Sonya, companion in Aldgate

About Sonya

Prescot Street is a short, unremarkable road behind the Aldgate towers, and Sonya likes it for precisely that reason. Athletic, 162 cm, compact and strong through the shoulders, dark brown hair long and worn straight, hazel eyes that take their time. She dresses with real restraint: one colour, good fabric, no jewellery beyond a watch, and she is always the least decorated person at the table.

In her early thirties, fluent English, and completely uninterested in being impressed. Sonya rows on the Thames at an hour most people would call unreasonable, she has a historian's appetite for the docks and what they did to this part of London, and she answers questions properly rather than charmingly. Her warmth is slow and entirely genuine when it arrives, which is usually around the second hour. She does not do small talk and does not apologise for that either.

Dinner is Cafe Spice Namaste on Prescot Street, a bright old building with far better food than its street deserves, four minutes from Tower Hill and six from Aldgate. Afterwards comes the walk down to the river, where the Tower stands floodlit and the noise of the City stops all at once. She lives in Knightsbridge and comes by road or on the Circle line, twenty five minutes either way. She eats early by preference, on the grounds that the eight o clock rush ruins a room she has waited a week for.

Aldgate is the eastern edge of the Square Mile, one minute from the platforms and a short walk from the Tower Hill rooms. The rates page is public and unchanged. Write to booking naming the building and the hour, and Nell does the arranging.

Booking her

Send the desk a start time, a length and the hotel, and Nell confirms in writing before she sets off. Sonya is settled with in person when she arrives.

Every figure she works to is public on the board, and the steps sit on the booking page.

An evening with Sonya

She is a dinner companion above all else, and she prefers an evening with one good table in it to three mediocre rooms. The food here is the point, the building is old and slightly odd, and the service is unhurried in a way that suits her exactly.

Sonya does not fill the first twenty minutes with chatter, which throws some people and delights others. Give it an hour. Once the plates are cleared she is telling you about the docks, or the river at six in the morning, or something she read last week and is still annoyed about. The walk afterwards goes down Minories to the water, ten minutes, and the last stretch along the wall by the Tower is the quietest place in the City after dark.