Sonya, companion in the City of London

About Sonya

Sonya has the trick of making a formal room relax, and the City has a great many formal rooms. She is 162 cm and athletic, her long dark brown hair worn straight, her hazel eyes holding steady while she decides what she thinks of you. She dresses with restraint: a dark dress with a proper neckline, a coat in something heavy, nothing that asks to be looked at. In her early thirties, she has an authority that does not have to be announced, and older rooms respond to it.

Her English is composed and a little dry. She has no patience for chatter and plenty for a real conversation, and she is comfortable enough with silence to let one sit for a while. Her interests are markets, history and the long argument between the two, and she is well informed without ever making a guest feel tested. She trains hard in the mornings, which is where the athletic build comes from, and she goes to bed early when she is not working an evening.

Her City evening belongs to the old trade. Sweetings on Queen Victoria Street, with its counters, its tiled floor and its refusal to change anything in a hundred years, is the room she chooses when a guest wants the real EC4 rather than a glass tower. Afterwards she walks you up towards St Paul's, where the steps are empty after seven and the dome is lit and the whole square mile has gone quiet. She lives in Knightsbridge and reaches the City in twenty minutes.

Old rooms, empty streets and the hotels beside them fill the City of London page. Dates for her go to booking, and Cordelia writes back on the day her diary opens again.

Booking her

Sonya is away for a short period, so dates are being collected for her rather than confirmed; Cordelia writes back the day her diary reopens. Evenings here run best from eight, once the offices have emptied.

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 Sonya

She would start later than most, because the City needs an hour to empty before it becomes worth walking through. Eight o'clock, a room that has looked the same since before either of you was born, and a dinner that arrives without ceremony and is better for it.

She is a serious conversationalist and an unusually good listener, so guests who came out intending to say nothing about their week frequently say all of it. Afterwards the walk up to the cathedral, where the steps are empty and the lights are on and nobody is about. She is not a late night companion by choice and she will tell you so, which is worth knowing when you set the hours.