What Happens at Night Read online

  Praise for

  What Happens at Night

  “In his characteristically precise and lucid prose, Peter Cameron invents a virtuosic tale that is by turns terrifying, comic, and heartbreaking. We do not always know whether we are in the realm of the real or the hallucinatory in this thrillingly mysterious and gorgeously written novel. What is never in doubt is that we are in the hands of a ravishing stylist and a supremely gifted storyteller.”

  —SIGRID NUNEZ, author of The Friend

  “The prose in What Happens at Night is faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing, like a tuxedo lined with knives. I can’t think of another book at once so beautiful and so unnerving, so poised between miracle and disaster. Peter Cameron is one of America’s greatest writers, the living stylist I most revere.”

  —GARTH GREENWELL, author of

  What Belongs to You and Cleanness

  “This book is a masterpiece—reading it reminds me of the first time I read Kafka. A whole new vision is suddenly revealed: unique, unexpected, unforgettable. Get ready for a new adjective: Cameronesque.”

  —EDMUND WHITE, author of A Boy’s Own Story

  “Peter Cameron is a compassionate and unsparing surveyor of all that comprises human character. What Happens at Night finds its home among the mid-twentieth-century classics of psychological realism, as brutal, in its way, as The Sheltering Sky, and just as memorable, just as peopled with the deep human mysteries. This new novel is a powerful and admirable addition to Cameron’s estimable body of work.”

  —RICK MOODY, author of The Ice Storm and The Long Accomplishment

  “I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by an American or by a living person that’s as exquisitely rendered as What Happens at Night. Every word is exactly as it should be; there is not a single extra word out of place. The novel feels as though it traveled through time to arrive here. Cameron’s prose creates an effect that is literally like a fugue (or cinematic fog): intense, beautiful, inescapable, and so much about grief that has been and grief that is to come, heartbreaking and tender. The story is so intense, such a fine reduction of the enormity of the dreams of marriage, the responsibilities of marriage, of life, of love, and the ways in which—unintentionally or not—we inevitably fail each other and ourselves.”

  —A. M. HOMES, author of Days of Awe and May We Be Forgiven

  “In the beautiful What Happens at Night, Peter Cameron sends a married couple to a mysterious northern country where only the schnapps is reliable. The world he creates is both recognizable and enchantingly strange. I never knew what was going to happen next, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. A profound pleasure for readers.”

  —MARGOT LIVESEY, author of Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy

  “Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night is a surreal, funny, heartbreaking story about love and mortality. Cameron’s sense of balance between the comic and the catastrophic, between cynicism and sincerity, is astonishing. This book reminds me of nothing else I’ve ever read, which is high praise indeed.”

  —MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, author of The Hours and The Snow Queen

  Praise for Peter Cameron

  “[Cameron’s] chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities infrequently found in contemporary American fiction . . . Cameron is above all a novelist of manners, building his effects from the drama and comedy of human relationships, working always on a small scale . . . [He] specializes in emotional subtlety and unspoken desires—all the while hinting at an almost overwhelming disorder swirling beneath the placid surface . . . We may be so slow to recognize Cameron as a twenty-first-century American master because he has the sensibility of a twentieth-century British one.”

  —CHRISTOPHER BEHA, Bookforum

  “Pull up a chair by the fire and settle in, but don’t get too lulled by the domestic setting, because Cameron’s writing is full of sharp angles and unanticipated swerves into the droll and the downright weird . . . I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that Coral Glynn is not ‘about’ anything so much as it is about the pleasures of storytelling . . . [Cameron] artfully compresses so many beloved English stories and tropes into one smashing novel.”

  —MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR

  “Peter Cameron [is] an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer . . . The plots, the ventures, the encounters of his characters, instead of taking them from point A to point B, abduct them into unintended and more expansive itineraries.”

  —RICHARD EDER, The Boston Globe

  “Mr. Cameron announces his talent in the way that matters: by telling a riveting tale with an often heartbreakingly pure prose style . . . [Cameron’s] writing . . . is bracingly unvarnished and unsentimental, stripped of pity or condescension. It is as though he has set an X-ray machine before the traditional English drawing room, leaving its demure occupants exposed in their loneliness and well-meant follies—and revealing them as movingly human.”

  —SAM SACKS, The Wall Street Journal

  ALSO BY PETER CAMERON

  One Way or Another

  Leap Year

  Far-flung

  The Weekend

  The Half You Don’t Know

  Andorra

  The City of Your Final Destination

  Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

  Coral Glynn

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2020 by Peter Cameron

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-96-7

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955150

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  for

  Eric Ashworth and Irene Skolnick

  in loving memory

  Miss Goering looked up at the sky; she was looking for the stars and hoping very hard to see some. She stood still for a long time, but she could not decide whether it was a starlit night or not because even though she fixed her attention on the sky without once lowering her eyes, the stars seemed to appear and disappear so quickly that they were like visions of stars rather than like actual stars.

