17
WARWICK ROAD, WEST KENSINGTON
Pure prestidigitation

After a brief spell in Chancery Lane, Crowley moved alone to rooms on the fourth floor of 60 Jermyn Street, a good address associated with restaurants and gentlemen's retailing – shirtmakers, shoemakers, scent, barbering – just south of Piccadilly and on the edge of clubland. Number 60 itself has a quietly magnificent doorway. He would have a life-long association with Jermyn Street, handy for Piccadilly, Regent St, Bond St, Whineray, and the Café Royal; there were also Turkish baths at number 76, and he later used the Savoy Turkish Baths at number 92 (opened 1910). He would return to Jermyn Street in 1942 for his last London address.

Crowley went to Tangier in 1907 with his student the Earl of Tankerville (a paranoid cocaine user or ‘coke fiend’ whom he'd met at Whineray's: Crowley calls him “the Earl of Coke and Crankum”) and on his return he found Rose's bill for 150 bottles of whisky in five months. Rose's unhappiness was made worse by knowledge of Crowley's infidelities, including the birth of an illegitimate son with a girl he had met in Soho named Jenny Zwee, who worked as a milliner in Burlington Arcade.

Nevertheless from February 1908 they made one last attempt to live together again at 21 Warwick Road, West Kensington. Crowley's library-study was in the ground floor room at the front, overlooking the main road, with the dining room and kitchen in the basement, and Crowley recounts his surprise at the speed and stealth with which Rose could nip downstairs and surreptitiously throw back a glass of whisky: “It was an act of prestidigitation and nothing else.”

By June he was writing to her doctor, a W. Murray Leslie of 74 Cadogan Place, that

life with Rose is intolerable while she locks me out of the house, insults her own guests at my table, uses foul language to servants, reels up Bond Street charging into passers-by, goes from crisis to crisis of hysteria, tells people wild and impossible lies about me etc etc etc ad nauseam… Rose is subject to insane delusions. I will not live in a house alone with her and a drunken ex-Piccadilly prostitute (called a servant, God knows why…)

This same servant would later testify in court that Crowley hit Rose, and entertained a short, dark, heavily jewelled woman overnight while Rose was absent, and in 1909 they divorced.