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  ‘She took one look at it,’ he remembered, ‘and thought it was a nice little car for him to run around in. What she didn’t know, of course, was that it was a racing car. It was 1290cc, four cylinder – it was exquisite.’

  It was even more so when Tara, who was surprisingly knowledgeable about engines, got under the bonnet and made some adjustments to make it go faster. He hadn’t yet passed his driving test, but he had an Irish provisional licence, which could be obtained without having to demonstrate any kind of proficiency behind the wheel. From the moment he sat in the car, it was clear that what excited him most was its speed.

  ‘The first night he got it,’ Glen remembered, ‘we took it down to Beaconsfield. It was in the days before they built the motorway. There was a whole series of roundabouts from Blackbushe onwards and he liked to drive around them at speed and make a bit of a show for his own amusement. It was a challenge for him. It was his first car and it was the first time he’d driven it. It wasn’t like the Lotuses we drove later on. Lotuses tended to go wherever you pointed them. You had to control this car. It was work. But he still pushed the boat out. We were sideways, left, right, on the road. The final roundabout was at Uxbridge. It was somewhere around there that we pulled into a garage to get petrol. The fellow who served us said to me, “If he carries on driving like that, he’ll kill himself.” And that was the first night he got the car.’

  For Tara, it was hugely liberating to at last have his own transport. London, a city in the throes of becoming the definition of coolness itself, was suddenly his playground. He especially loved doing the Chelsea Cruise, driving the stretch of the King’s Road between Sloane Square and World’s End that was turning into a catwalk for the young and the with-it. With another portable, battery-powered record player resting on the door of the open glovebox, he coasted up and down the road, listening to Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’, ‘Twistin’ the Night Away’ by Sam Cooke, or, if the mood took him, something more raw – maybe a little ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’ by Howlin’ Wolf – the stylus bouncing across the grooves whenever he was forced to step on the brake.

  Having his own set of wheels allowed Tara to get around to see his finishing-school friends from his Paris days. ‘He came around to our house in Montpelier Square to meet my parents,’ Jacquetta Lampson said of a warm, ambrosial evening she had reason to remember – it was one of the last times she ever saw him. ‘I remember sitting on the roof with him. It was a kind of forbidden hideaway. You had to climb out of this tiny upstairs window and crawl along this sort of perch, then you could sit on this flat roof. We played records there until it was morning. I remember Blue Moon by the Marcels and Runaway by Del Shannon. And then I remember the birds singing in the square in front of the house and it was the following day.’

  A change had come over him since they’d been friends in Paris, she noticed. There was an air of sorrow about him, like something was weighing on his mind. ‘At one point, he grew quite melancholy,’ she recalled, ‘then he said, “People only like me for my money – but at least they like me.”’

  What Jacquetta didn’t know was that Tara was now moving with a faster crowd. And he’d met someone – a girl. As a matter of fact, he thought he might be in love with her.

  •

  Unlike most of the girls who made up his social circle, Noreen MacSherry had no entry in the pages of Burke’s Peerage. She was the runaway daughter of an Irish-born postman. Slim and pretty, with dyed blonde hair, cut in the geometric fashion of the time, she was a well-known face around Soho, where she worked cloakrooms, sold amphetamines and was frequently mistaken for the American actress Jean Seberg. Nicki, as she’d decided to be known, was the essential Sixties butterfly child.

  ‘She had a kind of slightly androgynous quality,’ Christopher Gibbs remembered. ‘And she always appeared to have no fixed abode – you were always unsure of where she’d slept the night before, or what she was going to do tonight. She was very winsome and charming. And she certainly had some kind of survivor genes, which were apparent from very early on. And she was wild – she was very, very wild.’

  She was friends with Ronan O’Rahilly, who was thought by some to be in love with her, although Nicki’s regular boyfriend was a painter named Graham Rogers, whose surname she somehow managed to acquire. To one and all, she was Nicki Rogers.

