What would Alice Munro do? Or William Trevor?: workshopping a story

Tessa Hadley is obviously a really talented writer - her style is smooth and clean and she deftly sketches a character with just a few strokes and creates a scene - usually a British small-city or town, often industrial of "council housing" - very efficiently. She's become part of the New Yorker stable - and I have to give her, and the editors, credit in that she's one of the few they publish (though more and more lately) who actually write short stories (and not novels to be chopped up for publication by the yard). That said, her stories don't really excite me very much, they're all kind of flat and tepid (maybe intentionally, to mimic the midwinter, midlands British climate and landscape she's drawn to?). Her latest in the NYer, The Stain, is a good example - so let me be a little presumptive and "workshop" her story, much as we would have done back in the days of the Providence Area Writers: woman takes job as housekeeper for elderly man who has a crush on her and tries to fob off $ on her, which she rejects. What would Alice Munro do with this material? Or William Trevor? One thing - Hadley misses an opportunity by having her protag learn about the man's past (a South African apartheid enforcer) when the man's son insists on telling her. Wouldn't it have been better if she'd found out through some action? Or, if the son has to tell her - shouldn't it change her in some dramatic way? Maybe she was willing to take the $ until she learns, then in moral righteousness rejects the money, then learns that the son was lying to get her off the inheritance? There's a lot of dramatic possibility here, but the story never catches fire.