It’s like this. I am an options trader. This means that I see everything in terms of time to and probability and nature of outcome – in my personal as well as in my professional life. The one has leaked into the other. I tried explaining this to Sharon once and she kind of got it.
‘So Pascal’s bet,’ she had summarised, ‘is that you lose nothing by believing in God, whether he exists or not.’
To which I had said, ‘Yes.’ About to elaborate, I realised she had fallen asleep.
But Mie had really got it after she had stayed silent a moment and reflected. We were in a taxi in, of all places, Pascalstrasse, just north of Hamburg. ‘It’s not just that you lose nothing by believing in God but that you stand to gain an infinite amount if you gain everlasting life by believing. The argument is that from a risk and reward perspective one would be foolish not to believe.’
‘Exactly,’ I had said. ‘No risk and infinite reward.’
And yet, yet, I didn’t believe because, actually, the risk that I saw was one of personal obliteration, the evisceration of the very thing that made me me. We must consider not only the probability and the size of the outcome but the stake too.
From my study window, I look out over the garden and onto Isabella’s butterfly pavilion. We’re in the third year of her breeding butterflies here. That first summer, I was lying on my back in the grass playing with Sky when I looked up to see Isabella standing above us, a kaleidoscope of butterflies around her head. I reasoned then that if I remained married to her it wasn’t because I had committed to so many years previously but because I wished to on that very day as I hoped I would on every day.
I can see Isabella move from breeding cage to breeding cage, observing, tidying. A butterfly has alighted on an eyebrow; she juts her lower jaw forward and blows it off. Others garland her hair, like, from a distance, a straggly daisy chain. She moves gracefully, despite being seven months pregnant with our third child.
Sky is at nursery school, Jess is asleep in his buggy by the pavilion door. Isabella is possessive; too much so, I believe: she never lets the boys out of her sight when they’re at home. I think to myself that I should show more understanding and not take offence.
I don’t like the names she has chosen for our children but, now that they are our children’s, I like them more. I hope for a girl, now, after two boys, but need to have Isabella understand she must choose a name other than Gaia, a name that has different connotations for me than it does for her. From the start, Isabella insisted that we would have three children.
I trade from home now and Isabella works part-time as an art dealer, having begun with her brother’s pictures and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to price a painting just where a purchaser will buy it. We go into London once a week or so, me to lunch with other traders or former colleagues and Isabella, when Sky is at school, to catch up with Sharon in the gallery, taking Jess with her. Once a month, we go in as a family and show Sky and Jess the sights and the museums, keen that the wonderful city be accessible to them. Its avenues and streets feel like the arteries and veins that comprise us. The human proportions of its buildings and public spaces reflect us and refine us, our humanity, our aesthetics, our relationships.
Occasionally, Sharon will join us; she knows all the short cuts through London’s parks and the most secluded places. While she and Isabella chat, I entertain the boys, reviewing, all the time, my facile assessment of Mie as mind and of Sharon as body and of Isabella as person, perfect fusion of the two, and conclude, every time, that I’m being unfair to both Mie and Sharon.
Very occasionally, Kimberley joins us, when, by the end of the afternoon it will be me deep in conversation with her and Isabella running after the boys. Kimberley teaches English literature in a London university now and has a depth and breadth of reading I envy and find breathtaking. ‘You can find the solution,’ she says, wheezing, ‘to most of life’s important questions in a novel,’ to which I nod vigorously, while Isabella only smiles.