Escorts in Knightsbridge, SW1X and SW7, as the Society arranges them after dark

The district runs from Hyde Park Corner along the south side of the park to the Albert Hall end, with Brompton Road cutting south west through the middle of it. SW1X is the park half: Wilton Place, the garden squares behind Knightsbridge itself, and the run of hotels facing the trees. SW7 begins where the department stores end and the museums start, and is quieter by several degrees.

For guests moving between the two, a car from Berkeley Square takes about twelve minutes through Hyde Park Corner, and rather less after ten at night. That short run between the two districts shapes most of the evenings arranged here. A guest in Knightsbridge who wants dinner in Mayfair is nearer to it than he thinks, and a guest in Mayfair who has been told about a table on Wilton Place can be sitting at it inside a quarter of an hour.

The people who write from SW1X are a mixture: hotel guests on long stays, residents of the mansion blocks who keep a flat here and a house elsewhere, and visitors who have come to London to shop and discovered that the shops shut at eight. The evenings they ask for are unhurried and almost always begin with a drink at the hotel.

No house in SW1X has any tie to the Society, here or anywhere else. They are set down as a map sets down churches, to make the district legible.

The grandest is SW1X 7LA, with its back rooms over the trees and an entrance on Knightsbridge that never seems busy. SW7 1DW is two minutes west and keeps its bar downstairs, which suits an evening that wants to start quietly. SW1X 7RL stands at the Wilton Place corner and is the closest of the six to Belgravia.

SW1X 9PY stands five minutes south with the gardens of Cadogan Place below its windows. SW1X 7LY occupies the old station building at Hyde Park Corner and is small enough to feel like a house. SW3 1PT sits on a quiet street behind Harrods and is the easiest door in the district to arrive at unnoticed.

Knightsbridge station sits a minute from the district's midpoint and is a Piccadilly line stop, three stations from Green Park and direct to Heathrow. Five minutes east, Hyde Park Corner sits on that same line. Sloane Square, for the Circle and District, is about nine minutes south.

None of this matters to your companion, who travels by car, any run finishing within the first two zones being at the Society's expense. What matters is the clock. The stores close at eight, the district exhales, and the hour after that is when most guests here want company. Written to by six, Cressida can have a companion with you as the last bags go into a taxi.

In writing she sets out the hotel, the reservation name and the room number, and that is the entire paperwork of the evening. She receives the fee herself at your door. No further sum is raised at any point.

A guest on a long stay wrote at six: dinner at half past eight, company from eight, three hours at £1,500. Cressida sent Margo, who lives six streets away and walked, which she is not supposed to do and does anyway when the weather allows.

They had a drink in the bar downstairs while the last of the shopping crowd left the lobby, then went two minutes up the road to a dining room with white cloths and a low ceiling. She spent the first course on a painting she had seen that afternoon and the second listening. At eleven he walked her to the corner and she refused the car for the second time that evening.

Bianka, Margo and Sonya all give Knightsbridge as home. Bianka looks for what a menu has left out. Margo studies one canvas longer than most people study a whole room, and then explains it. Sonya keeps early evenings and has the stillest manner on the roster.

From over the border, Violetta, Patricia and Lea come across from Belgravia, while Michelle and Stacy come up from Chelsea. Angelika and Samanta cross from Mayfair when a Knightsbridge table has been booked from the W1 side.

East, Hyde Park Corner delivers you to Park Lane in two minutes by car and to the whole of Mayfair in a few more. South east, Wilton Place runs into Belgravia on foot. North across the park lies Bayswater, which the Society visits without keeping a page for it, and further east the road becomes Piccadilly and reaches Green Park. For a dinner given its full length, see the three hour dinner.