tablets. There was a very old man in a wheelchair with a younger woman who might have been his daughter. Almost all of them were white. Naomi counted, without meaning to, the way she always counted, because the counting had become a reflex so long ago that she could no longer remember choosing to do it. Two other Black passengers, a man in a tracksuit with headphones around his neck who looked like he might be a professional athlete, and a middle-aged woman in a wool dress reading a hardcover book. One South Asian family. One East Asian businessman. The rest.
She knew the demographic data for Signature. She had looked at it, along with everything else. It was not so different from this room.
Across the lounge, near the bar, a woman was speaking to one of the lounge hosts in a voice that carried.
"No, I understand that it's not your department. I'm simply asking you to call someone whose department it is."
Naomi looked up.
The woman was perhaps fifty, slim and very well put together, in a jacket of teal and emerald tweed that Naomi recognized as Chanel or a careful imitation of Chanel. It had metallic thread woven through it that caught the light, and a trim of something gold along the edges, and gold buttons. Under it she wore a cream silk shell. A single strand of pearls lay at her collarbone, white and round and perfectly matched. Her hair was light blonde, swept up into an elegant low chignon at the back of her head. Her face was finely made, with high cheekbones and pale eyes and the kind of skin that had been looked after carefully and expensively for a long time.
The lounge host was a young woman in the Meridian uniform, and she was nodding with the fixed, attentive expression of someone who had been trained to absorb displeasure.
"I've been flying in that seat for eleven years," the blonde woman said. "Eleven years. I am a Sovereign member. I'm told when I call the Sovereign line that I will be accommodated. I called the Sovereign line on Thursday and I was told the seat was already assigned and there was nothing they could do. Nothing. I find that very hard to believe."
"I'm so sorry, Mrs. Ashworth. I can check with the gate whether..."
"Please do."
The lounge host went to a desk and picked up a phone. The blonde woman stood waiting with her arms folded and her chin raised, looking out the window at the airplane below with an expression of patient, absolute expectation, as though the airplane itself had disappointed her.
Naomi looked back down at her coffee. She did not know, yet, what seat the woman was talking about. She thought she might be able to guess.
* * *
Catherine Ashworth had been awake since three.
It was not the flight. She had flown to London so many times that she no longer thought of it as travel, exactly; it was more like moving from one room of her life to another. It was not the hour either. She had never been a good sleeper and in the last year she had become a very bad one, waking in the dark in the big house in Greenwich with her heart going too fast and nothing to do about it but lie there until it slowed.
It was Olivia.
Her daughter was thirty-one years old and lived in London, in a flat in Islington that Catherine had seen exactly once. She worked for a charity that did something with refugees, which Catherine did not entirely understand and had stopped asking about after the second time Olivia had explained it in a tone that implied Catherine was being deliberately obtuse. Eighteen months ago, Olivia had married a man named Kwame Asante, an architect, born in Leeds to Ghanaian parents, at a registry office on a Tuesday afternoon with eleven people present. Catherine had not been one of them.
She had not been invited, technically. She had been told about it afterward, in a phone call that she still replayed sometimes in the dark at three in the morning, in which Olivia had said, very calmly, "I didn't want you there, Mum, because I didn't want to spend my wedding day watching you be polite to him." And Catherine had said that she did not know what Olivia meant, and Olivia had said, "Yes, you do," and then there had been a silence on the line for a long time, and then Olivia had said she had to go.
They had spoken perhaps six times since then. Short calls, birthdays, Christmas. And then, three weeks ago, an email, which Catherine had read standing in the kitchen and then sat down at the table to read again. Olivia was pregnant. The baby was due in March. Olivia thought, though she was not sure, that she would like Catherine to know her grandchild. She thought, though she was not sure, that it might be time for Catherine to come to London and have lunch with them both. Not a long visit. Lunch. On Wednesday, if that was all right.