Free Untold Story by Monica Ali Page A

him along.” It didn’t seem to occur to her that she had already been doing that.
    “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t ask me.” I enquired how she meant to achieve this aim. “By using my feminine wiles, of course. You know, hints about the best way, the best place, to propose, keep it just out of reach for now.” All those cheap novels of hers may have come in useful after all.
    She was certain she could make the mooring at the exact location that I thought best. “I’ll work it in . . . what’s the word . . . subliminally. I won’t make it a big deal.” I hazarded that her wish was her beau’s command, or words to that effect. She said, “Lawrence, you know my trouble with men is . . .”
    She dropped it. It’s too big a subject.
    We were away not long after three and she reckoned though she was normally an early riser they wouldn’t think to check her cabin until about eight o’clock, thinking that she had decided to sleep in for once. That gave us five hours, and three hundred kilometers’ distance. After that, the search would be concentrated on the water, the beaches, the reefs. In the car she put her feet up on the glove compartment and wound back her seat. I thought she was going to sleep but she didn’t. She talked. I hardly knew what she said, and perhaps she hardly knew either. She scarcely drew a breath. I was fitter then than I am now and the rowing had not been a physical strain, easily manageable even if she had not insisted on taking over. But the drive was a demanding one, on strange dark roads, with my strange load, gripping the steering wheel so hard it hurt my hands. After a few hours she insisted that we switch. She drove and talked, small news and gossip about the friends she had seen in Buenos Aires, also a girlfriend who had terrible morning sickness, a film she had read about. In the first light of morning she wanted to stop and have breakfast and even browse some roadside stalls. “What about those beads?” she said, slowing the car. “That stall there. Are they made of some kind of seed?”
    Perhaps the enormity of the situation was too much for her to comprehend. It may have been the only way she could cope. I do not know how to account for it, her preternatural calm. I took the wheel again for the short distance to the motel where I had planned to take a break. It was perfect. The Brazilian “motel” is rather different from its North American namesake. It is more akin to the Japanese “love hotel.” It is a place you can rent for a couple of hours or more, and where secrecy and discretion rule the day. In this establishment, which I had previously scouted, one drives up to a kind of sentry box, where the check-in, such as it is, takes place. Money, naturally, must be proffered but no ID is required. One then drives into the motel grounds, set within a high-walled compound, and looks for the apartment number outside the row of garages, each of which is hung with a thick, opaque vinyl curtain from ceiling to floor.
    She clapped her hands and hooted as she took cognizance of the setup. “My goodness,” she said. “Lawrence, look at this, a proper tryst!”
    I drove into our garage, lowered the window, and reached for the rope and pulley that closed the curtain behind the car. I explained to her that this type of motel is to be found all over Brazil, a country in which it is not uncommon for people to live at home until they marry, and that extramarital liaisons are frequently conducted in such an environment. More wittering from me, I fear, at that point, an attempt to cover my too-evident embarrassment.
    “How fantastic,” she said, as I located the door at the back of the garage that led to the apartment. “They’ve really thought this through. Nobody sees you get out of the car, nobody can see the car—how absolutely ingenious.”
    Before we went through the antechamber to the bedroom I hesitated, because I wished to explain