Nicky Haslam

The worldling’s pleasure

Two women are the only heroes of this book. One is Princess Margaret, whom the author points out was far more instrumental in the early years of Colin Tennant’s ramshackle creation of Mustique than merely lending it her unparalleled presence. Quite apart from insisting, after Tennant had fallen out with a slew of architects, that Oliver Messel — now synonymous with the island’s building style — become involved, she advised him on possible investors and operators.

She also stuck by him through all his quixotic irascibility. For his part, he flattered, feted, and fawned on this major star of his Caribbean fantasy. The other hero — or heroine —is his wife. ‘How wonderful Anne has been though all this,’ people say. Nicholas Courtney’s account of life with such an utterly selfish husband shows precisely how wonderful.

Tennant was quite clearly the most attractive, handsome, funny, odd, unpredictable and reckless creature of his time. And Lady Anne Coke, the beautiful and shy daughter of Lord Leicester, breaking the bounds of the sheltering stateliness of huge Holkham, fell once and for all for Colin’s raffish magnetism, his elegance, his knowledge and his unpredictability. Through thick and thin, through bastardy and treachery, through celebrity and celebrations, through physical cruelty and family tragedy, even for richer, for poorer, Anne remained Colin’s steadfast supporter and mainstay.

It can’t have been at all easy, however, or whenever, glamorous. Colin, richly born into ‘trade’ money, but distantly related to what remained of old Whig aristocracy, and closely to that hyper-intelligent, if slightly selfconscious ‘corrupt coterie’ the Souls, had inherited many of the latter’s traits; an amalgam of progressive thought, social-barrier breaking, classical knowledge and hi-falutin’ intelligence, mingled with class security and provocative teasing.

This bloodline endowed him with searing intelligence, a steel-trap memory, profligacy, flamboyant taste and a fatal, for many, but specifically for Anne, enchantment.

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