The Heart's Invisible Furies

‘The world,’ he would remark to her a few weeks into their acquaintance, ‘is a terrible place and it was our misfortune to be have been born into it.’
‘Still, the sun is out,’ she would reply then, smiling at him. ‘So there’s that at least.’

‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than seven decades of life, it’s that the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what’s around the corner and it’s often something unpleasant.’

‘Well, it was his loss,’ I said.
‘Oh don’t patronize me,’ she snapped, turning serious again. ‘People always say that, you see, but they’re wrong. It wasn’t his loss. It was mine. I loved him.’

‘I’m assuming that you have a good job somewhere?’
‘Oh right, yes,’ I said, telling her about my work at the Department of Education, and her eyes lit up immediately.
‘Now, that’s a great career to have,’ she said. ‘Almost as good as working in a bank. You simply can’t go wrong with the civil service. They can’t fire you for one thing, even if times are hard and you’re completely incompetent. Daddy always wanted me to join the civil service but I said, Daddy, I’m an independent young woman and I’ll find my own position, and find it I did on the foreign exchange desk at the Bank of Ireland, College Green. But I always think the great thing about the civil service is that you can go in there at twenty years old, spend every day of your life behind one desk and before you know it you’re an old man and it’s all behind you and the only thing left to do is die. There must be great security in that.’

Emily was a lovely girl, very personable if you like that sort of thing, but she was also my first girlfriend, the girl to whom I lost my virginity, and no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It’s like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you’ve developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn.