Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath

to him; and even Noah van Horn, that grim, turbulent man, could not help but be moved by the happy innocence of this gentle child of his.
    Noah’s intention had always been to educate Julius to take over the House of van Horn when the time came. But he realized before the boy was ten years old that he possessed no sort of a head for business, although what he did possess a head for was not at all clear. In his disappointment he became for a while still more brutal to the child, to the point that Julius emerged weeping from his father’s library on one occasion with blood running down his legs, and his daughters could tolerate it no longer. They went in a body, led by Charlotte, and with no little trepidation, to beg their father to desist.
    I have often tried to imagine what that interview was like. I know it occurred in the library, a dark, wood-paneled room on the second floor of the house. There were armchairs groupedaround a fireplace and a desk made of black mahogany, and bookshelves that rose on every side from floor to ceiling so high that a ladder was required to reach the volumes at the top. The pelt of a bear lay on the floor in front of the fire, the two glass eyes in the massive head staring unblinking into the flames. It was from one of the armchairs beside the fire that Noah barked out the command to enter when Charlotte knocked on the library door that evening.
    —Father, we have come to see you on a matter of grave importance to us, she said.
    The three girls stood trembling in the light of the gas-lamps as Noah sat with his feet planted wide apart and his hands resting on the arms of his chair, the fingers of one hand lightly curled about the stem of a glass of cut crystal which glittered in the firelight. He wore his smoking jacket, a long, skirted garment of red silk with gleaming dragons emblazoned upon it in gold thread. He wore leather slippers from Morocco. His eyes were hooded, his lip was damp.
    —Of grave importance to you.
    —To us all, said Hester, modest Hester, by far the mildest of the three. The poor girl was so frightened that no words came when she first spoke, and she had to start again. But like hersisters she gazed with firm resolve into her father’s face. Noah crossed his legs at the ankles and set his feet upon the head of the bear.
    —I am listening, he said.
    Charlotte then took one step forward and still with her hands behind her back she began to tell her father why the beating of Julius must stop. I do not know exactly what was said, but I imagine that as she warmed to her theme her arms grew restive and soon were put to work in service of her argument, and that she became flushed in the face and her voice rose in pitch. Her father, meanwhile, would soon lose the repose he had been enjoying, and the slippered feet came off the head of the bear, the broad brow creased and furrowed—he sprang to his feet and stood over the fire, the color in his cheeks growing ever redder and his hand slapping at his thigh with irritation. The younger girls, emboldened by Charlotte’s impassioned plea, were bold enough to cry “Yes!” when their sister grew especially persuasive, and although the entire event took no longer than perhaps ten minutes, by the time Charlotte was finished her father was in a state of some turmoil. He had begun with the simple conviction that Julius required discipline, and plenty of it, and thatis what he had believed until Charlotte told him flatly that the boy could not help it that he was what he was.
    This idea, strangely, had a profound effect on Noah van Horn, I mean the idea that his son “could not help it that he was what he was.” Almost at once, it seems, his feelings toward the boy changed. He saw as though in a blinding revelation that he had been punishing Julius not in order to improve his character but rather to discharge the anger that came with his recognition that the boy would never be as he wished him to be. That he had deceived himself