Free Curiosity by Joan Thomas Page A

of the family not acknowledged in any way in the house in Bristol. No, not so uneven after all.
    There is, in the drawing room, a grand painting of Halse Hall itself, with a grey curtain hung in front to keep the sunlight and flies off. In fact, the drawing room is crammed with paintings, and Henry spends afternoons unveiling them one by one, setting himself the exercise of seeing something new in each one. He always starts with his favourite, a painting signed
Chardin
. A robed monkey looks at coins with a magnifying glass and a discriminating eye. He’s an antiquarian by profession, a model of decorum. His hair is white over the temples and brushed neatly back. Curled on the rug lies his tail. For the first time, Henry notices a stove smoking into the room, warming the monkey’s naked long-toed feet, the most human part of him, somehow.
    Next to the intelligent monkey is a portrait of Uncle Alger and Henry’s father as small boys. They’re about eight, identical brown-haired boys dressed like miniature men in red jackets and riding boots. One stands with a hand buried in the ruff of a collie, light playing over his eager face. The other, erect with a testament in the crook of his arm, turns a sober and wary eye to the painter, as though he’s sulking from a morning scolding. Whenever Alger catches Henry studying the painting, he bustles over to assert his identity as the more appealing child, to claim possession of the dog, recall the sittings, what a trial it was to get the dog to stand still. He’ll discourse for hours onthe entertaining question of how he differed from his twin brother and how he was the same.
    But what an exercise, to paint identical children – to represent, through pigment and brush stroke, two opposite natures in the same form! Henry studies the boy with the dog. How do you paint curiosity? As a glow laid onto the temples, he decides: white flake and lead-tin yellow in equal proportions. He gets the magnifying glass from the map stand and holds it up, gazing into the swirls of Kassel umber that make up the eye itself. The eye (he chooses to believe it is his father’s eye) looks warmly back through a dab of zinc white.
    At the beginning, there was just twenty minutes between them. Uncle Alger was born while Henry’s father lay wailing in a receiving blanket and the doctor was out in the latrine, thinking his day’s work done. The women were pouring tea and waiting for the afterbirth when out came a foot! How could you have a second infant in your stomach and not know it? Henry carries this question over to the next painting, a portrait of his grandmother dressed in a handsome gown in the Chinese style that accentuated her homeliness, her hair powdered and her hands folded over her stomach, hands arranged to display her wedding ring (a fretted gold band with some sort of pebble mounted in it).
    Alger comes in, wigless, his hair chopped short and unevenly powdered. Sullivan follows with two glasses of port on a tray. From the armchair by the hearth, Alger moves through his preparatory throat clearing. “A lady in London has been left a fortune of 1,800,000 gold sovereigns!” he announces finally. He’s labouring over the London
Times
, brought to him courtesy of the daredevils on the Bristol post. “Think of it! Reckoning sixty sovereigns to the troy pound, that’s a weight of thirteen tons, seven hundredweight, twelve pounds.”
    “Indeed, you are quick,” says Henry.
    “It’s all here, they’ve done the sums for you. The ordinary man needs assistance in comprehending this sort of wealth, and the
Times
has kindly provided it. This is how we must think of it: if porters were hired to carry the coin, and each of them carried 298 pounds, 107 porters would be required.”
    “Why not give each porter an even three hundred?” asks Henry, pulling the settle closer to the fire. As he sits down, his father stands momentarily on the edge of his vision, on the edge of the veranda at Halse