Vanessa, companion in Notting Hill

About Vanessa

Sandy brown hair, lightened through in the way that takes a good hand and looks like nothing at all, is the first thing you notice about Vanessa. She is 173 cm and slim, with hazel eyes and the loose, easy posture of somebody who has never worried about a room. She dresses simply and in daylight colours: a long dress, a linen coat in summer, boots and a heavy knit when it turns. She looks the same at six o'clock as she does at midnight, which is not luck.

The manner is relaxed and completely without edge. She speaks English warmly and without hurry, and she is the least judgemental company here by a distance. Her interests are outdoors: long walks, the canal, the parks at the west end of town. She is curious about wine without being serious about it, and she would rather learn something at a table than demonstrate it.

Notting Hill is where she likes an evening to sit. The Ledbury on Ledbury Road is her choice when the evening is worth doing properly: a quiet room, a kitchen that does not make a noise about itself, and a service that lets three hours pass without ever seeming long. Paddington is home, ten minutes east, and she walks it when the evening is dry. Afterwards she likes the streets north of Westbourne Grove, which go silent by eleven.

There is more about her part of Notting Hill on a page of its own, and every length at rates. A message carrying the date is all booking needs.

• Slim and 173 cm, long sandy brown hair with balayage
• Hazel eyes, and a posture that never tightens
• Twenty five; warm, unhurried English
• Paddington based, ten minutes from Ledbury Road
• Quiet kitchens, three hour dinners, silent streets after

Arranging her evening

Vanessa's evenings are best when they are long, and the good tables in that part of town go early, so a few days' notice helps considerably. Delphine takes the date and the address.

Her figures are the house figures, set out in full on the rates page, and the whole arrangement runs in one written exchange from the first line to the confirmation.

An evening with Vanessa

She is early and entirely untroubled by having to wait, which is most of what anybody needs to know about her. Vanessa treats a long dinner as the whole evening rather than the first part of it, and she settles into a table the way other people settle into a chair at home: coat off, phone away, in no danger of looking at the time.

The conversation moves at whatever pace you set and she is happy either way. She asks about the parts of a life people usually skip and she never once makes it feel like an interview. Afterwards the streets north of Westbourne Grove are dark and completely quiet, and she likes twenty minutes of them before anything else is discussed. What happens then is yours to decide.