Vanessa, companion in Hampstead

About Vanessa

Sandy brown hair, lightened through the lengths, falls past her shoulders and does most of the work: Vanessa is slim and 173 cm, her hazel eyes reading grey in one room and green in the next. She dresses with a certain northern European plainness, good fabric and no decoration, and the effect in a village of expensive coats is that she looks like she lives there. At twenty five she has an unhurried manner that suits NW3, where nothing has been in a rush since about 1890.

She is calm, thoughtful and genuinely curious about how anybody ends up where they have ended up. She has English and nothing else, used with care, circling a subject rather than announcing conclusions about it. Psychology is the thing she reads for pleasure, which she is slightly sheepish about and should not be, and she is very good at the kind of conversation that starts with work and ends somewhere far more interesting. She will not push, and she notices when a question has landed badly.

Her Hampstead evening often begins at the Freud Museum on Maresfield Gardens, a red brick house ten minutes from Finchley Road where the study has been kept exactly as it was, couch and rugs and antiquities and all. She comes across from Paddington, a change at Baker Street and about twenty five minutes, or a straightforward drive up Fitzjohn's Avenue outside the rush. Afterwards the village is fifteen minutes uphill, and the evening usually settles into a long dinner on a street where the kitchens close earlier than you would like.

The Hampstead page covers the lanes, the museum and the hotels below the village. Send a night to the evening desk and Vanessa will propose an hour with the study still open and a table held after it, because the kitchens up here shut earlier than anybody expects.

Asking for her

Vanessa suggests a late afternoon start so the museum is still open and dinner is not rushed afterwards. Three hours at £700 covers both comfortably; the dinner date at £900 covers them slowly.

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 Vanessa

Four o'clock, and a suburban street that gives no warning at all about what is inside one of its houses. The study is small, crowded and strangely moving, and Vanessa goes quiet in there. Outside afterwards she has questions, and they are better ones than the obvious.

The walk up into the village takes fifteen minutes and climbs the whole way, which she thinks is the correct way to arrive. Dinner is early by town standards, eight at the latest, because the kitchens here wind down and she would rather have the long version of a meal than the last table of the night. She stays for the coffee, always. Afterwards the lanes back down towards the station are lit and quiet, and she walks part of the way with you rather than saying goodnight at a door.