Violetta, companion in Whitechapel

About Violetta

Mile End Road runs east from Whitechapel station in a long straight line, and Violetta walks it the way other people walk a gallery, stopping at things. Tall and slender, 178 cm, taller than anybody else in this book, with black hair worn long, sleek and straight, and dark brown eyes. She dresses simply and expensively: a column of dark fabric, a coat to the ankle, flat shoes because at her height the alternative is theatre.

She is thirty, speaks English fluently in an unhurried register, and has the particular calm of a woman who has already heard most of it. Violetta likes old buildings and old films and will trace the history of either at length if encouraged. She is dry rather than cold, funnier than her face suggests, and she asks the sort of question that stops an evening for a second in a good way.

The Genesis on Mile End Road is where she starts when she can: a cinema that has been on that site in one form or another since the last century, with worn seats in the big room and a bar that fills up between screenings. Dinner is back west towards the station, five minutes, where the road is still loud at eleven. She lives in Belgravia and comes east by road, forty minutes, so she books longer evenings here by preference.

Whitechapel has four lines through one station and is two minutes from the City on the Elizabeth line. Fares sit on rates. Ask booking for an evening after the nineteenth and Nell will write it down.

Booking her

Violetta is out of the country until the third week of October and Nell is arranging the evenings after her return now. Send a date and an address and the desk will confirm it in writing.

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

An evening with Violetta

A cinema is an unusual first hour and she uses it deliberately. Sitting beside somebody in the dark removes the awkward part of a first meeting entirely, and the bar afterwards gives you something to disagree about that is not each other.

Dinner runs late and she is in no hurry at all. Violetta talks about buildings the way other people talk about people, with opinions and affection and the occasional grudge, and she is generous with the good stories. Afterwards the walk back along the main road is loud, lit and entirely alive at midnight, which she prefers to a pretty street with nobody on it. Back at the hotel she will take the chair by the window and keep the conversation going well past the point you meant to stop.