Margo, companion in Westminster

Nobody on this list handles a difficult table better than Margo. She is 166 cm and slim, dark brown hair long and straight, brown eyes, and at 31 she has the ease of somebody who has been the calmest person in a room often enough to find it unremarkable. She dresses conservatively and expensively and is never the loudest thing at dinner. Nothing about her arrival draws attention, and that is entirely deliberate.

Her English is fluent and unusually precise. She is discreet by instinct, good at knowing which subjects to leave alone, and genuinely interested in what people do rather than in what they earn. She rides at weekends, reads two newspapers a day, and can rescue a conversation that has gone flat without anybody noticing that she did it. She has a long memory for detail and a very short one for anything that ought to be forgotten, which is the combination this work actually requires.

In Westminster she suggests the Cinnamon Club on Great Smith Street, the old library room, early enough that the division bell crowd has not yet arrived. Afterwards the hotels around Victoria Street are eight minutes by car and the Embankment ones about ten. She comes in from Knightsbridge, fifteen minutes at that hour, and she would far rather be twenty minutes early than one minute late. If the evening involves other people she asks for their names in advance and uses them correctly all night, which sounds small and is not.

Find her on the Westminster page. Length by length, the figures are under rates. Tell booking the setting as well as the hour and she will arrive dressed for it.

Margo is the name to ask for when other people will be present and discretion matters. Tell Romilly the setting as well as the hour, and she will arrive dressed for it.

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

An evening with Margo is a well run one. She arrives early, she has read enough about the room to be comfortable in it, and she takes the temperature of the table within the first two minutes. If you have brought her to meet other people, she will be the reason the dinner goes smoothly and nobody will be able to say exactly why.

Alone, she is warmer and considerably drier. She likes a long second half, a good bottle and a conversation that goes properly into one subject rather than touching six. She does not ask about your circumstances and she does not volunteer hers. At the finishing hour she leaves without any fuss at all, which is the part experienced guests value most.