  Adding to her allure was the fact that no one seemed to know who she was or where she’d come from. Big cities allow people to hide in plain view and Nicki Rogers was certainly doing that. She was born in Yeovil, Somerset, and spent her childhood in Tulse Hill, south London, except a period during the war when she was sent to live with her grandparents in Northern Ireland. She was the eldest of three children born to Sean MacSherry, or Shane, a London postman, originally from Newry, County Down, and his wife, Anne, who came from Carrickmacross, County Monaghan.

  She was, by her own admission, rather wild in her youth. In 1960, when she was seventeen, there was a row in the house and she ran away to Birmingham to live with her mother’s friend, whom she knew as Auntie Eva. What caused the trouble is unclear, though later in life she confided in friends that she’d had a baby, which she’d given up for adoption.

  After several months in Birmingham, she returned to London, where she got a job as a clerk with the Bank of England, earning £4.10 a week. She was not a success. After a few weeks, she thought about quitting to enrol in art college.

  ‘The bank thought that was a very good idea,’ she said shortly before her death in 2012, ‘and they very much encouraged me to pursue it! The only problem was that I had no art to show. My boyfriend at the time was a painter called Graham Rogers, so I decided, okay, I’ll move in with him.’

  She never made it to art college. Instead, at night, in form-hugging, ice-blue denims, she worked as a coat check girl, first in the Marquee, then in several clubs around Wardour Street, where she sold amphetamines to the clientele and fell in with a number of Soho faces, including Ronan O’Rahilly and – as fate would have it – Tara’s new friend, Michael Beeby.

  She met Tara for the first time in the middle of March 1962, one week after he turned seventeen and not long after her relationship with her artist boyfriend had fizzled out. She was sharing a flat in Cromwell Gardens, Kensington, with a girl whom Michael was dating. ‘This flatmate of mine said Michael was calling around and he was going to have this seventeen-year-old Irish kid with him,’ Nicki recalled, ‘and would I come with them on a double-date? I said, “Seventeen? I’m sorry, I don’t do babysitting.”

  ‘I was actually trying to get out of the house when Michael pulled up in his red Mini. I stood at the door and I watched this tall fellow get out, which was Michael, then his passenger – Tara – who was wearing a crash helmet, for reasons I never discovered. Perhaps it was a joke about Michael’s driving. I just thought, “What a twit!” but it was too late for me to sneak out the door.

  ‘So we all went to Battersea Funfair, which was Tara’s idea. He’d loved it since he was a boy. He was still a boy, really. He had this blond hair and this beige skin – he was quite tanned – and these green eyes. I can’t say that I was attracted to him for the first, I don’t know, two and a half hours. But it was his manners that drew me to him. He had the most beautiful manners and the most beautiful nature. He was incredibly polite without ever seeming smarmy. I can’t think where he got that from, because his mother wasn’t like that at all. It was probably his father.

  ‘And, very unexpectedly, I ended up having a wonderful day, playing on the waterslide and everything else. His mother had bought him an Alfa Romeo for his birthday. He’d only had the thing a week, but his hands were already covered in calluses and blisters from tinkering with the engine to try to make it go faster. We went to see a fortune-teller at the fair. This gypsy woman looked at his hands and said, “I think you do some kind of manual labour for a living,” which of course he found absolutely hilarious.’

  Tara, inexperienced in sexual matters, was immedi
ately smitten. In fact, the following morning, he was back at the door of Cromwell Gardens, this time alone, with the Alfa Romeo parked outside on the road, the engine idling. He drove Nicki to Devon to see Fantôme, a three-masted luxury yacht that his grandfather, Ernest, bought forty years earlier to take his daughters on a yearlong cruise. It was moored in the Exeter Ship Canal. ‘He wanted to show me the boat on which his mother had sailed around the world as a little girl,’ she said. ‘And after that, for the next few weeks, we barely left each other’s side.’

  The relationship was intensely physical from the beginning. They spent days in bed together, grateful for that other vital ingredient in the social metamorphosis that Britain underwent in the 1960s: the oral contraceptive. The Pill had gone on general sale for the first time the previous year and would change the sexual mores of an entire generation.

