as he was active on the other bed servicing a woman from behind. As she was face down I couldn’t see her name tag. Beppe was delighted to perform for a crowd and slowed down his strokes, allowing us to view his manhood more clearly. I lurched back into the living-room and was cornered by Adam. He led me to the couch where I passed out, face down in his lap.

Ben shook me awake. Apparently, I was there for about three quarters of an hour. He assured me afterwards that he had spent those forty-five minutes talking to a New Zealand woman about stippling a mantelpiece, but I’ll never know for sure. We had to go back into the bedroom again to get our coats and amazingly, Wiggy was still bouncing away, her hairpiece having slipped a good inch. I had an overwhelming urge to smack her bum. So I did. Repeatedly. She responded by bouncing faster. Ben threw my coat at me in disgust and marched me out of the hotel.

The End. (I will send accounts of other parties visited by this writer in the future.)

Adam from the Party Susan Club telephoned. It transpired that the party in the Kensington hotel had merely been a pre-med for the big op - a full-on swinging affair in a Gothic tower in the heart of the Kent countryside.

‘It’s going to be very special,’ promised Adam. ‘There’s going to be a live show, prizes for the sexiest-dressed person, there’s a Jacuzzi and a four-poster games room.’

I accepted his invite quickly and said goodbye, partly because I didn’t want him to fill me in on the missing forty-five minutes I’d spent face down on his lap. The other reason was that Dominic had picked up the extension to listen in on the call.

Dominic wanted to come with me. He was excited by the ideas of a naked romp in a National Trust Jacuzzi but I’m sure in his fantasy he didn’t picture the other bathers as looking like the anaphrodisiac Adam and co. As that was exactly what Ben pictured the other bathers as looking like, he would have been only too happy to stand down as my consort. Dominic refused to believe my protestations about how hard the Party Susans had been hit by the ugly stick.

‘Group sex is a big fantasy of mine,’ he suddenly admitted.

‘Ten minutes in the Jacuzzi with Wiggy would pop that particular balloon,’ I said, picturing her in a floral bathing cap on top of him. ‘You can’t come. Believe me, I’m doing you a favour.’

Dominic didn’t believe me and on the night of the party threw a wobbly about being left out, which made it all the more awkward for me to have to ask him if he’d drive down later in the evening to collect us.

So I wasn’t in the best of moods on the way down to Kent and the fact that there was no bar on the train would have been the final straw had Ben not gone through his rucksack and found some miniatures which had been given to him by a grateful Quantas steward. I was thinking about the sexiest-dressed person competition. How could I not win it? Just having my own hair put me head and shoulders above most of the other competitors. So, although I was wearing an out fit that would have looked over cautious on a nun, I had a rubber dress in my handbag. Ben, still peeved that I’d insisted he come instead of Dominic, hadn’t even bothered to wash for the evening so at the very least I had to beat him.

We were told to meet the other guests in a village pub. Arriving half an hour early, it suddenly occurred to me that we had no idea what the people we were going to be meeting looked like. The trouble with being in a small pub in Much Hampton on the Mind on a Saturday night, was that everybody was dressed for sex-cess. With only a finite number of available farmers, the women had to take the hard sell approach. Therefore, no hemline could be hiked too high, no neckline plunged too low. The acres of flesh outnumbered the acres of lycra by ten to one and stilettos were wielded in every colour as long as it was white. How could we sort out the swingers from the merely cheap? Ben refused point blank to go up and ask anybody.

The white stilettos were the first sign that something strange had happened between London and Much Hampton. Somewhere along the line we had slipped into the Twilight Zone and time seemed to be working backwards. Sipping a rum and pep, I ignored the exhortations of the DJ to join in the Rowing Song. The music slipped backwards through the seventies and I’m sure just before Esther and Abi launched into ‘Cinderella Rockerfella’, I heard the couple at the next table discussing the three-day week. Where were the other swingers? Unless Wiggy jumped up on the bar and did the splits over the optics, I could see us spending the evening discussing the fuel crisis, saying no to Europe and wondering if Ruby would ever learn the secrets of Mrs. Bridges’ duff. As I tried to work out how much a tanner was in new pees, a woman dressed in a school uniform walked into the bar. Since she had probably borrowed the uniform off her granddaughter, I knew that I had found a swinger.

