This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor

Doesn’t seem to have broadened her mind. She’s been gone nearly a year now and she’s barely even written. Don’t even rightly know where she is. And you can bet your bottom dollar she’s not getting a decent cup of tea. This is a decent cup of tea. This is a proper cup of tea. This is what you want to expect when you ask for a tea. A pot and a jug and some good china. It’s important to know what to expect. You expect to get what you expect. You don’t get that when you go away. You don’t know what to expect. Leaving the bag on the saucer like that, with the water going cold. And you only have to come back.’
    The sun was out for a minute, and the sea was shining, but there was another shower coming in. I started filling the mop bucket, and turned a couple of chairs over. She started getting all her bags together. She shook her head a few times, as if she was annoyed with something.
    ‘Listen to me going on,’ she said. The way she says it, it sounds like that’s really what she means. What she wants. But I had things to be getting on with.

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    Gainsborough
    She wouldn’t tell Patricia. She’d decided that before even saying goodbye, before she’d stood there and listened to his footsteps crunch away through the gravel. What was there to tell anyway. It was only talking.
    And he’d approached her first. When they were standing in the reception room, holding their information leaflets and waiting for the tour of the Imperial Palace to begin. You’re English right, he’d said, and she’d nodded, and he’d asked if they might swap cameras for the morning, for the duration of the tour. Which she hadn’t understood straight away. He wanted his picture taken, he’d explained, with his camera, and he wanted to return the favour. Which was no sort of favour at all because she didn’t like being in her own holiday photos. She knew what she looked like.
    It’ll save us swapping back and forth every time, he’d said.
    It had seemed rude to say no, once he’d asked. And there had been other people standing there, other people he could have asked, but he’d asked her. Which was something.
     
    He was in Japan for three weeks, he’d told her. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka. The whole shebang . Spending his army pension, because he figured what the hey it’s just sitting there and he happened to have this time on his hands. He was between jobs , he said, smiling in a way which was surprising for such a big man. Boyish was the word she thought of, although she didn’t think he was any younger than her. Ex-US Army Engineers, so he’d seen a few countries in his time but had never been to Japan, always wanted to. Been working in a repair shop the last few years, welding, but the work had dried up. Living in Duluth, Minnesota, which when you figured all the countries he’d been through it was funny how it wasn’t a million miles from where he’d started out. Good place to be, and it was handy for where his kids lived now.
    He’d told her all this before the tour had even started, and in return she’d told him that she was a school secretary from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire – like the artist, she’d said, although it’s no oil painting, and she’d been surprised when he laughed – and that she was only here for a week. He’d done more of the talking, it was fair to say.
    And when they’d introduced themselves, just as the tour began, he’d held out his hand for her to shake. Which she hadn’t been expecting. He had a very large hand. He was really quite a large man, he looked sort of like a rugby player or something and she could see even from where she was standing that none of it was fat. Shaking hands with him had made her feel sort of petite. Which she certainly wasn’t used to.
    Wade, he’d said. Elizabeth, she’d replied.
    That room though. If they were going to have that many people waiting in there for the tours to begin, they should have had a fan or something. Air-conditioning. It was too