The girlfriend experience: warmth without the performance

Usually less than people expect. A drink in a pub with wooden floors and too few chairs, where you both end up standing and it turns out better that way. Dinner booked late and ordered fast, or no dinner at all. A whole booking spent in one room with the television off and the window open, which more than one woman here will tell you is the version she would choose for herself.

What it is not is a script. Nobody here pretends to have known you for years, and nobody performs an arrival. The warmth is the ordinary kind, which is why it survives a second booking and a third.

Lucy is the least judgmental company on the list and requires no audience whatsoever; guests tired of being sold to tend to end up with her. Molly reads how much conversation somebody actually wants, which is a rarer skill than it sounds. Lea asks about your work and then asks a second question.

Rosa walks to most of her bookings and arrives early and unhurried. Nancy is warm from the door and needs no settling in period at all, which makes her an unusually easy first booking for anybody who has not done this before.

Fitzrovia is the natural home of this kind of evening. It is where the middle of the city relaxes slightly, the rooms are small enough that a conversation starts on its own, and Charlotte Street is two minutes from a pub that holds thirty people at a push. Lucy comes up from Pimlico in twenty minutes and sends the desk her actual departure time rather than a guess.

St James's works for the opposite reason. It is the smallest district on this site, built out of courtyards, and the old dining rooms in it are staffed by people who have worked the same floor for thirty years. Lea will have a life story out of a waiter in four minutes flat and is ten minutes away in Belgravia.

Describe the evening rather than choosing from the photographs. One sentence is enough: a long week, no appetite for a restaurant, somebody easy to sit with for three hours. Romilly will put a name forward with a reason attached, and if the reason does not convince you, say so and he will put forward another.

Everything else is the ordinary process. Four lines to booking, a reply inside a quarter of an hour with a figure and a minute, one check about the building and the room, and then she travels. The whole list is on On The Books if you would rather choose yourself.

The fee buys her time and her company through it. That is the whole of the arrangement here, on this page and on every other one, and it does not change because the evening is an informal one. Nothing else is on sale at any figure.

It also does not mean an open ended evening. She keeps to the finishing hour, cheerfully, and tells you when it is close. Guests who want longer book longer, which is what the three hour and four hour lines on rates exist for.