The pub was soon swarming with them. (I should never have worried about not being able to spot a swinger as there is definitely a uniform. Women who have changed hands more times than the Olympic flame wear a look of bitter experience. The men do wear white shoes and though the age of the Medallion Man may be long gone, there is still a gap in their chest tans where their Krugerrands used to be.) There were a couple of familiar faces. The petite brunette had been there all the time but I hadn’t been able to see her over the top of the bar. Adam turned up last, still Moira-less. We left the pub en masse and followed Adam through the village in a crocodile, like some obscene school outing.

We turned off the main road and found ourselves in a field in complete darkness. Somebody was flashing a torch in the distance and I could just about make out the outline of a tower against the night sky. As we got closer, we were told to keep quiet as the other tower residents were definitely not swingers. For a while there was only the creak of a leatherette mini-skirt to be heard. Once inside, we were told which areas of the tower were out of bounds and shown where to change if we needed to. With the competition as it was, the sexist-dress prize was going to be a walk over.

Getting around the tower meant passing through entrances sometimes no more than four foot in height. Only the brunette could pass through unhindered. In the kitchen the party fare seemed above par for the Party Susan brigade but the drink was still in the Sarson’s league. Ben went to open our own wine and, in his nervousness, managed to snap the corkscrew in half. It was an omen. And I didn’t listen.

We moved into the living-room or what was probably The Great Hall. It was a circular room with heavy stone walls, a walk-in fireplace and real animal skins scattered across the floor. You would have thought that the air would have been heavy with sexual expectancy, but the snatches of conversation I heard from other people were rather mundane. These people, when asked, would invariably say that the reason they took up swinging was boredom and yet swinging seemed to bore them too.

‘Didn’t see you at the Ealing party last Saturday,’ said one woman lifelessly to another.

‘Couldn’t find a baby-sitter,’ she sighed back.

The women obviously saw each other week in, week out. They had come to the point in their marriages where, to get a new dishwasher, they had to put out for six boring men instead of just one. Realising they’d been duped, they’d switched off. They were dead behind the eyes.

Not that Ben was exactly the life and soul. He sat on a sofa, kicking the head of a snake skin and refusing to be drawn into conversation with anybody. I got chatting to a man, Billy, who recognised me from the hotel. He introduced me to his girlfriend Sabina, who, at nineteen was a good twenty years younger than him. I asked him why he’d joined the club.

‘We wanted a bit of excitement.’

Though the response was entirely expected, it made me angry. Here was a none-too-attractive man pushing forty with a very beautiful teenage girlfriend, moaning about the lack of excitement in his life.

Sabina added, giggling, ‘It’s a bit of variety.’

If she wanted to change, I wanted to tell her, then change Billy for something with a few less miles on the clock. The conversation was cut short by all the lights being turned out. I joined Ben on the sofa. As the room grew quiet, he began to laugh.

At one end of the room, there was a small stage. Suddenly, entering from behind the arras, came Adam, dressed as the Grim Reaper. Ben laughed louder.

‘Quiet, quiet,’ the Grim Reaper roared, waving his scythe in Ben’s direction. He made a welcoming speech and then added, ‘There are ghosts in this tower. Tonight, before the celebrations can commence, we must first pay three forfeits to appease their restless spirits.’

A shiver went down my spine. It wasn’t the ghosts; I knew that forfeits meant party games…

I was right. For game one, the Grim Reaper selected a woman from one side of the room and a man dressed in battle fatigues from the other. A black bin-liner was brought out and the Reaper informed them that they were to get inside and swap underwear. The couple were blindfolded and the bin-liner was then swapped for a clear plastic sheet. It wasn’t much of a game as the woman wasn’t wearing any knickers.

As Grim pointed his scythe around the room to select the contestants for game two, Ben and I sank back into the sofa. I would have been more willing to go with the reaper had he been the real thing. He picked three men and three women who were each given a party trick to perform. If their performance made any of the others laugh, the laugher had to forfeit an item of clothing. The fact that none of them undid so much as a button should give you some idea of the level of hilarity this game provoked. Even Ben stopped laughing. One woman had to simulate intercourse with the aid of a three-foot inflatable penis, two men had to have a cock fight with dildoes and another did some kind of lion taming act of I which I lost the plot completely. I seem to remember that a blow-up doll featured in the action too. She was the only one who looked remotely turned on.

