Liana, companion in Kings Cross

About Liana

Chestnut brown hair worn straight and long, brown eyes, a slim 167 cm frame: Liana is easy to describe and rather harder to summarise. She dresses in a deliberately quiet register, dark colours and clean lines, the sort of outfit that looks correct in a station hotel lobby at seven and equally correct in a concert hall at eight. At twenty eight she carries the composure of somebody who has waited for a very great many trains and stopped minding. She travels light and always has a book in the bag.

She is thoughtful company and a genuinely good listener, which is a rarer skill than charm and lasts longer. She has English and no other, spoken carefully, with the pauses left in. If you have just come off a long journey she will not make you perform: she is content to sit for twenty minutes while you come back to yourself. Her own enthusiasms are music, architecture and the odd business of a district that has been rebuilt twice in one lifetime.

Her Kings Cross evening often starts at Kings Place on York Way, a five minute walk north of the station, where two concert halls sit under an office block beside the canal and the programme runs from chamber music to jazz in the same week. She comes over from Marylebone, which is a single short ride on the Circle or the Metropolitan and takes less time than finding the right exit at this end. Afterwards she likes the water level terrace behind the building, or the walk up to Granary Square when the fountains are still on.

The platforms, the water and the rooms between them are on the Kings Cross page. Put the train and the hotel in your note to the evening desk; arrivals are what Liana does best, and she is waiting when it pulls in rather than a quarter of an hour behind.

Asking for her

Liana is used to trains that run late and will hold a start time rather than lose an evening to fifteen minutes. An hour at £250 works for an arrival; ninety minutes at £400 is the more comfortable version.

Every figure she works to is already public on the board, and the order of the evening is set out on the booking page.

An evening with Liana

Half seven, and the concourse is doing what it does at half seven, so she waits at the quiet end rather than under the departure boards. Liana asks about the journey and actually wants the answer. One drink before the music, somewhere with a window onto the canal, and she will have looked up what is being played so you do not have to.

The hall is small enough to hear people breathe in, and she likes the seats at the side for that reason. Afterwards the walk back through the goods yard takes ten minutes past brickwork that was derelict within living memory and is now lit like a stage set. She will tell you which of the buildings is genuinely old and which one only looks it.