  ‘Tara was very sweet,’ said Nicki. ‘He told me that the only woman he ever loved before he met me was an American woman he saw demonstrating the hula hoop in Harrods when he was thirteen years old. It was all very intense. But then he had to go away to Switzerland for three weeks that April. He was going skiing. He loved skiing, but he hated being away from me, because being in a relationship – being in love – was all very new to him.’

  There was something else, which he referred to in an oblique way during the night he spent listening to music on the roof with Jacquetta. He had a suspicion that his new friends only liked him because he was rich. What if this girl was only after his money, too? He was sufficiently confused about his feelings for Nicki to keep the relationship a secret from his mother.

  ‘He knew she wouldn’t approve,’ Nicki said. ‘Charmian Scott or Candida Betjeman: that’s who Oonagh saw as an ideal partner for Tara. In fact, he was a little bit besotted with Charmian when he met me, although I’m not sure that she thought of him in that way. She was going out with Hercules Belville, a dear friend of Tara’s. But I think Oonagh would have been pleased if he’d ended up with her and I expect he knew that. So before he went to Switzerland, I told him to decide if he liked her or if he liked me. But she wasn’t having sex with him and I was. I think that’s what swung it in my favour.’

  After three weeks, Tara returned from his skiing trip, having made up his mind that he wanted Nicki to be his girlfriend. ‘From that point on,’ she said, ‘we were inseparable.’

  As Tara’s relationship with Nicki intensified, some of his older friendships began to slide. Hugo Williams met Tara once or twice in London, but was scared off by the company that his young friend was keeping. ‘He outgrew us really,’ he remembered. ‘We weren’t fast enough for him. He was moving on up, to the Chelsea set, then on to the rock and roll set. And life is dangerous in such company. If you didn’t have money, you couldn’t keep up. I was working on a literary magazine and my life was so humble compared to the kind of life Tara was leading. It was just too much for me.’

  According to Michael Boyle, Tara had a very clear understanding that at least some of his new Wardour Street friends were using him for his money. He may have even suspected it of Nicki. But he was too in love with her to do anything about it. ‘He used to say to me, “I know they’re hustlers. I don’t mind. I’m a hustlee.”’

  According to Nicki, however, there wasn’t any money to hustle. The Guinness trustees were keeping a tight grip on the purse strings, presumably alarmed at the pace at which Miguel was bleeding Oonagh dry. Tara was living on an allowance of £7.10 a week, although several of his friends remember him carrying a chequebook, which was virtually unheard of for a boy of seventeen.

  Several other friends picked up on the same melancholia that Jacquetta noticed in Tara that summer. He was in love, but there were too many complications with the relationship for him to properly enjoy it. Nicki wasn’t like the demure, well-born girls of his experience. She was wild. Tara wasn’t in control.

  One day that summer, he called to see Lucy Hill, his childhood friend with whom he’d reconnected since he moved to London. She was living in Little Venice when Tara showed up in his car, close to tears. ‘He was with Nicki at the time and I think things were already difficult,’ she remembered. ‘He opened up to me a bit. He was almost weeping and he said the same thing he’d said to me when we were children: “I know people only like me for my money.”’

  His favourite song that summer was ‘But I Was Cool’ by Oscar Brown Jr, the jazz and soul artist, who sings about his golden rule: always have nerves of steel and never show folks how you really feel. Tara would quote lines from the song like they were a spell that could ward off bad karma.

  ‘He got his motto from that record,’ Williams remembered. ‘He used to say, “Be cool, act cool, stay cool, keep cool.” So this became a deliberate act for him – not showing things, especially what he was feeling. But I would have thought his defences were skin-deep.’

  •

  That summer, Tara and Nicki went on their first holiday together. They took the Alpha Romeo and a stack of 45s onto the Channel ferry, then drove down through France to Saint Tropez. ‘His father had told him there was no way he was taking the car,’ Nicki remembered, since the legal driving age in France was eighteen. ‘He was much more in awe of his father than his mother, because his father used to say no to him, whereas Oonagh let him do whatever he wanted. But in this case, Tara decided that he was going to take it anyway.’

  He was tearing along the road when, just outside Antibes, the police attempted to pull him over.

