Lea, companion in St James's

St James's keeps early hours and Lea rather likes that about it. She is 161 cm and petite, with auburn hair that waves without being asked and hazel eyes set in a face that looks permanently on the edge of a joke. At 23 she is the youngest sort of good company: warm, unguarded, and impossible to embarrass.

Her English is fluent and enthusiastic. She asks about your work and then asks a second question, which is rarer than it ought to be. She collects old maps of London, drinks her wine cold whatever the colour, and has a weakness for restaurants where the staff have worked the same room for thirty years and say so. She is curious about buildings, old public houses and anybody who has lived in one place for a long time, and she will have a life story out of a waiter in four minutes flat.

Which is why she suggests Wiltons on Jermyn Street, where the service is older than both of you and the evening slows down in the right way. Afterwards the hotels around Pall Mall and Piccadilly are four to six minutes on foot and she will walk them if the shoes permit. Lea lives in Belgravia, ten minutes away by cab, which makes her one of the more realistic names on the list for an evening decided at short notice. The walk from Jermyn Street up to Piccadilly takes three minutes and she spends every one of them on the shop windows.

Her evenings live on the St James's page. Prices by length are gathered under rates. Two lines to booking, the hotel and the hour, and the desk does the remainder.

Lea is close enough to SW1 and St James's to be a genuine short notice option most evenings. Give Romilly the hotel and an hour and the answer comes back quickly.

Every figure she works to is on the board of rates, and the rest is one message away.

Lea likes an evening that starts before it is properly dark. Seven o'clock, a corner of an old dining room, and a first course spent establishing that neither of you is going to be difficult. She talks easily and laughs at her own stories first, which puts most guests at ease inside about four minutes.

The second half is usually slower and shorter on ceremony. A walk up to Piccadilly, a nightcap in a hotel bar with heavy curtains, and then a quiet hour or two with the phone somewhere else. She is affectionate company rather than formal company, and she treats a booking the way she treats a dinner invitation: she turns up properly dressed and genuinely pleased to be there.