Violetta, companion in Hayes

Height changes a room and she is aware of it. Violetta is tall and slender, 178 cm, her black hair long, sleek and straight, her brown eyes holding a look a beat longer than most people manage. Early thirties. Belgravia is her address and she has no patience for the idea that an evening is only worth dressing for inside zone one, which is how she ended up with a following in a town twenty minutes west on the Elizabeth line.

She is reserved at first and then surprisingly funny, and the switch usually happens around the time the first drink is finished. Her English is precise and she has a dislike of small talk that she manages politely rather than rudely. Guests who want an evening of genuine conversation rather than a performance book her repeatedly, and several of them are people who work out here for months at a time.

Her Hayes recommendation is the Old Vinyl Factory on Blyth Road, the enormous former record works where the pressing plant has become flats, offices and a cinema. Five minutes from Hayes and Harlington station, it is the only building in the town with any real romance to it. She likes an evening that starts with a film there and ends slowly, and she thinks a suburb with a history is better company than a hotel with a view of a runway.

The Hayes pages are at Hayes. Tell the desk the night, the hotel and whether you want the cinema or simply a long dinner, and she will arrange the evening around your morning. Booking has the practical detail.

She likes an evening with something in the middle of it. A film, a long dinner, an argument about whether the town is improving or simply changing. Hayes has more going on than its industrial reputation allows, and she enjoys pointing that out to guests who assumed they were stuck in a hotel for the fourth night running.

Afterwards she slows right down. Back at the hotel or the flat, coat off, one lamp on, the conversation still running from whatever the evening put in front of you. She is not a woman who watches the time, and she is at her best in the last hour, when nothing is being arranged and neither of you has anywhere to be until the morning.