He was tall and slender and quiet, with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses and the careful, observant manner of a man who designed buildings for a living and was accustomed to looking at a space for a long time before he decided anything about it. Catherine had met him twice. Both times she had been very polite. She remembered, now, with a clarity that made her stomach hurt, exactly how polite she had been. She remembered asking him where he was from, and when he said Leeds, asking him where he was really from. She remembered his face when she asked it. It had not changed at all. That was what she remembered most.
They sat down across from her. Olivia said hello, Mum. Kwame said hello, Catherine, it's good to see you. A waiter came and they ordered drinks, and Olivia asked about the flight, and Catherine said it had been fine, and they talked for a few minutes about the weather and the traffic and the menu, the way people talk when they are standing at the edge of a cold lake, testing the water with their toes.
Then Olivia put down her menu and said, "Mum. On the phone yesterday. You said you'd done something stupid."
Catherine looked at her water glass.
"Yes," she said.
"Do you want to tell us? You don't have to."
"I want to," Catherine said. "I don't know how."
She was quiet for a long moment. Kwame was watching her. Not unkindly. Carefully. The way she imagined he looked at a building that might or might not be structurally sound.
"Have either of you," Catherine said finally, "seen a video. On the internet. Of a woman on an airplane. In New York. Yesterday."
Olivia's face went very still.
Kwame looked at Olivia. Then he took out his phone, and tapped it a few times, and turned it around on the table so that Catherine could see the screen.
It was the video. The one from row 4. She had not watched it. She had seen it was there, last night, at the hotel, scrolling on her phone at two in the morning because she could not sleep; she had seen the gray blurred oval where her face should have been, and her own voice coming out of the little speaker, and she had put the phone face down on the nightstand and lain in the dark until the window turned gray. She had not watched it. Now it was on the table in front of her, paused on the first frame, a young woman in a cream suit holding out a boarding pass.
"A friend sent it to me this morning," Kwame said quietly. "She said, have you seen this, it's quite something. I watched it on the Tube." He paused. "I recognized the jacket."
Catherine closed her eyes.
"It's blurred," Olivia said. Her voice was strange. "Your face. Why is it blurred?"
"She asked him to," Catherine said, with her eyes still closed. "The woman. Ms. Morgan. She asked the boy who filmed it to blur my face. I didn't know until last night. I read the caption." She opened her eyes. "She said I didn't need to be famous for it."
Nobody said anything.
The waiter came back with their drinks and set them down and looked at the three faces at the table and went away again without asking whether they were ready to order.
"Mum," Olivia said, very quietly. "Is it true? What she said? In the video?"
"I didn't hear what she said in the video."
"What you said. Is it true? Did you say that?"
Catherine looked at her daughter.
She thought about a great many things she could say. She thought about saying that it was a misunderstanding. That she had been upset about the seat. That she had been thinking about Olivia, about the baby, about Richard, about lunch, and had not been herself. That she had not meant it the way it sounded. That she had not known who the woman was. All of those things were true, or partly true, and none of them were the truth, and she found, sitting in a small bright restaurant in Islington across from her pregnant daughter and her daughter's husband, that she was too tired to say anything except the truth.
"Yes," she said. "I said it. I looked at her and I decided she didn't belong there. Because she was Black. That's why. I didn't think it in those words. I've never thought it in those words. But that's why. That's the only reason there was."
Olivia's eyes filled with tears. She did not wipe them away.