Samanta, companion in Canary Wharf

About Samanta

Samanta books the far end of the week on purpose, because Thursday in E14 is when the towers are ready to stop. She is slim and 174 cm, her long dark brown hair loose, her brown eyes measuring a room quickly and giving nothing away. She dresses in clean, expensive lines, a long dark dress, a coat she wears over her shoulders, one thin gold chain. In her late twenties, she has the bearing of someone who has been in a lot of rooms and been impressed by very few of them.

Her English is even and quiet, and she says less than most people expect, which tends to draw a guest out. She listens the way good lawyers do, without interrupting and without forgetting. Her subjects are architecture, long flights and the strange beauty of a city built in twenty years. She is warm once she has decided to be, and she is not in any hurry to decide, which makes the moment she does worth waiting for.

Boisdale of Canary Wharf in Cabot Place is where she likes to spend an evening here, upstairs, where there is a band most nights and the room is dark enough to forget which postcode you are in. She takes a table away from the stage so you can still talk, and she stays until the second set. Afterwards there is the walk out to the dock, water on three sides, towers overhead. She lives in Mayfair and the Jubilee line brings her east in twenty minutes.

The dock and everything standing around it is described on the Canary Wharf page. Write the night to booking, mention whether the upstairs table should be held, and the confirmation covers both.

Booking her

Thursday and Friday evenings are when the desk places her in E14 most often, and a day of notice secures the upstairs table. Send Cordelia the date, the hotel and the hour and the confirmation comes back the same day.

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 Samanta

She arrives at eight, by which time the lobbies have emptied and the restaurants have filled with people who have decided the week is over. Upstairs there is a band, and she asks for a table far enough from it to talk. The first hour is mostly her listening while you put the week down.

By the second set she has warmed up and the conversation has gone somewhere better than either of you planned. She will stay to the end of the music. Afterwards the dock, which is worth the ten minutes it takes: black water on three sides, the towers doubled in it, and almost nobody about. She walks back with you and lets the evening finish wherever you had arranged that it would.