Stacy, companion in Euston

About Stacy

The tallest woman here carries it lightly: Stacy is slim, 176 cm, her hair long and near black brown, her brown eyes going straight to whoever is speaking. She dresses in one clean line, usually dark, usually without pattern, because she worked out early that anything fussy on a frame like hers turns into a costume. Flat shoes more often than not. At twenty two she is the youngest here by a matter of weeks and the least impressed by a room, which passes for shyness for about ten minutes.

She is quiet at first and then very funny, with a deadpan that takes a stranger by surprise. She has one language, English, used economically, asking short questions and listening to long answers. Food is her real interest, particularly the unfashionable, inexpensive, family run kind, and she has a list of places in her head organised by how late they serve rather than by how good they look. She is happiest when a plan turns out to need less money than expected.

Her Euston evening usually starts on Drummond Street, two minutes behind the station, at Diwana Bhel Poori House: formica tables, Gujarati vegetarian cooking and a thali that has been feeding people on this street since the nineteen seventies. She comes north from Chelsea, which is a change at Green Park and twenty minutes on the Victoria line, or a very optimistic half hour in a car. Afterwards the hotels around the square and along Euston Road are minutes away, and the station clock is close enough that nobody needs to leave early to be sure.

A flight that lands late or a meeting that overruns are both workable, provided somebody knows. Message the evening desk with either and Stacy will be standing where she said she would be, station clock in view; Drummond Street, the square and the hotels between them are on the Euston page.

Asking for her

Stacy is straightforward about time: she would rather take ninety minutes at £400 and do it properly than stretch an hour into something rushed. Longer evenings need a little notice so she can book a table.

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 Stacy

Seven o'clock, and she walks you round the back of the station to a street most travellers never see, where four or five kitchens have been quietly excellent for fifty years. Stacy orders without asking and it arrives faster than you expect. She eats properly and talks between mouthfuls rather than through them.

An hour later the street is cooling off and the station is lit up at the end of it. If there is time she likes the square with the old plane trees for twenty minutes, because it is the only green thing here and almost nobody uses it. She will tell you when to leave for your platform, and she will be right, and she will not make a fuss about being right.