The four fair heads, and how little else they have in common
Four women hold this page, and blonde is a loose word for all of them. Cindy wears hers long and wavy. Nancy is golden, Nora honey, Thea caramel. Colour here is recorded as it looks by a window at noon, because a low room flatters any fair head and tells you nothing useful about it.
Past that single fact the four share almost nothing, which is why this page is written as four separate introductions that happen to sit on one sheet.
Particulars
Cindy is 168 cm, slim and blue eyed, 26, and comes in from Chelsea in twenty minutes. She swims most mornings, reads biographies rather than novels, and holds an unreasonable knowledge of London bus routes that has rescued more than one evening from a closed road.
Nancy is 170 cm, curvy and blue eyed, 30, and lives in Covent Garden five minutes from the theatre doors. Choral singing, crime novels and a late theatre supper, in that order. She is warm from the first minute rather than the twentieth.
Nora is 166 cm, athletic and hazel eyed, 26, and crosses from Paddington in twenty five minutes. Architecture, cycling and climbing, and the strangest good hour in WC1, which is a candlelit museum evening on Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Thea is 165 cm, curvy and green eyed, 29, and comes in from South Kensington in twenty. She paints, she goes to the Friday late openings, and she is gentle company with no need to try hard at all.
The evening each would propose
Cindy asks for an early table on Piccadilly, out again by nine with the night still available rather than spent. Nancy wants the classic Covent Garden night and is unapologetic about it: a booth, a curtain, a walk across the piazza while the last buskers pack up.
Nora starts with something open late and odd, then dinner five minutes away on Great Queen Street, and she sends you the opening times herself rather than leaving it to chance. Thea takes forty minutes with the seventeenth century before anything else happens, then a quiet room on St Martin's Lane.
Talk, in a line each
This is the part that actually decides between them. Cindy talks about early starts, open water and the plan that went wrong and turned out better. Nancy talks about a chorus rehearsal, a bad thriller she finished anyway and which WC2 kitchen is still serving at half past ten.
Nora talks about how a building is put together and why the wrong door was cut into it. Thea talks about paint, and about the quiet rooms in a gallery that everybody walks straight past on their way to the famous one.
Cross references
Nancy and Thea are also on curvaceous, Cindy on slim and slender, and Nora on toned and athletic. By decade, Cindy, Nora and Thea sit in the late twenties and Nancy in thirties and beyond. All four therefore appear on exactly three pages of this index, which is the ordinary arithmetic here rather than a coincidence.
To ask for one of the four
Each opens at £250 for the hour and climbs the same seven lines on rates. Nora and Thea are two of the names the desk puts forward for an evening that begins with something to look at rather than something to eat. Nancy is the fastest of the four to confirm at short notice, because she has five minutes to walk.
Send a name and an hour to booking, or describe the evening and let Romilly choose between them. The other twenty four are on On The Books.
Tell us where.
We write the rest.
The desk is being read right now, by a person rather than a form. One line with the district and the hour is all it takes, and nothing is set until you say so.
- WhereYour hotel or flat
- WhenThe hour you name
- CompanionFrom the board
- Arrival20 to 35 minutes
- FigureQuoted in writing