Thirties: four names, and what they are asked for

Thirty

Nancy is 170 cm and curvy, golden blonde and blue eyed, with the calm of a woman who has already dealt with most things once. She walks into a hotel lounge as though meeting an old friend, talks well, asks properly and is interested in the answers. She takes dinners and whole nights on Park Lane rather than short calls.

Violetta is 178 cm, tall and slender, black haired and sleek, and drily funny to the point that the joke often lands a second after she has moved on. She is mysterious for about an hour and good company for the rest of the evening, and she is frank that the second hour is worth the first.

Thirty-one

Margo is 166 cm and slim, dark brown and straight, and dresses with a precision that borders on severe. Her English is exact, she reads history, follows the markets out of habit, and has a talent for the one dry remark that ends a subject properly. Her view is that an hour is not long enough to be seen at her best, and she declines short bookings on that basis.

Thirty-two

Sonya is 162 cm and athletic, dark brown, hazel eyed, and direct in a way that saves everybody an hour. Her opinion of a wine, a hotel or a plan arrives briefly and without apology, and she is right often enough that guests give up arguing. Underneath it she is warm and rather protective, particularly of a guest who is out of his depth in a formal room.

What four names is good for

Rooms where something is at stake. All four are on the client dinners and openings or overnight pages, and between them they take the great majority of the bookings this house arranges for an evening that has to go well rather than merely be pleasant.

It is a small drawer and the diaries are the tightest here, largely because guests who book one of the four tend to book the same one again. Two days of notice is sensible, and naming two of the four in one message is faster than writing twice.

Where else the four sit

Two are in brunettes, one in black haired and one in blondes. Two are in slim and slender, one in curvaceous, one in toned and athletic and one in each of petite and statuesque, which is the full width of the tape in four names.

If this drawer is empty on your date, late twenties holds the names closest to it in manner, and its own page says which.

Asking for one of the four

Say what the evening is for, in one line, because with these four that line does more work than the date. Then the date, the hours and the address. The answer names her, gives an arrival time to the minute and a figure in pounds, and nothing is held until you have agreed to all of it.