The house behind the door on W1D

The idea is small and old fashioned: one number, one host awake at every hour, and a list short enough that whoever answers knows each woman on it personally. Nobody is sorted into a queue and nobody is passed between departments. The message you send at half past midnight reaches somebody who can tell you which of two ladies is better at a jazz cellar and which is better at a long supper.

Reads, answers, and arranges. A host checks that a booking is real, holds an evening against a deposit, tells a lady where she is going and how to get in, and stays reachable while she is there. Ten to fifteen minutes is the usual wait for a reply, and that holds at four in the morning as firmly as it does at seven in the evening.

A host also says no. Requests that fall outside time and company are declined without discussion, and so is anyone whose messages suggest an evening neither side would enjoy.

In person, always. She comes in, her identity document is examined, her age is confirmed as over eighteen and her right to work here is checked. She is listed because she chose to be, by herself, with no agent and no third party behind her, and she may amend or withdraw her listing whenever she likes. That is the whole recruitment process, and there is no other route onto the guest list.

Every lady here starts at the same figure, and the rate card is published in full rather than held back for a phone call. Pricing one woman above another would say more about the house than about either of them. What changes between names is the evening they suit, not the sum at the end of it.

Pictures are taken for this house, checked against the woman in front of us, and replaced when she changes. Light and colour are corrected; a face, a figure and a shape never are. Nothing comes from a stock library. The photo policy sets out the rules in detail, because the one thing a guest cannot verify from a screen is the thing most worth being honest about.

Guests write, and some of what they write goes up: first name, month, nothing explicit, moderated before publishing and never invented. Ordinary scores stay ordinary, because a wall of perfect marks persuades nobody who has ever read one. Any lady may have something written about her taken down, and it goes that day.

Eleven neighbourhood pages, from the home postcode outward: Soho and Chinatown first, then the squares to the south and the quieter streets above Oxford Street. Outcall only, to hotels, serviced flats and private residences, anywhere inside Zones 1 and 2 at no extra cost, and further out for the price of the cab, quoted in advance.

The door does not close. It answers on a wet Tuesday in February as readily as on the Friday before Christmas, because the hours when this part of London actually needs a house like this are rarely the convenient ones. Fees cover time and companionship only, here and on every other page, and that sentence is not there to be read around.