It will happen, and it will be short
Dine often enough in St James's and it is a certainty. The rooms are small, the tables close together, and the same few hundred people eat in them week after week: at Wiltons on Jermyn Street, down the stairs at Quaglino's on Bury Street, in the clubs along Pall Mall and the dining rooms of the hotels on St James's Place. Somewhere around the main course, a man you last saw across a conference table in another city will notice you, put down his napkin and come over.
He is not coming to find anything out. He is coming because it would be odd not to. He will stay for a minute and a half, say something about the fish, and return to his own dinner. The only way to make those ninety seconds last longer, and linger afterwards, is to fill them with an explanation.
The whole of the answer
Stand if you would stand for anyone. Shake his hand. Then turn slightly towards your companion and say her first name: this is Margo. That is the entire introduction and it is complete. You do not add a friend, a colleague, somebody from the office, your cousin's goddaughter or any other phrase with a noun in it. A first name is how most people are introduced at a restaurant table, and it sounds exactly as ordinary as it is.
She will smile, offer her hand if he offers his, and say something brief and pleasant about the room. He will say something back. Within a minute he will remember that his own table is waiting, and he will leave with nothing to repeat, because nothing was said that could be repeated.
Why the explaining is what people remember
A first name on its own is forgotten by the time he sits down. It carries no information, so there is nothing to file away. An explanation is different. The moment you say she works with you in the Geneva office, you have told a story, and stories invite questions: which team, since when, do you know so and so. Each answer needs another, and your companion, who has been handed a part with no rehearsal, has to invent the rest in real time while smiling.
Worse, an explanation tells him you thought one was needed. People notice unease far more readily than they notice circumstances. A man comfortable with a first name gives an acquaintance nothing to wonder about. A man who explains, particularly at length and particularly unasked, hands him the only interesting moment of his evening, and he will describe it to his own table before the plates are cleared.
What she does with the ninety seconds
This is where an experienced companion earns her evening. She does not volunteer what she does, and if he asks her directly she answers briefly and without the least embarrassment, with something true and unremarkable, and then turns the question back to him. Most people would rather talk about themselves than listen to anyone else, and she knows it. By the time he has told her where he is staying and what he makes of the hotel, the minute is over.
She also knows when to do nothing. If the two of you need a word about business, she will study the wine list with complete absorption. If he lingers, she lets the conversation run down rather than feeding it. And when he has gone she will not ask who he was, partly because you may prefer not to say, and partly because the evening was about the two of you before he arrived and will be again within a minute.
Why plain company makes it easy
The reason this works so well lies in the kind of evening being interrupted. What guests call the girlfriend experience, as this house practises it, is warm and entirely unperformed. There is no pet name, no act and no pretence of a shared past. A companion who is not playing a character has nothing to drop when a stranger arrives and nothing to pick up again when he leaves. She is simply someone you are having dinner with, which is what she looks like, because it is true.
Evenings built on a cover story are the ones that go wrong. Evenings built on nothing more than good company survive any interruption, because there is nothing in them to be found out. The ladder is the same as for any other dinner here: two hours at £500 for a supper, four hours at £900 for the long version, with the fee handed to her in person when she arrives and never discussed again.
Company for a room where you are known
If you dine in rooms where you are likely to be recognised, tell Tamsin so. It changes nothing about the booking, but it lets her suggest women for whom those ninety seconds are entirely routine. From the thirties drawer, Margo is the obvious name: exact, unhurried, uninterested in pretending anything, and gifted with the one dry sentence that closes a subject. Violetta is drily funny and slow to give much away, which is precisely the right temperature for a stranger's minute at the table.
Among the younger women, Karolina lives ten minutes from Jermyn Street, asks for Wiltons herself, and is perfectly comfortable saying very little in a small panelled room. For the larger version of the same situation, an evening in which everyone knows everyone, the note on receptions at Lancaster House plans the hours around it.
Filed under: most of the names in this piece are also hung in the slim and slender drawer of the the cabinet.
Questions this piece raises
No, and nobody will expect one. Companions here are known by their first names only, and a first name alone is how most introductions at a restaurant table happen anyway. Adding a surname only invites the question of where he might have heard it.
Decline pleasantly and offer another time: you are halfway through dinner and would like to catch up properly next week. He will almost certainly be relieved, because he did not really want to join you either and was only being polite.
Only if you want to. She will not raise it and she will not ask who he was. If you do want to talk it over, she is a good listener, and she has usually noticed rather more about him than you did.
More of the long view
Put the long view to use
The evening this describes is one message away, and Booking shows how plainly it confirms.