  ‘We heard a siren,’ Nicki said. ‘And they were behind us, ordering us to stop. I remember Tara and I exchanged this look, like he was trying to make up his mind what to do. And then he just put his foot down. He outdid the police car and he did it on roads that he didn’t know terribly well. They didn’t catch us – he was thrilled by that. And looking back I think that was the start of his obsession with motor racing.’

  They spent three weeks together in Saint Tropez, along with some of Tara’s Paris friends, including Mark, Jacquetta and Michael Boyle, as well as Melissa North, who was still carrying a torch for her former boyfriend. Yet theirs had been an innocent, unconsummated love; very quickly, she divined that what Tara had with Nicki was something altogether different.

  ‘I think Tara and Nicki were the first couple I ever understood to be incredibly sexually in love,’ Melissa said. ‘One felt immediately that they must have had incredible sex together. I had never noticed that before in people. It was chemistry. Nicki would always be sitting on top of him or leaning on him and they would always be close. And he was always tactile around her. She was a sex goddess to me.

  ‘The first time I saw her, like everyone else, I thought I was looking at Jean Seberg. She was this very narrow person. Stick thin. She only wore Levi’s. And she had very, very short hair, dyed peroxide blonde. And lots of eye make-up. She was just so unlike any of us ex-debbie girls and exactly what I would have expected Tara’s girlfriend to be. Gorgeous, exotic, glamorous, with amazing style.

  ‘And a fantastic dancer. We would go out to these clubs in the south of France and Nicki was like a magnet for people. People couldn’t take their eyes off her. Everyone wanted to be around her.

  ‘She seemed so much older and more worldly than any of us and she had confidence, no matter what situation she found herself in. And of course there was this story doing the rounds that she had been a gangster’s girlfriend in Wardour Street, which wasn’t true, but it made her even more glamorous in our eyes, this rumour that she came from the world of criminals.

  ‘I remember being very impressed that they were in the south of France with absolutely no interest in doing anything. The house was full of all these posh people. It was Lord this and Lord that. And it was: “Ra, ra, ra – let’s go to the beach!” and off everyone would go in their cars. But Tara and Nicki didn’t want to go anywhere. Nicki was white as a sheet. As it happened, I got terribly badly sunburned on the first day we arrived, so I had to stay home as well. Tara, Nicki and I had the house
to ourselves. We’d spend the days reading and playing records and chatting – it was heavenly – before everybody would come back and it’d be, “Ra, ra, ra – let’s all go go-karting!”’

  After three weeks, they returned to England, managing to avoid any further police chases on the road to Cherbourg. But two days after arriving back in London, Tara managed to rear-end another car on Kensington High Street: the first of many crashes to come.

  •

  In August, the couple were parted for a week when Tara returned to Dublin for the Horse Show. He threw himself headlong into a week of parties, including a debutante ball in Castletown House, County Kildare, for Sarah Catherine Connolly-Carew, the youngest daughter of William, the sixth Baron Carew. It was one of the last formal coming-out balls ever held in Ireland. And, as if to mark the passing of one era to the next, the Daily Express carried a photograph of Tara on the dance floor, in a navy corduroy suit, performing the scandalous Twist.

  While he was in Ireland, he told his mother about his new girlfriend. Oonagh’s response to the news is not recorded but it can’t have been good. While she despised her sister Maureen’s kind of snobbery, she clearly had something different in mind for her darling baby boy than a postman’s daughter who worked in nightclub cloakrooms.

  He listened to his mother’s concerns, but he didn’t care what she, or anyone else, thought. It was, after all, how Oonagh had raised him. He decided that summer that he and Nicki were going to live together, whatever it took. Quite a number of his friends believed, mistakenly, that he was cut off because of his love for a commoner. Tara and Nicki may have contributed to this impression themselves by spending the autumn and winter of 1962 squatting with friends, or living in grotty and numbingly cold bedsits. Ferdinand Mount, the future policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher and editor of the Times Literary Supplement, remembered sharing a mews off the Fulham Road with the couple that winter: 21 Bury Walk. It was owned by two sisters, Guinevere and Jacintha Buddicorn, who had an interest in the occult.