The Little Teashop in Tokyo by Julie Caplin Page 0,24

good for you.’

‘There is very little bread in our diet.’ Haruka explained. ‘In the West you eat too much bread. It is not good for …’ she patted her stomach.

‘No, this is lovely and light.’ She didn’t feel the least bit bloated or over full.

As Haruka cleared away the dishes, insisting that she didn’t need any help despite the offer, Fiona checked her watch. Gabe was due to collect her in under an hour. She was all set, her camera at her side as well as a notebook. She wanted to do a tourist’s guide to Tokyo on her blog and planned to write down station names, because she’d never remember them, and directions to key tourist landmarks. Today Gabe was taking her to the Skytree, the tallest building in Japan and, Mayu had told her proudly the night before, the tallest tower in the world. Fiona had smiled. It was all about definitions, she thought.

‘Would you mind if I took some pictures of the house?’ she asked Haruka. ‘I’d like to put them on my Instagram page and write about what it’s like to live in a Japanese house; it’s so different to houses at home. Especially the toilet.’

She hadn’t had the courage to ask her hostess about all the buttons and symbols on the toilet. It all looked rather high tech and complicated, although she was taken with the nifty tap-sink arrangement on top of the toilet cistern where you washed your hands and the water was used to flush the toilet. Completely ingenious.

As she rose to her feet, her phone beeped.

I’m afraid an unexpected job has come up and I shall be tied up in the studio all day today. We shall have to postpone our trip. Pick you up at the same time tomorrow?

Fiona dropped her phone on the table. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said letting out a heartfelt groan. ‘Gabe has called today off.’

Haruka frowned. ‘That is very bad mannered. Is he unwell?’

‘No, he says he has to work.’

Her mouth folded into a disapproving line and Haruka looked positively cross – well, as cross as was possible on her lovely serene face. ‘You could go to work with him. That would be mentoring. I am very sorry.’

‘It’s fine.’ Fiona winced. It wasn’t fine at all. She was eager to get started today and take some pictures for her exhibition.

‘No, it is not,’ said Haruka, blinking furiously, her hands fidgeting on the table

Fiona’s voice softened and she reached out to touch the agitated woman. ‘It’s not your fault.’

‘You are a guest in our country. It is most impolite and very unlike Gabriel. I am disappointed in him.’

‘It’s okay. I’ll do something else. At least I know how to find my way on the trains.’

Haruka ignored the feeble joke and patted her hand. ‘Green tea. I’ll make some tea and then we will decide what to do.’

Fiona almost smiled at the very Englishness of it, tea and sympathy, and watched as Haruka rolled up her sleeves and bustled busily back to the kitchen, her slippers whispering over the tatami mats.

She followed her and was gestured into a seat as Haruka warmed the water on one of the gas rings. The kitchen was very spare and compact compared to her mother’s cluttered farmhouse style and it took her a moment to work out what was missing. There was no oven. The only way of cooking seemed to be the gas rings on a small hob, not that it seemed to hold Haruka back, but it was still positively modern compared to the cubby hole in the teashop.

As soon as she set the blackened pot on one of the rings, the older woman began to stab furiously at her phone.

‘You’re not texting Gabe, are you?’ asked Fiona a shade anxiously.

‘No.’ Haruka’s crisp reply stopped her asking any more questions and she sat in silence, wondering what next, until Haruka poured tea into two porcelain pots and held one out with both hands to Fiona with one of her small, neat bows.

‘Thank you.’

Haruka kept glancing down at her phone.

‘How do you know Gabe?’ asked Fiona, a question that had piqued her since yesterday.

‘He came to teach at the university for six months and my husband invited him to stay here. Then he got lots of work and decided to stay. He moved into the apartment we own when it became free and made some rooms into a studio.’ She smiled fondly. ‘He was like a son.’ The smile slipped