Tea & Antipathy (26 page)

We settled these mysterious claims—there was no Queen Anne table in the house; we hadn't broken anything; the carpet stains had been there when we arrived; any more recent stains
had resulted from the defective drain flood ignored by Mr. MacAllister, and we had paid all bills engendered by us—for an amount roughly equivalent to twelve dollars. Mrs. Stackpole and Mr. Mantrap thus passed out of our lives forever.

Percy Snell, on the other hand, had not passed out of our lives, because Jordan was entangled with Basil Goldbrick and the English press clipping bureau. All sorts of papers had to be drawn up and signed, and it was July of 1966 before Jordan could come home more or less for good. Basil hired one Gilbert Cradge to run the bureau, and began to charge various personal expenses to it; this of course might eat up any possible profits, but Jordan didn't complain because he was deeply grateful to Basil for having taken over total responsibility. Basil and Gilbert sent the occasional cheery note, and the business seemed to be running as well as could be expected. If it showed a profit, Jordan was entitled to a return on his investment.

In April of 1969, Jordan and I went back to London; this time we were able to stay at Dolphin Square, in a dry, warm, comfortable apartment. Dolphin Square is a block of permanent and transient flats erected on the Embankment before World War II. We arrived after the usual sleepless jet-lagged night, and Jordan rushed off in the usual cold rainstorm to the Pressclips office to see his old pals and check on how things were going.

To his horror, he found the office entryway blocked by various husky persons carrying Pressclips furniture out to a large moving van, or lorry, in the street. One of the clipping employees happened to be standing there. “Oh, hello, Mr. Miller,” she said warmly, “How've you been?”

“What,” Jordan said, “Where … ?”

“Oh, we're moving to the Isle of Wight,” she said, “Nice to see you again.”

Jordan returned home with a raging head cold, and spent several days of our holiday hanging over the electric fire with a towel over his head. From that moment, his feelings toward Basil Goldbrick were never the same—especially since Basil was less than responsive to phone calls and letters. Jordan wanted Arthur Anderson, an independent accounting firm, to audit the Pressclips books, but made no headway with this because Basil's accountants, Blackleg & Crum, had perpetual difficulty coming up with the figures. Percy Snell, in response to Jordan's increasingly frantic appeals, explained that there really wasn't anything anyone could do. For the better part of three years, Jordan fired off letters to Percy, who in turn communicated with Blackleg & Crum. At the end of that time, word reached us that Basil Goldbrick had shaken off this mortal coil. He was no more.

After a decent interval, Jordan returned to the fray. Gilbert Cradge was apparently running the company for Daisy Goldbrick, now that Basil had left the scene. Jordan told Percy Snell that he had to have an accountant.

“This is ridiculous,” Jordan said. “I have to have access to the books.”

“Well, you see,” Percy said, “Gilbert Cradge and Blackleg & Crum have all told me that on his deathbed, Basil's last words were, ‘Don't pay Jordan.' This makes it very difficult.”

Frustrated, Jordan decided to fire Percy Snell. Burton Thigpen, of the large prestigious firm of Conquest & Weed, came highly recommended; so we went up to his elegant offices in the Aldwych to talk to him. Burton was sympathetic, and the offices seemed pleasantly laid back—when I went to use the
attractive ladies room, I shared the sinks with a woman who was washing out a head of lettuce—so Jordan hired Burton. It took longer than we realized for Jordan to explain everything to him, and when we emerged into the Aldwych we discovered that our rented car had been towed away.

We took a cab to the police car pound in the East End. There the police were more than sympathetic. They asked how long we had been in England. We told them we'd been there almost three weeks.

“No, no,” they said. “You've been here a week.”

“No, we haven't,” Jordan said. “We've been here almost three weeks. We came—let me see—”

“No, no,” they kept saying. “You haven't been here that long.” They were looking at us significantly. We didn't get it. Finally one of them said, “Since you've only been here a week, you aren't going to be charged for the towing.” Then we got it.

This was a tourist-friendly British gesture, and the policemen and women couldn't have been nicer. The atmosphere was certainly benign, as it had not been in our Knightsbridge days several years earlier. We were happy to detect a thaw in the attitude toward Americans. Of course we were no longer in touch with Maud Tweak. Despite this welcome improvement in the general atmosphere, we were forced after several months to face the fact that Burton Thigpen not only looked like Percy Snell—and therefore of course like Mr. MacAllister—but shared Percy's ingrained inability to get anything done. Blackleg & Crum kept presenting innumerable reasons why they couldn't give Jordan access to the Pressclips figures.

We returned to London and took Gilbert Cradge, a very thin friendly person in his thirties, to dinner. Gilbert confided to us that Basil had absolutely drained the company and
there was no money left at all. His feelings toward Basil lacked warmth.

“He wasn't any help,” Gilbert said. “He used to sit and doze in his office. I often thought,” he remarked softly, leaning toward us over his fish plate, “I often thought how simple it would be just to take a cushion from his sofa and hold it over his face while he was sleeping there.”

We decided on the basis of this comment that we did not want to have anything more to do with Gilbert Cradge, and we were sorry that we had taken him to dinner. When we got back to Dolphin Square that night, we toyed with the idea of calling Daisy Goldbrick and warning her against falling asleep in Gilbert's presence, but we decided that she would probably not accept advice from us.

We expressed frustration to an English acquaintance, who told us to forget about Burton Thigpen and Conquest & Weed.

“What you need is a different type of lawyer,” she said. “You need a young lawyer from a small firm, somebody fresh who needs the business, who knows how to work.”

This sounded sensible to us. She gave us the name of Norman Ziman. So Jordan fired Burton and hired Norman, who was different physically and in every other way from Mr. MacAllister, Percy Snell and Burton Thigpen.

Norman ran into the usual difficulties with Blackleg & Crum, but he had a suggestion for Jordan. “You know,” he said, “as a shareholder in this company, you can actually bankrupt it if you choose. Of course you'd lose your investment. But as a last resort, perhaps we can threaten them with this.”

We didn't have to think about this very long. It looked as though our investment was going to be lost anyway. We didn't think we had much to lose. So Norman told Blackleg & Crum
that Jordan was going to bankrupt the company if he didn't get paid.

At first, they thought this was amusing. “You'll lose all your money,” Harvey Blackleg said to Jordan, with a chuckle. When Jordan said he was too angry to care, Harvey clearly didn't believe him. But as Norman put the bankruptcy procedure into operation, they began to realize that this was no laughing matter. After weeks and weeks of bluster and protest, and on the very eve of the winding up of the company—with literally hours to go—they capitulated, produced the books, agreed to pay Jordan off, and did actually pay him, in quarterly installments.

Thus ended our English press clipping venture. But we could not seem to break off our connection with England. Somehow we became book publishers—often called the accidental profession—and since we could not overcome our predilection for the English novel and English books in general, our publishing house inevitably bore an Anglophile stamp. Our publishing experiences with the English were certainly more positive than our clipping episodes had been. For one thing, we didn't meet anyone like Maud Tweak in publishing, and we rented no houses in Knightsbridge. This is not to say that bizarre adventures did not befall us in our new incarnation—but that is another story.