An evening for two guests, arranged only when both of you have asked

Hours of company for two people instead of one. A companion at your table, in your conversation, for the length you have agreed. She is good at a room of three, which is a genuine skill, and she is there to be talked to rather than looked at.

It is time and companionship and it is nothing else, on this page as on every other page here. Nothing further is offered, implied or available at any figure, and every woman on the list decides for herself which evenings she takes.

Thea is gentle company with no need to try hard, and she begins these evenings in a gallery rather than at a table, which removes the awkward first twenty minutes entirely. Sonya is the best conversation on this list and is entirely unbothered by an audience of two.

Roxi asks for a firm start time and keeps to it, and she is at her best in a snug bar with no music in it. Lea is impossible to embarrass and laughs at her own stories first. Patricia is the one to ask for when nothing should feel arranged: nothing wasted, nothing missing, for exactly as long as booked.

Bloomsbury is the quietest option in the zone and the best for a first one. It is laid out on garden squares, it keeps its voice down about twenty minutes from the noise, and the small rooms on Lamb's Conduit Street will take a table of three without making anything of it. The hotels there are four to seven minutes from most of them.

Central London suits an evening with something in it. A late gallery opening on a Friday, dinner five minutes away on St Martin's Lane, a walk across a bridge at eleven. Thea comes in from South Kensington in twenty minutes and knows which rooms around there stay quiet after nine.

Say that the booking is for two guests in the first line, because it changes how Romilly answers. Give the date, the hour, the length and where you are staying. Then the second guest writes a line of their own, or takes a short call, and that is the whole of the extra step.

From there it is the ordinary process. A name and a figure and a minute come back inside a quarter of an hour, you both answer yes in the thread, and one check follows about the building and the room. Booking sets it out, and On The Books has every name if you would rather choose than be suggested.

Three hours at £700 is the usual choice and the sensible one. An hour is too short for three people to settle and two is only just enough if there is dinner in it. Four hours at £900 covers a gallery, a table and the part afterwards.

One companion, one fee, handed to her in person when she arrives, at the same figures as every other booking on this site. Travelling inside Zones 1 and 2 is already counted. The seven lines are printed on rates and nothing is added to them for an evening with two guests in it.