I wasn’t really watching the game too closely as I was trying to get an answer out of Sabina as to what she was doing with someone like Billy. He misinterpreted my interest and offered Ben and me a lift back to London - no strings of course.

The Grim Reaper had warned that as the games progressed, more and more couples would have to become involved in the action. When he announced that he needed five couples for the third game, I suddenly wished I’d dropped my drawers in the bin-bag. Fortunately, the others were such, if you’ll pardon the expression, eager beavers. The couples were swapped around and the five men made to stand in a line with their underwear around their ankles. The women were then told to give the men an erection without using their hands or mouths. As none of them were versed in the erotic art of ‘bag piping‘, coitus a mamilla was the only option available and bosoms were bouncing like Space Hoppers, to surprisingly little effect. Not a man was left standing. These people were living out their fantasies and yet nobody was remotely turned on. They weren’t excited. I wasn’t excited. Why didn’t everybody put their clothes back on so we could all go home? The game was only brought to a head by one woman giving it, and the recipient struggled wearily to half-mast.

Adam reappeared on the stage, still wittering on about the ghosts. As a further appeasement, a woman was prepared to offer herself up as a sacrifice. And sacrifice she certainly did. Beforehand she’d sacrificed her pubic hair, during she sacrificed her knickers, and afterwards it became clear that she’d completely sacrificed her integrity. She was an attractive woman in her late twenties and was an erotic performance artiste. She selected one balding man, pushed him to his knees and secured a dog lead round his neck. She slipped behind the arras and reappeared wearing a black party-size strap-on dildo. Still on all fours, the dog’s trousers were taken down and she stroked between his cheeks with her plastic pipi. Rather naively, I had assumed that the Party Susan Club had just hired a rather enthusiastic Kiss-A-Gram. It took me a while to realise that she was actually Linda, the party hostess. As she simulated buggery (or was it simulated bestiality?) her husband and our host, Darryl, looked fit to burst with pride.

For her next act, she lay totally naked on the stage with her legs in the air at ten to two, giving the crowd an excellent chance to study her topiary. She’d done a very good job but as I moved forward on the sofa to check for stubble rash, she obscured her entrance with the first in a long line of phoney phalluses. I looked at Darryl. ’That’s my girl!’ said the look on his face. The woman could have been a demonstrator at the Ideal Home Exhibition, such as was her professionalism. As the dildoes upped in girth, she maintained her synchronised-swimming smile and sent her legs to quarter to three. Darryl’s ecstasy knew no bounds when, dispensing with what must have surely been a traffic cone, for her finale, she selected two men from the crowd and entreated them to the oral delights of her front and back bum. This blew the crenulations off Darryl’s turret. I was amazed to see that her exertions had left no trace on her vagina. She still had a snap like a mousetrap on her pubococcygea.

I noticed three black men standing at the back of the audience and went over to them. I mention their colour because the swinging scene seems to be a mostly white affair. They told me they were nurses and I really felt sorry for them. They said they’d been invited by Darryl and were really a little bit shocked by what was going on. When Darryl came over and said enigmatically to one of them, ‘Are you still prepared to go through with the act?’ I was a little confused. Were we going to have a first aid demonstration?

The show in the Great Hall had finished. But, said Adam, there was more. He led the party down another of the tower’s stairwells and into the master bedroom. The room was in semi-darkness and we fumbled our way, feeling for chairs that had been placed around a king-size bed. We were in the four-poster games room and there was definitely no sign of the shove-ha’penny board. The lights went down completely and then went up again to reveal Linda spreadeagled on the bed atop a satin sheet, exercising her pelvic floor muscles.

She wasn’t on her own on the bed for long. Very soon, two of the ‘nurses’ appeared in the bedroom, naked and rubbing their thermometers. I’d been so naďve. The nurses took turns mounting Linda with ne’er a condom in sight. Occasionally, one of the men would hop off the bed and disappear behind a screen to restore his erection. Why these sudden attacks of modesty, I don’t know. Ben was irate.

