Danielle, companion in Hayes

You notice the hair first, long and straight and properly black, then the brown eyes, which stay level while everyone around her is fidgeting with a lanyard. Danielle is curvy and 170 cm, and she dresses for the building she is walking into rather than the one she has just left. Late twenties. South Kensington is home, but Hayes is a straight line on the Elizabeth line, a little under twenty minutes from Paddington, and she has done that run more times than she has counted.

Her manner is calm to the point of being restful. She listens, remembers the names of people she is never going to meet, and picks the conversation up where you left it an hour ago. She speaks English, steadily, and has no interest in filling a room with noise. Guests on long contracts out here, the ones living in a hotel from Monday to Thursday, tend to book her for the evening they would otherwise spend watching the ceiling.

Her Hayes evenings are usually at the hotel off junction four of the M4, which is modern, quiet, and five minutes from the station when a car is going the right way. She will meet you in the lobby with the day already parked. Hayes itself is a working town rather than a night out, and she says so: the good part is the Elizabeth line, which means dinner in town is genuinely possible if you would rather not eat where you sleep.

Her UB3 nights are listed under Hayes. Tell the desk the hotel, the evening and whether you want to stay put or go into town, and she will work out the trains. The full ladder is on rates.

There are two versions of a Danielle evening in Hayes and she will ask which one you want before she leaves town. The first stays local: a drink in the hotel, something ordered late, the curtains shut against a car park and the M4 humming somewhere behind it. She is entirely happy with that version and never makes it feel like second best.

The second gets on a train. Hayes and Harlington to Bond Street is quick enough that dinner in town costs you the journey and nothing else, and she likes the symmetry of coming back out together on a nearly empty carriage. Either way she does not rush the end of it. She is good at the last hour, when the talking slows down and nobody is checking a phone.