Violetta, companion in Angel

About Violetta

Everything about Violetta is long: the sleek black hair down her back, the line of a tall and slender 178 cm frame, the pause before she answers a question she finds interesting. Her eyes are brown and very steady. She wears one colour at a time, and flats more often than anybody expects, having decided years ago that comfort and elegance were never actually in conflict. At thirty she has the settled quality that arrives when a woman knows what she enjoys and stops auditioning alternatives.

She is composed, funny in a low key and completely unshockable. One language, English, used sparingly, which makes the things she does say land harder. Cinema is her subject, particularly the old halls themselves rather than the films inside them, and she can tell you which London screens still have their original proscenium. She is a natural companion for a long evening that does not need filling with chatter.

Her Angel evening is usually the Screen on the Green on Upper Street, two minutes from the station, a cinema that has been showing films since 1913 and now has sofas at the back and a bar at the front. She comes up from Belgravia, which is not a short trip in any direction: the Victoria line to Highbury and back down, or a slow car through the middle of town, and she allows forty minutes for it without complaining. Afterwards the restaurants at the bottom of Upper Street stay busy late, and Camden Passage is a minute away when she wants somewhere smaller.

The cinema, the passage and the hotels she reaches easily are all on the Angel page. She is back in the middle of October and already holding dates, so a night proposed now to the evening desk will stand where a later one might not.

Asking for her

Violetta is away at present and taking dates for her return, which the evening desk will hold without any fuss. When she is here the dinner date at £900 is her usual shape of evening.

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 Violetta

Half seven on Upper Street, a neon sign that has been there longer than anybody's grandparents, and a room with sofas at the back that she books without asking because she knows you will prefer them. Violetta takes a film seriously and will not talk during one. She is, however, extremely good in the twenty minutes beforehand.

Afterwards it is a short walk to dinner, either down the hill towards the quieter end or into the passage where the tables are small and the rooms are warm. She is unhurried about the last hour of an evening, which is unusual, and she does not check the time. When she decides it is over she says so kindly and goes. The station is two minutes from the table, which she calls a civilised way to end a night.