‘It’s so bloody racist,’ he hissed. ‘The black studs servicing the white mistress.’

Around the room, many of the men were fumbling in their trousers but I don’t think they were looking for the phone number of the C.R.E. Pretty soon, Ben was one of the few men left not pulling his pud. During a breather, one of the nurses came and sat next to me.

I voiced Ben’s objections. ‘Don’t you think there’s an element of racism about this?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied.

Far be it for me to be a patronising liberal. I changed my tack. ‘Why don’t you use a condom? Don’t you worry about HIV?’

‘Don’t depress me,’ was his considered reply.

And that, to be honest, was as deep as anyone at the Party Susan Club went. It was just there, they did it, and didn’t ask any questions. Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I thought, smoothing down my dress for the sexiest outfit competition, trying to ignore the fact that I’d just noticed a video camera on the bedroom wall.

It was a cattle market and only one cow was going to win. I stood in line with five other women and stowed all of my feminist principles. The winner was to be judged by the amount of applause they received.

The response to the first woman, the petite brunette, befitted her restricted stature. ‘Pity that Ladybird hasn’t introduced a lingerie line,’ I smirked to myself. I was next. I struck a couple of lubricious poses in my latex and Ben barked appreciatively. The rest of the crowd were pretty lukewarm. I was aghast. When it came to the woman next to me, the crowd went wild. She was topless with a couple of chains draped across her breasts and wearing silver panties underneath, and get this, a regular pair of twenty denier American Tan tights. The rest of the competitors went for nothing. As she accepted her prize, I turned to her and said, in the spirit of Miss World, ‘If I’d known all I needed to do to win was to get my tits out I would have done it’.

She needed that bottle of Liebfraumilch more than I did.

It was coming up to the time I’d arranged for Dominic to pick us up, when I had an idea. If Dominic were to actually see what was happening there, I was sure that it would help convince him that he was better off out if it. It was a bit of a risk. For all I knew, he could find the sight of Miss Sexiest Dress standing there in her hose the last word in wet dreams.

Chancing that he wouldn’t, I found Darryl and told him that Ben and I had recently begun having a regular threesome with another man, who was at this very moment waiting in his car in the village to meet us, and could we invite him to the party. Ever the congenial host, Darryl agreed and showed Ben and me back to the main road, offering as he did so to photograph me for a fetishwear magazine.

‘So many of my models hate wearing rubber,’ he said. ‘You obviously love it.’

I nearly said yes just to spite the woman in the tights, then it clicked. Linda and Darryl weren’t merely enthusiastic amateurs. Neither were the nurses. They were all pros. I am shocked at my level of naivety sometimes. Here were a group of people willing to show their innards at the drop of a dildo and when Darryl had told me, just prior to asking me to be a model, that he was in the video business, I honestly thought he meant something like Blockbuster’s.

Dominic had parked his car in a lay-by in the village and when he saw us he resumed moaning about being left out and then looked horrified when I told him that he could come back to the tower with us in the guise of the trois in Ben and mine’s menage.

Returning to the tower, we made for the bedroom and I saw that my concern about the video camera had been right. Five people were naked on the bed under the camera’s watchful eye which broadcasted their activities via a large screen TV in the corner. The wankers were out in force too and practically everybody was naked. We tried to find refuge in the bathroom only to find Darryl and Linda and four of their closest friends enjoying the Jacuzzi.

‘Come on in,’ said Linda.

‘I couldn’t possibly,’ I replied. ‘The latex is the only thing that’s holding me in.’

Linda was a philosopher. ‘Don’t worry about that, we’re all bodies underneath.

I couldn’t think of any other excuses. Dominic had to pull me out of the dress.

‘Check for video cameras,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want to end up on ‘You’ve Been framed.’’

‘And you too,’ said Linda to Ben and Dominic. The boys looked at each other helplessly and undid their trousers.

Ben and I had had the chance to numb ourselves slightly with alcohol. But as Dominic was driving he had to stay completely sober and as he climbed into the Jacuzzi you could almost see his group-sex fantasy fly right out the window. The water was hot and the conversation strained. Ben was smoking furiously and to Linda’s horror was letting his fag ash drop into the water.

‘My, it’s hot in here,’ I said lifting my scalded nipples out of the water. All around me rhubarb-coloured penises were floating on the surface and, I fancied, panting for breath.

