Danielle, companion in South Kensington

About Danielle

There is a stillness to Danielle that makes the rest of a room look busy. She is 170 cm and curvy, with long black hair worn straight past her shoulders and dark brown eyes she uses instead of raising her voice. Her wardrobe runs to clean lines and one strong colour, and she wears a heel she can hold for a full hour without once redistributing her weight, which tells you something about the house she was raised in. In her late twenties, she has the manners of a house where guests were taken seriously.

She is a listener first. Her English is measured, her questions are specific, and she has no interest in filling a silence that is working perfectly well. What she does have is a proper education in pictures and objects, gathered slowly rather than crammed, and a memory for detail that turns a museum hour into something you will still be quoting a week later. She is warm rather than effusive. You will notice her kindness after the fact, in the small things she arranged without mentioning them.

South Kensington is her ground, and the Victoria and Albert Museum is where she likes to start, on a late opening when the galleries are half empty and the light is artificial and kind. One room, properly looked at, then dinner on Thurloe Street or back at the hotel. Her flat is a short walk off the Cromwell Road, so an evening can open on the museum steps instead of under a lobby chandelier, which is a better way to start.

Start with the South Kensington page, which has the museums, the hotels and the walking times. Then put your evening in a note to booking, and the written confirmation will name your meeting place.

Booking her

Tell the desk the date and whether you want her at the hotel or at the museum steps, and Cordelia sets the meeting point in the confirmation. Danielle prefers three hours or more, which is what a gallery and a dinner honestly need.

Her figures are the same figures every companion here works to, printed on the rates page, and the order a booking runs in is on the booking page.

An evening with Danielle

She will ask you one question beforehand: pictures or objects. The answer decides the floor. On a late opening she walks straight past the famous rooms to whichever gallery she has decided you should see, and she gives it half an hour, no more, because attention is a budget and she spends it well.

Dinner afterwards is close by and unhurried. She is at her best in the stretch of an evening where the talk moves from what you saw to what you are actually thinking about, and she does it without any obvious turn. If the weather holds she goes back by the long route through the streets behind the museums, where the houses are lit and the pavements are empty, and she finishes the evening at your door rather than in a bar.