introducing zelda and eveline

Mentor: So, you're in a period of readjustment.

Man: Well, that's for sure. You see, my wife became my best friend. Or rather, she became my best friend, then my wife, then my best friend again, but she wanted still to be my wife, but it was too painful for her I suppose. And there was a lot to complicate matters. Like, her daughter.

Mentor: Her daughter.

Man: Yes, her daughter is key. My wife has three daughters in fact. And one son. By two previous marriages. I don't know if you can imagine a single forty-year old man, rather detached and isolated in the world, an avoider of other people largely, completely estranged from his family, suddenly finding himself in a relationship with a woman almost a decade his senior, with three children in their twenties and a youngest daughter around fourteen, a teenage runaway whose vacant room I'd moved into. And these children all popping in and out regularly, with their friends and boyfriends and domestic dramas and pregnancies and sibling spats. It was instant storyville. My journal was working overtime. And perhaps I was more enamoured of this new environment than I was of my new partner, though she was the eye of the storm, if you will. The initial generator of all this family activity. 

Mentor: So you took an interest in one the daughters?

Man: Well, yes I did, but it's a long story. Okay, there I was, having moved into this house as just an ordinary tenant, a lodger. Anxious from the start because I knew my landlady, a friend of a friend, had a romantic interest in me. An attractive older woman whose sullen youngest daughter resembled Lolita, and was even halfnicknamed such by her amused elders. But I was no Humbert Humbert and my future wife was certainly no Charlotte Haze. No, at the beginning my sexual focus was very much on Charlotte - I mean, sorry on my future wife. Let's call her Zelda. That's the name of my grandmother, actually. Who died in childbirth at twenty-six. Besides, Zelda’s youngest, whom I’ll call Lola, wasn’t much in the picture. She only turned up now and again to collect something and flounce off again. Her bust bustin out all over. Zelda’s eldest child, a troubled soul upon whom I shall bestow a pleasant biblical name, Esther, was when I first met her a still newly minted Christian, though she has since confided to me that she always felt the spirit move within her. She too had been a teenage runaway, lost for some years in the ways of wickedness, but in recent times she has managed to support her youngest sister in returning to the right path and accepting the lord into her heart. But I mean not to mock her nor anyone, she is as complex and unfathomable as we all are, and she has a good heart, a liberal nature and all her mother's pragmatism. Zelda's second child is the daughter in question. Let us call her - not Bertha, nor Beryl, nor Bridget. No, I shall call her Eveline. I doubt she'll like that, nor know the allusion.