Sonya, companion in St Pancras

About Sonya

Thirty two and entirely done with hurrying, Sonya arrives at an unvarying pace that other people end up copying. Athletic and 162 cm, she wears dark brown hair long and straight, and her hazel eyes are steady and a shade amused. She dresses with restraint and some vanity about fabric, favouring things that travel without creasing, and she owns a coat she has had mended twice rather than replaced. She looks, in the best sense, like somebody meeting a friend rather than keeping an appointment.

Her manner is warm and unembarrassed, and she has the confidence of a woman who no longer feels obliged to fill a silence. There is English and no other, spoken with a slight formality that softens within half an hour. She is drawn to the parts of a city that survived everything built around them, and she can talk for an hour about how a railway rearranged a neighbourhood without once sounding like a guidebook. She is patient with a tired guest and quick with a cheerful one.

Her St Pancras evening usually begins at St Pancras Old Church on Pancras Road, eight minutes behind the terminus, where a small church sits in a graveyard that a young Thomas Hardy was set to tidy when the railway came through and stacked the headstones in rings around a tree. She comes over from Knightsbridge, a straight Piccadilly line run of about twenty minutes that beats any car on the Euston Road. Afterwards the station hotels are five minutes away, and she likes eating late here, once the last continental departure has taken its crowd with it.

Late suits this district, once the final continental departure has taken its crowd away with it. Propose a meeting point to the evening desk, or ask for one, and Sonya will offer somewhere better if she knows it; the station hotels are listed on the St Pancras page.

Asking for her

Sonya takes evening bookings from around six and prefers a start she can walk to rather than one that needs a car. Two hours at £500 covers the old churchyard and a table; three is the unhurried 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 Sonya

Six on a September evening, and she takes you behind the station rather than into it. The churchyard is a few hundred yards from one of the busiest platforms in Europe and it is completely silent, which she finds funny every single time. She knows two of the stones by name and will tell you why they matter.

Then back towards the lit end of the road, where she has an opinion about which of the station bars is worth sitting in and which is simply convenient. Dinner at half eight, unrushed, and she asks the kind of questions that mean the plates get cleared before you notice. If your train is in the morning she will say goodnight at a sensible hour and mean it.