The Little Teashop in Tokyo by Julie Caplin Page 0,37

quietly, pausing to snatch at the sugar sachet, scrunching it up in his palm and staring beyond her through the window before saying with candid honesty, ‘I’m used to doing my own thing. It’s years since I taught and my commissions tend to be commercial these days rather than private. They don’t require much of me.’ The face he pulled suggested that he was disappointed with the latter.

‘Is that by choice?’ she asked, her tone much gentler.

He focused on her face, sudden light in his eyes as if he’d woken up and was now not just awake but wide awake. With a shrug, he took another sugar sachet out of the pot on the table and tapped on the surface. She imagined the grains inside tumbling over themselves in a rush to greet gravity and recognised it as a delaying tactic. She didn’t fill the silence.

Instead she leaned back in her chair and surveyed his handsome face and the lines around his mouth that deepened as he talked.

‘Yes.’ He rubbed at one eyebrow. ‘Commercial commissions usually have very fixed ideas about what they want. The piper plays the tune and I don’t enjoy that. And teaching … I find all that energy and enthusiasm exhausting. Always thinking they’ve invented a new wheel. Does that answer your question?’ She felt a rush of disappointment in him which must have showed because he adopted a mocking smile and asked, ‘Nothing to say?’

She shook her head. What had changed? What had changed him from the vibrant, excitable man overflowing with enthusiasm and seize-the-moment drive that she remembered. There had been a time when you could feel the fizz of his energy, when he could barely keep still because he was bursting with ideas and impatient to move on to the next thing.

For a moment the silence between them hung heavy as they were both lost in their own thoughts.

Finally, Gabe tossed the sugar sachet aside. ‘Tomorrow we’ll start again. Have you any idea where you’d like to go?’

This was as much of an olive branch as she was going to get.

‘I’d like to see something a bit more traditional.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded and then unexpectedly, as if he wanted a real answer and not a general platitude, asked, ‘Any particular reason why?’

She narrowed her eyes, considering for a second. ‘I’m thinking about the photographer as a voyeur of tourists. So rather than taking pictures of the tourist places, I’m taking pictures of the tourists’ reaction to them.’

‘Go on.’ He sounded bored but those blue eyes met hers in a shrewd, assessing examination, as if he was reluctantly interested. She ducked hers as her pulse picked up. His eyes had always fascinated her. Fringed with dark lashes, bright and attentive – or rather they had been, once. Then they had missed nothing, constantly roving as if on the lookout for the perfect shot and then they would suddenly stop as if arrested by something. Her teenage hormones had supplied plenty of examples of his eyes resting on her face, softening with admiration, interest, even passion. Those teenage hormones had been fanciful, duplicitous and unreliable.

Ignoring her dry mouth, she forced herself to speak. ‘For example, when we were at Shibuya. Everyone was looking up. Today at the tower on the glass floor. Everyone was looking down.’

‘A contrast.’ He nodded approvingly.

Her face lit up with a sudden smile, thrilled that he’d immediately connected with her idea. She hadn’t even had to explain. And then caution told her to temper her enthusiasm. You made a fool of yourself once before.

In a calmer, more professional voice, she explained her idea in more detail.

‘Clever,’ observed Gabe. ‘Watching the watchers. But you might find voyeurism has been done to death.’

His laconic shrug infuriated her.

‘So you don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she said, deflating faster than a punctured balloon.

‘I didn’t say that, exactly. Just that it’s been done before. Like I said, that’s why I don’t like teaching. I’ve done enough soul searching for one day. If you want any more culture, the Edo Tokyo museum is nearby. I can drop you there if you want.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she muttered, tucking her hands beneath her thighs. The urge to strangle him was almost too much to resist. He was the most infuriating man on the planet. He hadn’t heard a word she’d said and had damned her big idea with faint praise. She was so disappointed she could cry.

‘Tomorrow you can decide where you want to go.’ And with that he