Karolina, poised company from the Jordaan

If the evening involves a table where people are introduced by their job titles, Karolina is the name to put forward. She has the poise for it, 174 centimetres and slim, in clean minimal clothes that read as expensive without a single logo anywhere on them, and enough discretion to turn a room of strangers into an easy audience within about ten minutes of arriving.

She is 27 and quiet by default, which people mistake for shyness until the first dry remark lands. The wit is what guests remember. It arrives late in a sentence, delivered without any change of expression, and it has rescued more stiff dinners than she would ever take credit for. She is not cold, whatever those first five minutes might suggest to a stranger; she warms in her own time and then stays warm for the rest of the night. Her hair is long, straight and black, her eyes brown, and none of it is styled to be the loudest thing in the photograph.

Music takes up her Sundays. She plays piano seriously, goes to the opera whenever something is worth the ticket, and walks the city looking at buildings the way other people look in shop windows. Ask her about a facade on the Keizersgracht and your ten minute stroll turns into an hour. Margo plays too, if you would like the same conversation in a different key on another night.

She is a Jordaan resident, a short run from the canal ring and a comfortable one out to the airport hotels if your night ends nearer the runway than the city. She is precise in English and never wastes a word of it. Long bookings suit her best, because the Karolina who appears somewhere in the second hour is the one guests write back about.

The evening she describes when asked is a concert followed by a very late dinner. Something at the concert hall if the programme deserves the ticket, seats where the sound is honest, and no talking whatsoever until the interval.

Dinner afterwards is where Karolina actually arrives. She is quiet by default, which strangers mistake for shyness for about ten minutes, and then the first dry remark lands with no change of expression at all. She will tell you what the pianist got wrong and why it did not matter in the slightest. Walk her back toward the Jordaan and a ten minute stroll turns into an hour, because a facade holds her attention the way a shop window holds everybody else's, and the Keizersgracht is on the route. Give her several hours. The version that surfaces later is the one people ask for again.