Samanta is 174 cm and slim, and she has the long, unhurried way of moving that goes with it. The hair is dark brown and long, the eyes brown, the clothes expensive in a way that takes a while to register: no labels, very good cutting, one colour per evening. Late twenties. She is the sort of person a room adjusts around slightly without anybody deciding to.

Her English is precise and her humour is quiet and slightly wicked, arriving in single lines about an hour into an evening. She is genuinely interested in how a thing was made, be it a building, a business or a dinner, and she asks about it properly. She walks a great deal, goes to the small galleries rather than the large ones, and has a long standing habit of eating in restaurants with under thirty seats. Anything larger, she says, is a room rather than a kitchen.

Her Mayfair evening is Kitty Fisher's in Shepherd Market, a tiny basement room off a courtyard that most people walk past for years without finding, where the food comes off a wood fire and nobody is performing. She takes the corner table downstairs. Having lived in W1 for years, she leaves through the market itself, past the doorways nobody photographs, and has you at your hotel inside ten minutes.

The small rooms she likes need a day of warning, so plan a little ahead of yourself. W1 and the rest of the women on it are on the Mayfair page. One message to booking with your date and the hotel gets a plain answer inside the day.

Nothing has been written up under Samanta yet, which is usually what discretion looks like. A note goes on the board only when a client sends one in writing, she agrees to it, and the office has checked that it reads as a first name, a month and nothing private.