Bookings by Occasion · 10 occasions
Bookings by occasion: ten evenings, each arranged around the reason for it
Requests reach Cressida's desk as occasions long before they become names. A table held for eight on Bruton Place. A reception at Grosvenor House with a chair that ought not to stay empty. A flight landing after dark, a Saturday at Ascot, a birthday that deserves a second voice at dinner. The Society sorts those requests into ten kinds of evening, and each one is set out on a page below.
No occasion is a package, and none carries a price of its own. There is a single tariff, beginning at £600 for one hour and reaching £3,000 for a night, and each occasion simply borrows a length from it and plans around that length with some care.
At 20:00
The occasion
A table, a reception, a flight: each asks for a different kind of company.
10 bookings by occasion
Each page explains how that kind of evening is arranged and which companions suit it best.
In the old Mayfair sense, calling hours were the afternoons on which a household received visitors, and a footman carried their names upstairs. The Society keeps its calling hours around the clock...
Of everything the Society arranges, the dinner date is the evening it arranges with the most pleasure. Four hours at £1,800, shaped around a single reservation: something to drink beforehand, a...
A song from 1940 put a nightingale in Berkeley Square, and Mayfair has smiled about it ever since, because nobody has reliably heard one there. The hours the song describes are real, though: the...
The phrase is borrowed, and the Society uses it carefully. Here it describes an evening in which nothing feels booked. She is glad to see you and says so. She orders one dessert and two spoons...
A good many of the Society's guests reach Mayfair by air and leave it the same way, sometimes on a scheduled flight from Heathrow and sometimes from an airfield most people never see. Travel...
London's formal calendar runs through a handful of rooms in W1, and the Society's desk knows most of them by their seating plans. A charity gala in the vast Great Room at Grosvenor House. An...
Two companions, one guest, one evening: that is the whole definition of a duo, and the Society approaches it the way a good hostess approaches a seating plan. Two people who merely look well side...
Some of the Society's most enjoyable evenings are arranged for two hosts rather than one. The company is the same; the table is simply set for three, and the conversation has two people to delight...
Mayfair after ten belongs to its clubs. Some are nightclubs with a doorman and a list; more are members' clubs behind Georgian fronts that give nothing away. A night out with the Society moves...
The London Season never quite ended; it simply stopped announcing itself. Between the Chelsea Flower Show in May and the close of Glorious Goodwood at the start of August, the calendar still fills...
For one guest, in W1
Hotel and residence calls are the plainest of the ten: a companion at your door, at whatever hour you name. Dinner dates give four hours to one table and the stroll away from it. Overnights by the square run ten hours, from a late table to breakfast upstairs. The girlfriend experience, in the Society's reading of the phrase, is less a length than a manner: warmth, ease, and an arm taken on the way home.
When other people are watching
Some evenings have an audience. Event companionship covers galas, auction nights and client dinners, where a briefed guest at your side counts for more than the seating plan. Nights out in clubland follow the late rooms of Mayfair from a hotel bar at nine to a members' club after midnight, where the membership is yours. Duo evenings bring two companions to one table, and evenings for couples bring one companion to two hosts, invited by both of them.
Further than the square
Travel companionship meets flights, keeps to timetables and now and then boards them. Weekends and the Season hold the longest arrangements of all: Friday to Sunday in town, or a week built around Ascot, Henley or Glyndebourne, quoted from £6,000 as one figure.
Names, and how they are suggested
Each page lists the companions Cressida would think of first, chosen from the roster for temperament and habit rather than looks. They are suggestions and nothing firmer. Any member of the circle may be asked about any occasion, and every one of them chooses which evenings she accepts. If yours falls between two pages, put it into a sentence of your own. The booking page shows what a first message needs, and the rates page carries every figure.
One message to Cressida
Write with the night you have in mind, an hour, and where you will be staying. Cressida answers in the same thread, usually within minutes, with a name and a figure.