For her records, Angela had chosen Debussy’s ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’, because Hugh had played it when he was a music student, and Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy’ because it brought back the fifties. She wanted an extract from Schumann’s Dichterliebe, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, because it was the first LP she ever bought, and Billie Holiday – her voice shot through with crackles and sighs – singing ‘Willow Weep’, because it reminded her of Streatham Ice Rink. She asked for Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert’s B flat Piano Sonata, which she described as her favourite piece of music; in one of our last meetings she had said she now preferred Schubert to Beethoven – ‘more heart’. Woody Guthrie’s ‘Riding in My Car’ she chose because she liked being driven and because it reminded her of being in the car with Alexander, who was learning it on his guitar. The penultimate number was Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry’: played at an unfamiliar speed, it wound through the place like treacle. On the tape decks was David Miller, at the time Deborah Rogers’ assistant. He was beckoned to an aisle seat by one of Rushdie’s bodyguards. ‘You’re playing this at the wrong speed,’ said Rushdie. But weird and slow though it was, this was the recording that Angela had in her collection, so Miller stuck to his guns. As the song wound slowly on, the actress and writer Pauline Melville stood up from her seat and began to dance. The author of short stories about shape-shifting rolled her shoulders and hips very gradually; she looked like a graceful hallucination. The final record was one of Richard Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’; Hugh said that was something on which she would never have alighted had she not been ill. In the middle of it, a poster of Wise Children which had been stuck up at one side of the stage came loose and fluttered down.
When the time came for Angela’s luxury to be announced, Mark and Alexander came up from the audience and onto the stage. They turned around Corinna’s bright screen. On the back of the scene of island vegetation she had painted Angela’s choice of luxury. It was a zebra.
Acknowledgements
I would not have written any book without the early encouragement of Christopher Ricks and Karl Miller. I would not have written this book without the prompting of my friends Tim Dee, of BBC Radio, and Alexandra Pringle, of Bloomsbury.
I am grateful to Mark Pearce, Alexander Pearce and Rose Boyt, and to Lindsay Duguid and Carol McDaid from whose terrific editorial advice I have greatly benefited.
Thanks, also, to Edward Horesh, Rebecca Howard and Corinna Sargood, to Xandra Bingley, Michael Holroyd, Fiona Maddocks, Diana Melly, Rick Stroud and Francis Wyndham; to my agent David Miller and, at Bloomsbury, to Holly MacDonald, Paul Nash, Anya Rosenberg, Anna Simpson, Justine Taylor and Alexa von Hirschberg. Thanks to the Authors’ Foundation.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my friends Georgina Brown, Anne Chisholm, Richard Hollis and Posy Simmonds.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer
First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by Susannah Clapp
Endpaper illustration © Corinna Sargood
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A Card From Angela Carter Page 6