Patricia, companion in Highgate

About Patricia

Auburn brown hair, long and heavy, catches whatever light a low ceilinged room can offer, and Patricia has a way of arranging herself under it without appearing to try. Slim, 172 cm and brown eyed, she dresses with a certain gravity: dark colours, good tailoring, a wool coat that has clearly been resoled at the hem more than once. At twenty eight she is drawn to old rooms and old streets, and she chooses clothes that do not argue with them.

She is reserved for the first half hour and excellent company for every hour after that, which she will warn you about herself. She has one language, English, and she uses it thoughtfully, often answering a question a minute after it was asked and answering it properly. History is her subject, the local and slightly morbid kind: who is buried where, which house lost its garden to a road, why the village ends exactly where it does. She is very funny about all of it.

Her Highgate evening belongs to the Flask on Highgate West Hill, a low warren of a pub from the sixteen hundreds with a courtyard that fills the moment the sun comes out. She travels up from Belgravia, which is a long way in any weather: the Northern line to Archway and the hill on foot, or the better part of forty minutes in a car. She plans for the hill rather than around it, and she will tell you plainly that the village has no station of its own and no hotel either, so most evenings here begin or end somewhere further down.

The village keeps neither a station nor a hotel, so an evening here usually begins or ends a little further down the slope, and she will say which she would choose. The lanes, the gates and the views are on the Highgate page; the desk needs only a night and an address.

Asking for her

Patricia asks for a little notice because of the distance, and she prefers an evening long enough to be worth the hill. Three hours at £700 is her usual shape, the dinner date at £900 when the courtyard is open.

Every figure she works to is already public on the board, and the order of the evening is set out on the booking page.

An evening with Patricia

Seven in July, the courtyard three quarters full, and Patricia already at the table in the corner with the good wall behind it. She likes this pub for the reason everybody does: the ceilings are low, the rooms are small, and four hundred years of other people's evenings are somehow still in the plaster.

Later she walks. Down past the gates on Swain's Lane, which she will tell you about in some detail and with obvious relish, then back up the other side where the whole southern view opens between the trees. By eleven the village is genuinely asleep and the hill down to the road is quiet enough to hear yourselves. She never rushes that part. The hill down takes twelve minutes and she has never once suggested a taxi for it.