A table for two: dinner, and someone worth sitting opposite

What to tell Cordelia about the table

Either name the restaurant or describe the room you want, and she will do the rest. Loud or quiet, early or late, a corner or a counter, a kitchen you already trust or one you have never tried. If the booking is in your hands already, say the time it is held for and the desk works the meeting hour backwards from it with the walk allowed for.

Where she meets you

Two arrangements work and the confirmation will name one of them. She comes to your hotel first, which gives you a drink and twenty minutes before anyone is looking at a menu, or she meets you at the restaurant door, which several of the women prefer because an evening starts more evenly when both people arrive at the same place.

What the desk will not do is arrange a meeting on a street corner or under a clock. A foyer, a bar or a restaurant with a number on the door, always, so that nobody is left standing about looking for a stranger.

How four hours usually run

Seven o'clock, one drink and no menus. Half past seven, the table. By nine the room has settled and the part of the evening worth having is underway, which is the stretch most conversations never reach because two hours was booked instead of four. By half past ten the plates have gone and the decision about the rest of the night belongs to you.

The bill, and what the fee has nothing to do with

Dinner is yours, as it would be with anyone. The fee covers her four hours and her company, and the rates page prints every figure on the ladder so there is no arithmetic to do at the end. She will not order to a number you have not mentioned, and if you tell the desk roughly what sort of room you want she will arrive suiting it.

Shorter and longer versions

Three hours at £700 works for an early sitting followed by a short walk, and it is the right length when a table is booked for half past six. Anything grander wants the full four. If the night is likely to keep going after the restaurant closes, book the four hours and add to them from the table rather than trying to guess at eight o'clock how you will feel at midnight.

Four names for a long sitting

Karolina belongs in the old dining rooms and gets a corner table in places that turn other people away. Michelle is the one to book when other guests are joining, because she makes strangers like one another. Liana can do the loud room on a Friday or the quiet one at eleven with equal ease. Thea starts late by preference and is still good company well past midnight.

The two things guests forget to mention

The first is the hour the table is actually held for, as opposed to the hour you hope to sit down. Restaurants give away a held table after fifteen minutes and the desk builds the meeting time around the real one. The second is anything the kitchen needs to know about, which is easier said in a message to Cordelia days beforehand than to a waiter at eight o'clock on a Friday.

A third, less often forgotten but worth saying anyway, is the room itself. A companion who knows she is walking into a panelled dining room dresses for it, and one who has been told nothing dresses for the average of everything, which suits no room at all. Two sentences about the restaurant are worth more to the evening than any amount of planning on the night.

If the restaurant lets you down

Kitchens cancel, rooms flood and staff fall ill. When that happens the desk finds another table in the same district rather than handing you a problem, and the companion keeps the hours she was booked for. Tell Cordelia at once and she will have somewhere else by the time you have finished reading her reply.

The fee reaches the companion in person when she arrives, before any of the evening begins. The written confirmation naming her, the hour, the length and the figure is the entire record of the arrangement.