Angela Culme-Seymour

Bolter's Grand-daughter

Writersworld, 2001.

It was very cold; the lake in Regent's Park was frozen, an icy white haze hung low over the black branches of the trees. I saw Jan walking very fast round the edge of the lake, her face a bluish-mauve colour from the cold, her eyes red-rimmed from crying...We went on walking round the lake and then back again

The author is the grand-daughter of Trix Ruthven, 'a society beauty who famously "bolted" from her first and second husbands and became known as the Bolter - all very shocking in the 1900's' (blurb). Jan is Angela's mother; her distress may be compounded by a sense of deja vue, as her daughter has left her husband to live with another man. And it's not all roses for Angela. Her lover's business venture in wartime London is near collapse, and she has appealed to a previous lover to rescue them from bankruptcy.

Thursday was a beautiful spring day. I pushed Mark in his pram to Regent's Park... Beds of scarlet, yellow, pink, black and purple tulips made great lines of colour against the dark tree-trunks. The blue sky was reflected in the water of the lake...The huge barrage balloons floated three hundred feet up in the air, silver in the sunlight. Mark crawled happily off the rug and over the grass. Every now and then he pulled clumsily at a daisy, examined it, and brought it back to me, or pulled himself up by the wheel of his pram and dropped it inside. But the nagging anxiety never left me