‘Ooh, they’re sexy,’ said Linda pointing to Dominic’s tattoos. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m having a mange-tout with these two,’ he said, pointing at Ben and me.

Linda seemed unsure as to why Dominic felt the need to share his vegetable secrets and there was an uncomfortable silence. Eventually, this was broken by a man sitting opposite me making a few penis jokes.

‘My, it’s hot in here,’ said Dominic and I simultaneously.

Dominic shot up, got out of the tub and wrapped himself in a towel. I did the same and we left the bathroom. Strangely, Ben didn’t follow on.

The stone floor was cold on our feet as we wandered from room to room. In the basement we found an ersatz dungeon with a primitive rack. And to my delight, Miss Sexiest Dress was tied up on it. The temptation to turn the handle another notch and say ‘How’s that for your tits?’ was great but I resisted.

‘Would you like to sleep with her?’ I whispered to Dominic.

‘Where’s the novelty value in having sex with another woman who’s kept her tights on?’ he said to me pointedly.

We returned to the master bedroom and Dominic admitted that he was completely freaked out by the orgy going on around us. He’d been expecting a little more discretion from the participants, though God knows why when so many breakfasts had been interrupted by the arrival of the Party Susan Polaroids.

Ben reappeared, still nude.

‘Why didn’t you get out of the Jacuzzi when we did?’ I asked.

‘I was trying to get Darryl’s toe out of my arse,’ he said.

Dominic went off to get us a drink while we sat down in the bedroom and watched the TV. It may seem a little odd to watch a TV broadcasting something which was happening live a few feet away but watching it on a screen gave it a more palatable distance. Suddenly I felt a hand tweaking my nipples. I looked up to see the bald headed ‘dog’ with his hand stuck up a woman’s skirt. He obviously thought my breasts were detachable as he was trying his damnedest to pull one of them off. Ben realised what was happening and wrestled my breast out of the dog’s paw. A naked nurse came and sat down beside us. Apparently, things had hotted up in the Jacuzzi after Ben had got out.

‘Damn!’ I said none too convincingly, rubbing my aching nipple.

‘I want to go with her again,’ said the nurse, pointing to a fortyish blonde who was being seen to by two men on the bed. ‘She’s dynamite.’

Unfortunately, the woman decided that she’d had enough for one night and moved off the bed and got dressed. The threesome hadn’t been alone. What from the TV screen, I had taken to be a bump on the duvet was, in fact, my little friend sitting on the face of her regular partner. What she did next was obscured by Ben appearing on the TV screen.

‘God, it does put five pounds on you,’ said Ben, watching himself, ignorant to the fact that I was now rubbing the nurse’s penis.

Dominic’s timing was immaculate. Coming back with the drinks he immediately noticed my French polishing. ‘Home! Now!’ said Dominic, indignantly.

‘He put it in my hand. What was I supposed to do with it?’ I asked, letting go. ‘You just don’t appreciate the rigours of research.’

As Ben went off to retrieve our clothes, Dominic glared while I gave it another quick rub. The nurse didn’t seem to mind too much when I stopped. He went off and flattened the bump in the mattress.

Ben came back from the bathroom and threw our clothes at us. He was apoplectic.

‘I can’t get to my knickers,’ he snarled. ‘Some fat man is sitting on them having a wank.’

Once I had my clothes on, I felt rather overdressed. More people had arrived since I last looked and there were around sixty people there in various stages of intercourse.

Adam came over to us. It was the first time I had seen him since the party games.

‘Can I come and join in your conversation?’ he asked. ‘Nobody else wants to talk to me.’

‘No, we’re having a row,’ said Dominic and Adam scurried off.

There was no one to show us back to the road. Ben was still cursing me for taking him to the tower and therefore losing him his underpants. He strode into the darkness in a temper and promptly fell, head first, into a ditch. Dominic dragged him out and we returned to the tower to enlist the aid of a torch. Dominic was furious too, but not about my little diversion with the nurse. His manhood had been questioned and found wanting. He’d had the chance to act out his fantasy and it had terrified the life out of him. Walking back to the car I had both of them whingeing in unison.

The End

I will send in more accounts of parties next week.