The hotel arrival: a room number, an hour, and a knock at the door

The hour you want her, how long for, the building, and either a name from On The Books or one sentence about the evening. Romilly reads it himself, at three in the morning as readily as at seven in the evening, and comes back inside a quarter of an hour with a name, a figure in whole pounds and the minute she can be at your door. Nothing is fixed until you answer yes in the same thread.

Then one check, once: the name the reservation carries, the building, and the room number. At a flat it is the street, the block and the floor instead. That single exchange sits in the same conversation as everything else, and it goes no further than that. Booking walks through the sequence step by step.

Inside a shared postcode, twenty minutes is honest. Across the zone it is nearer forty, and between seven and nine the roads lose to the platforms, which is already built into the figure you are given rather than discovered afterwards. Nobody here will tell you half an hour and mean an hour.

Several women live inside the districts they are shown in, which changes the arithmetic entirely. Jasmin and Molly both live in Soho and walk to most bookings, eight minutes at the outside. Liana is minutes from Portman Square and covers Marylebone on foot. Tina is the fastest arrival in WC2 by a clear margin. Samanta lives a few streets from most of the W1K and W1S hotels and would rather arrive on foot than shaken out of a car.

She arrives as your guest does. Through the front, across the lobby without hurrying, into the lift, one knock. No desk in this city plays any part in it, and no hotel named anywhere on this site has any connection to this house or has ever been asked for one.

If you would rather meet downstairs first, say so when you write and she will be in the bar at the agreed time with something to read, not scanning the room for a face she has never seen. The room number is given at confirmation and at no other point. Where a front desk prefers to announce a visitor it will ring up, you answer, and she is pointed at the lift.

A hotel is not a condition of anything. A serviced flat on Great Portland Street, a mews behind Devonshire Place, a company apartment in Bloomsbury: all visited on identical terms, with the street and the door confirmed once in writing. In some districts private addresses account for a large share of the evenings arranged here.

What the desk wants to know is whether there is a porter behind the door or an entryphone, because the middle of London is split roughly evenly between the two and the difference decides how she comes in. Nothing else changes, and the figures least of all.

An hour at £250 is the floor and there is nothing shorter. It is long enough for a drink, a real conversation and an unhurried goodbye, and it is genuinely the right booking for a first evening if you are unsure. Ninety minutes at £400 lets the first twenty minutes stop being the first twenty minutes. Two hours at £500 is what most weeknights in this zone actually run to, and guests who suspect they will enjoy themselves tend to start there rather than ask to extend later.

Adding an hour once she is with you is possible when the diary behind you has room in it. Ask her, or send the desk a line, and the extra time is agreed in the thread at the ordinary rate before it begins. Nothing is ever added afterwards that was not written down first. The whole ladder, one hour to ten, sits on rates.