The set-up at Hanover Square fell to pieces after the manageress, one Lily Hubard, was arrested for fraud. Hamilton was arrested again for bad debts and fraud shortly afterwards.
Crowley then shifted to Arlington Chambers, Dover Street (at number 5, now redeveloped). He was helped to move by a friend or associate of Hamilton's named Eric Jackson, whom Crowley found he rather fancied: “Eric interests the ageing Alys” 1 he wrote; “Is it too silly? Is it merely cerebral?”
Arlington Chambers didn't last – the chambermaid complained about his hygiene, and he was out again within a week – but it was a stopgap address on what had become Crowley's ‘manor’ on the long main drag of Piccadilly with Mayfair behind it.
Crowley sometimes went to Hatchett's restaurant on the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly, and to a restaurant called Maison Basque, at number 11, where his dining partners included Collin Brooks, an editor he wanted to cultivate. Brooks was a bon viveur and old Café Royal habitué, a friend of Louis Umfreville Wilkinson's, and he had also written a cheap thriller – a “shocker” – called Mad-Doctor Merciful (Hutchinson, 1932) which compared the symptoms of lunacy and mysticism. Not a man to be intimidated by Crowley, he had a rather hearty and hard manner, and one of the intriguing lines lurking in his memoirs is “You don't need a revolver often, but when you do, you need it damned badly.”
Brooks and Crowley also went to what Brooks describes as a “that new Latin Quarter which has grown up around Portland Place” (a mini-Bohemia taking its character from the BBC staff at Broadcasting House) and in particular to a bar and restaurant attached to the Langham Hotel called the Bolivar, which was on the corner of Portland Place and Chandos Place. Crowley already knew this area at the far end of Regent Street well, and this restaurant, and it was here Brooks introduced him to the spy-traitor Guy Burgess and his partner Peter Pollock: “one or two of the younger generation who wished to meet him”, as Brooks calls them.
Crowley pulled out his new party trick of putting methylene blue dye in his drink, perhaps to give the impression it was some strange potion, from a little phial labelled ‘Lady Astor’. The humour of this is a mystery, but probably related to the fact that Lady Astor was famously teetotal.
Brooks writes in his memoirs that by now Crowley could be something of a bore. Nevertheless, after dining, “we would go to his chambers in Piccadilly, where he would produce some exotic wine… he always gave the impression of having somebody hidden in his bedroom, perhaps a virgin goat.”