  JANE BOWLES

  Two Serious Ladies

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  Evening descended with unnerving abruptness, like a curtain hurriedly lowered on an amateur theatrical gone horribly awry. And then the man noticed that the darkness was not the result of the sun setting but of the train entering a dense forest, leaving behind the open fields of snow it had traversed all afternoon. The fir trees, tall and thick, crowded closely along the tracks, like children pressing themselves up against a classroom window to get a better view of some gruesome accident in the street.

  His wife sat on the seat across from him; they were the only two people in the small, wood-paneled carriage of the old-fashioned train. For a long time she had been staring absently out the window, mesmerized, it seemed, by the endless expanse of tundra, but she suddenly recoiled when the train entered the dark woods as if the trees brushing the sides of the carriage might reach in and scratch her. She touched the tender place on her cheek where the skin had been nastily scraped the night before.

  They had visited the market of the city where they were staying, for although they were not tourists, they were strangers, and eager
to feel a part of some place, any place, if only for a night. And so the woman had been trying to find some charm in the market, for she was at a place in her life where it was necessary to discern and appreciate any charm or beauty she encountered, but this market was singularly without charm, for it contained nothing but fish and meat and root vegetables, and the fish did not look fresh and the meat was not muscle but organs and brains and feet and lips and hearts, and the vegetables were all winter vegetables, roots and tubers and other colorless things that had been savagely yanked from their cold earthen beds. No bright pyramids of tomatoes and peaches, no bouquets of basil and nasturtium, no glistening jeweled eyes of fish, no marbled slabs of beef. And then she had seen, in the distance, one stall that sold spectacular hothouse flowers, and had run toward it, desperate to find something that did not entirely turn one away from life. Her husband had noticed their artifice before she did, and had tried to steer her down another aisle, but she pulled free of him and ran toward the colored brightness of the flowers, wanting to bury her face in their fragrant petal softness, buy an armful of them and carry it around with her, like a bride, like a diva in the footlights, but in front of a fishmonger’s stall she had slipped in a puddle of frigid water and fell to the floor, scraping her cheek and palms on the wet, fishy concrete.

  It was not until her husband had caught up with her and helped her to her feet that she realized that the flowers were plastic. Not even silk! She could have at least touched them if they were silk.

  After a moment the woman returned her attention to the book that lay open upon her lap. She had found this old book, The Dark Forest by Hugh Walpole, in the waiting room of a train station that they had passed through, obviously abandoned by a fellow traveler. For some time after the darkness fell—or was entered—she continued to read, but suddenly she looked up from her book at the dark rushing windows of the carriage and asked, Is there a light?

  There was just enough light remaining in the carriage to see that there was no light.

  I don’t see one, her husband said.

  You’d think there’d be a light, she said.

  Yes, he said, you’d think.

  She sighed disappointedly, whether at the lack of a light or at his response to such a lack, he knew not. Probably both, and more.

  They had been traveling for days, first by plane, and then by train and ferry, and now once again by train, for their destination was a place at the edge of the world, in the far north of a northern country, and not easily gained. Their journey was like a journey from a prior century, a matter of days rather than hours, the earth serious and real beneath them, constantly insisting on its vastness.

  An authentic evening was now occurring, the darkness a product of the sun’s absence rather than its obscurity. They both watched it through the window. The woman touched her reflection, which the darkness outside had just revealed. Look at me, she said, so gaunt. My God, gaunt: how I hate that word. Gaunt and jackal and hubris. Seepage and—what are the other words I hate?

  She had begun to do this recently: familiarly allude to odd, supposedly long-held predilections or positions that had never previously been mentioned. Or existed, as far as the man knew. So he ignored her nonsensical question by asking her what the book was about.

  For a moment she said nothing, just watched her reflection hurtling along the dark scrim of pines. About? she finally said. In what sense do you mean?

  He did not answer, because he did not like to indulge her contrariness.

  After a moment she said, It’s about the war.

  Which war?

  One of the World Wars, she said. The first, I think. They’re in trenches.

  And?

  And? War is awful. It’s bad enough I’m stuck reading it; don’t make me talk about it too.

  Okay, he said. I’m sorry.

  She looked at him, her audacity suddenly collapsed. No, she said. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sorry. I’m just on edge, you know—about everything.

  I understand, he said. I’m on edge too.

  About everything?

  No, he said. Not everything. Just, you know—how this all will go.

  Or not go, she said.

