Three nights under canvas

Every group trip has somebody who organises it, and the organising of this one fell to Duda, who is competent at nearly everything and hopeless at sums. Six people and three tents, which sounds perfect until somebody notices that one of the tents was a one-man.

Nobody noticed in the city. They noticed in the hills, two hundred and twenty kilometres out, with the car already unpacked.

It should be recorded, in Duda's favour, that she offered herself the one-man tent three times, and that on all three occasions the offer was declined for reasons that sounded noble and were in fact about something else entirely. No group of six adults settles a logistical problem without first settling four other questions nobody asked them to settle.

The outcome of the negotiation was as follows: Duda and Karina in one tent, Serginho and Paulinho in the other, and the one-man to whoever reached the consensus last.

Which left the two-man tent to Ana and Vicente, who at that point had known each other for exactly seven hours and forty minutes, all of them spent inside a car.

Ana was thirty-four and had a personal rule against travelling with strangers. She came because Karina insisted, and because August had been a difficult month, and because the photograph of the waterfall was very beautiful.

Vicente was a friend of Serginho's from work, which in group vocabulary means peripheral, and had the sort of silence people mistake for shyness for the first two days and then stop mistaking.

Neither of them had planned a single thing. This is true and worth stating at the outset, because the whole business depends on it.

What is also true is that Ana worked out the tent arithmetic about four seconds before everybody else, and that in those four seconds she said nothing.

The hills in August run to nine degrees at night and twenty-four in the afternoon, which confuses anybody who packs a bag looking at the daytime forecast.

The first night was a model of correctness.

A two-man tent is a metre forty wide, which in practice means two sleeping bags touching. They laid the bags out with a ten-centimetre gap down the middle, and that gap was treated by both of them, for three hours, as an object of archaeological value.

They talked late. Vicente told her about his brother, his brother's divorce, and how watching a marriage end from outside teaches you more than being inside one. Ana told him about a job she walked out of in January and did not regret on any day of the week, except Tuesdays, for reasons she herself found ridiculous.

At two in the morning she was cold.

She said nothing. She was cold in silence, politely, curling up inside the bag with a minimum of noise.

Vicente, who was not asleep, waited about fifteen minutes and then said, to the roof of the tent, that the bags had compatible zips and could be joined into one.

Ana said yes.

They joined the bags, got in, and nothing happened. That needs saying plainly, because it is the single most important fact of the first night: absolutely nothing happened, and the two of them slept, and in the morning the two of them woke up knowing exactly what had not happened.

The second day was the waterfall, which was forty minutes up a trail and was, in fairness, very beautiful.

Groups run a radar system that nobody operates. Nothing was said at breakfast. But on the trail Karina walked with Ana for the first twenty minutes and then, with no visible transition, dropped back to join Duda, and that was not an accident.

At the waterfall Serginho did what the Serginhos of this world do, which is to get into freezing water shouting and call everybody else a coward. Paulinho filmed it. Duda read a book.

Ana went in to her waist and stopped. Vicente went in properly, swam the pool, came back. When he came back he stood beside her and said nothing for a while, and the two of them watched Serginho try to climb a rock that anybody with eyes could see was slippery.

"He's going in," she said.

"He is."

"Aren't you going to warn him?"

"He wouldn't believe me."

Serginho went in. All six of them laughed, and nobody was hurt, and somewhere inside the laughing Vicente put his hand on Ana's back for two seconds and took it away.

Two seconds is not much. It is also a great deal more than none, and Ana spent the rest of the afternoon with a precise awareness of her own spine.

It rained on the second night. It rained the way it rains in those hills, starting at eleven and asking nobody's permission.

Their tent was a good one, but it had been pitched in a hurry on ground with a slope, and around half past midnight water started coming in at one corner. Not much. Enough to soak thirty centimetres of groundsheet on the left-hand side, which was Ana's side.

The physical solution was straightforward and they both arrived at it simultaneously: everybody onto the right.

The right-hand side of a tent a metre forty wide is, approximately, seventy centimetres.

It rained for nearly two hours. A tent in the rain is a loud place, which helps, and a completely dark one, which helps a great deal more, and a place where there is absolutely nothing to do, which is decisive.

It started with her hand, which was looking for the torch and found his wrist.

Neither of them pretended it had been an accident, which saved about eight minutes.

What happened afterwards happened slowly, because there was no room to hurry, and in silence, because Serginho's tent was four metres away and canvas keeps no secrets. Both constraints improved everything. This is a thing the organiser of the trip did not foresee and that anybody who has ever slept on a campsite could have foreseen for her.

At some point Ana laughed into his ear, a laugh with no sound in it at all, only warm air and a shaking shoulder, and that was the thing Vicente took home with him.

The rain stopped around half two. They stayed awake until nearly four.

Breakfast on the third day was a masterpiece of coexistence.

Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. Karina poured Ana a coffee without asking whether she wanted one, which in a group of that kind is practically a telegram. Paulinho made a joke about the rain, and the joke died in the air for want of collective nerve, and Serginho, who is the least subtle person in that group and possibly in the country, looked at Vicente for three seconds and went back to his eggs without a word, which for him was an enormous effort.

Duda, who had got the tent arithmetic wrong, drank her coffee with the expression of somebody assessing whether she errs by luck or by talent.

Ana and Vicente conducted themselves all day with exemplary decorum, and their decorum was so exemplary that it became, on its own, the loudest piece of information at the table.

The third night had no rain, no exceptional cold and no logistical accident whatsoever.

That matters. On the third night there was no excuse left, not the slope, not the compatible zips, not nine degrees. What was left was a tent a metre forty wide and two people who already knew.

They went in at half ten, which was early, and nobody on that campsite remarked on the hour out loud.

Of the third night the record is shorter, because it was the only one of the three in which neither of them was paying attention to anything that could be recalled afterwards in order.

Ana remembers the smell of the canvas. Vicente remembers thinking, in a gap, that there were nine hours left before they had to take it all down.

On the way back, the car that had come out with Ana in the middle seat went home with Ana in the middle seat.

Nobody proposed a swap. Karina, who drove the first hundred kilometres, put on a long playlist and asked no questions at all, and that restraint cost her a visible effort.

Vicente got out first, at a station, because he lived the other way.

He took his rucksack out of the boot, said goodbye to the five of them, and said goodbye to Ana too, in exactly the same way, in the same tone, which fooled two of the five people present.

The trip group chat stayed active for another nine days, which is the normal half-life of that kind of group. Photographs, the one of Serginho going in, an argument about who owed what to whom.

Ana and Vicente posted in it with the exact frequency of people who are not avoiding a group chat.

At no point in those nine days did the two of them message each other inside it.

This was noticed by Karina on the fourth day and mentioned to Duda on the sixth, and Duda, who remains hopeless at sums, got that one right first time.