Thirties and beyond: four companions who stopped guessing
Four of the twenty eight are thirty or over. Nancy and Violetta are thirty, Margo is thirty one and Sonya is thirty two, and between them they hold the perimeter hotels, the airport hotels out past the county line, the central terminals and the village at Longford.
It is a short list and a useful one. These are the names the desk offers when a guest has had a difficult week and would rather not perform through an evening, or when a booking runs long enough that the second half matters more than the first.
Thirties and beyond, as the roster stands
Nancy, and the rooms facing the northern runway
Nancy is curvy at 170 cm, golden blonde with blue eyes, and travels out from Covent Garden for afternoons as readily as evenings. She knows which side of each hotel on the perimeter looks over the northern runway and she asks for it, because an hour of watching the lights come in is a better opening than a bar with the television on.
Margo, the hour after the terminal
Margo is slim at 166 cm, dark brown haired, and has made a speciality of the hour after you finally leave Terminals 2 and 3. She is dry, worldly and very hard to shock. She does not flatter, and if your plan for the evening is a poor one she will propose a better one and be right about it. She reads long biographies and holds strong views about people who have been dead a century. She is travelling until the end of September.
Sonya, one road through the village
Sonya is athletic at 162 cm with hazel eyes and holds the whole of Longford in her head, which is less impressive than it sounds until you have tried to find an address out there after dark. She is back in the middle of October. Ask Hester for the date and she will pencil an evening on it.
Violetta, the far hotels
Violetta is 178 cm, tall and slender, with long sleek black hair, and she takes the airport hotels out at Colnbrook and along the Old Bath Road. Some of them are handsome and some are a bed beside a motorway; she is honest about which is which and lets the evening decide the rest. She is away until early October and prefers a longer booking when she returns.
What four experienced evenings cost
Exactly what everything else costs. Three hours is £700, four hours with dinner is £900, and a full night is £1,800, with her travel out from central London inside the figure rather than beside it. The rates page carries every rung in whole pounds and the fee is handed to her in person when she arrives.
What is being booked is her time and her company for the agreed length. That is the same at thirty two as at twenty two.
The four under other tags
By hair, Nancy is a blonde, Violetta is raven haired, and Margo and Sonya are brunettes. By build, Nancy is curvaceous, Margo and Violetta are slim and slender, Violetta is also statuesque and Sonya stands under both toned and athletic and petite.
All four are among the first names Hester suggests for long layovers and longer stays, the bookings that run past a single evening.
Read the sign, then pick the hour
Send a length, a time and the road or the terminal you are staying near, and a name comes back with a travel window on it.