  They had both fallen asleep and were simultaneously awoken by a peculiar sensation: stillness. The train had stopped. Outside the carriage window they could see, through the veil of fog that their breaths had condensed upon the glass, a platform and a building. There was no one about and no sound but the tickling sifts of snow gusting against the window. The man thought of the warm molecules of their breath, trapped against the cold glass of the windows, a union outside of, independent of, them.

  This must be it, she said. Wasn’t it the first stop?

  Yes, he said.

  Then this is it, she said.

  I don’t see any sign, he said.

  No. She rubbed a messy circle on the window, but nothing helpful was revealed, just more of the wooden platform, on which a single lamp separated a conical swath of snow from the huge surrounding darkness.

  This must be it, he said. He stood up and opened the carriage door.

  Don’t go, she said.

  But this must be it, he said.

  It can’t be, she said. It’s not a real station. There’s no town, nothing. It must be a way station.

  A way station?

  Yes, she said. A pause, not a stop.

  He stepped out onto the platform, disturbing the perfect blanket of snow. He felt like a barbarian. But once its perfection had been defiled he knew he must continue, for a hairline crack on a beautiful piece of china is more upsetting than the same piece of china shattered on the floor. So he ran about in ever-widening circles, kicking up the snow about him as messily as he could, and drew near enough to the building at the platform’s edge to see, in a sort of echo of faded paint, the name of the town that was their destination.

  He suddenly felt foolish and stopped his cavorting, and in the ensuing stillness he became aware of some frightening engagement in the darkness behind him. The train. He turned to see it slowly moving, so slowly that for a moment he thought it must be the darkness moving behind it, but then he knew it was the train, for he could see his wife leaning forward, looking out of the still-opened door, her white face silently surprised, and for a second it felt like death to him, like how one must let one’s beloved depart this world, gliding silently slack-faced into the snow-dark.

  But then a sense of emergency successfully obliterated that vision, and he called out to the woman and ran toward and then alongside the hastening train, and she was up and throwing their bags out the open door as if it were all part of a well-rehearsed drill, and just before the place where the platform ended she leaped into his arms.

  The train clacked into the darkness, the door of their carriage still flung open, like a dislocated wing.

  For a moment he held her closer and tighter than he had held her in a long time. Then they unclasped and went to fetch their bags, which appeared artfully arranged, dark rocks on the snowy Zen expanse of the platform. Then they stood for a moment and looked about them at the darkness.

  This can’t be it, she said.

  He pointed to the letters on the station wall.

  I know, she said, but this can’t be it. There’s nothing—

  Let me look around front, he said. Perhaps there’s something there.

  What?

  I don’t know. A telephone, or a taxi.

  Yes, she said. And perhaps there’s a McDonalds and a Holiday Inn as well. She laughed bitterly and he realized that she had finally turned against him, forsaken him as he had watched her forsake everyone else she had once loved, slowly but surely drifting toward a place where anger and impatience and scorn usurped love. She stepped away from him, toward the edge of the platform, and for a moment they silently regarded each other. He waited to see whether her fury was rising or falling; he suspected she was too exhausted to sustain such glaring fierceness, and he was right—after a moment she staggered and
reached out to steady herself against the metal railing.

  With his outstretched arm, shrouded in his Arctic parka, he swept a cushion of snow off a bench that stood against the station wall. Sit down, he said.

  No. I’m coming with you.

  No, sit. Are you cold? Do you want my coat?

  There’s nothing around the front, she said. There’s nothing anywhere.

  Don’t be ridiculous, he said. Sit.

  I’m not a dog, she said. But she sat on the bench.

  I’ll be right back, he said. He waited for her to object but she did not. He bent down and kissed her cold scraped cheek. Then he walked along the platform and around to the front of the building, where no one was, and even though their encounter had been conducted quietly, he had the disturbing feeling one gets upon leaving a pulsating discotheque late at night—the sudden absence of sound more jarring than its presence.

  A few dark cars and trucks stoically amassed garments of snow in the small parking lot. A single road disappeared into the forest that surrounded everything. There was no sign of life anywhere, just trees and snow and silence and the shrouded slumbering vehicles.

  And then a light shone from one of the cars in the parking lot, and its engine started. The silence and stillness had been so deep that witnessing the car come to life was as eerie as watching an ambered insect unfurl its frozen wings and fly away. A bubble of white at the center of the car’s snow-covered roof glowed from within, suggesting that the car was—might be—a taxi. The door opened, and the man watched the driver light a cigarette and throw the still-flaming match into the air, where it somersaulted into the snow, and died.

  The man assumed that it was his appearance that had roused this vehicle from its slumber, yet the driver gave no indication that this was the case; he smoked his cigarette and regarded the parking lot and the train station with disinterest.

  So the man walked down the wooden steps and crunched across the hard-packed snow of the parking lot. The driver made no response whatsoever to the man’s approach, not even when he stood in the narrow alley of snow that separated the car from its neighbor.