A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  Throughout this time, Moura was disquieted by what was happening in the world, particularly in Germany, with its unrest, its national shame and proliferation of aggressive workers’ parties. The world, she wrote to Wells, was ‘again preparing to bring to life a Bastard’. She couldn’t have worded it more presciently. ‘How naughty of it!’ she added.42

  As Europe began building its stack of powder kegs, England must have looked all the more inviting, if only it would let her in. Moura cultivated Wells’ interest in her and minimised her relationship with Gorky; she was here to help with his publishing, she said, because of his ill health. Moura flirted with Wells, alluding to their night together in the Kronverksky apartment and anticipating a similar liaison during an upcoming visit to Italy. ‘It would be delightful if you really came to the Riviera – for you surely would allow me to find you in your ermitage, wouldn’t you?’ she teased, referring to the hotel in which he planned to stay.43

  But by late 1923 she was becoming irritated with him. He wasn’t replying to her letters as diligently as he ought, and there was intense competition from his other lovers. Wells’ womanising was legendary – a friend of Lockhart (who had no idea at the time about Moura’s relationship with Wells) wondered at the man’s energy, with four new novels and five mistresses every year.44 Wells, who was still married to his wife, Jane, was trying to end his long-standing relationship with Rebecca West. And in summer 1923 he had a fling with an Austrian journalist, Hedwig Gatternigg, who had offered to translate some of his work into German. It was a brief encounter, but she began to stalk him. He was disturbed but incapable of resisting her sexually. The affair ended with her being taken away by police after invading his house and threatening to kill herself.45

  Instead of trying to rekindle his affair with Moura, Wells embarked on a difficult relationship with Dutch journalist and traveller Odette Keun, an extremely volatile woman whom he met in France and with whom he would be painfully entangled for the next nine years. All the while, however, the special, inescapable hold that Moura had established in Petrograd three years earlier was still there.

  Moura, despite the practical importance of Wells for the future and her irritation at his inadequate responses, didn’t worry overmuch about him. Throughout 1923 she had been kept warm by one thought – the possibility of a reunion with Lockhart. The old flame was still burning, and now they were back in touch.

  Notes

  * court of honour.

  † Association for the Common Good.

  17

  One Perfect Thing

  1923–1924

  Despite all the ways in which Lockhart had let her down and hurt her, she couldn’t free herself from him. She had tried to cut him out of her thoughts, and seemed to be succeeding. But at the beginning of 1923 she heard word of him again. And yet again he managed to hurt her.

  He had never stopped thinking of her, he wrote, and professed to believe that she had shied away from coming to him in 1919 – that she had lost her nerve. ‘Knowing me as you do,’ she wrote back indignantly, ‘how could you think I would run away, afraid to face you?’ And how, she asked, could he wonder what her feelings were now? ‘It seems useless to say that I love you just as much as ever – for love does not even seem to be the right word at all – it is just that with you I have known happiness which I did not know either before or after and in the long run – it is always only that that counts.’1

  She told him how she had lived through the years since his departure, sometimes despairing, sometimes ‘finding a thousand reasons for hoping . . . I still lived, feeling sure, somehow, that you were there. Do you know what that means?’ And then, just as she was leaving Russia, believing that she would now be free to find him again, there came the heartbreaking news of the birth of his son. ‘I had to face the future without you,’ she wrote. ‘It was as I suppose death is to those who suddenly lose faith in life after death. And, to face it, I had to build myself a reason for facing it at all.’2 Moura was a woman of high drama, seemingly unconscious of the point where she crossed the line from real emotion into high-sounding fiction; for example, her statement that in marrying Budberg she had been motivated by a profound need to be of use to someone, and that this gave her her sole reason for living.

  Maybe it was that step too far that caused Lockhart to go on doubting her. In his view, it had been entirely a marriage of convenience. Or perhaps his doubts came from Magre’s ‘urge to demean that which I love’ – ‘I know by the sight of her tears that her suffering is great / And despite all that, I affect to doubt.’

  Unable to help herself, she urged him to come to her now – to meet in Berlin. He must write immediately to let her know when he would be coming. She advised caution, and begged him to be patient with her this time while they worked out the best, least harmful way to get her out of the commitments she was tied up in.

  Sober reflection could have told her that it was hopeless, that Lockhart would not come to Berlin, that there would be no way out. And yet she continued to hope. While she lived her life that year, working, cultivating Wells, looking after Gorky, holidaying with the children and enjoying the narcotic of gaiety which ‘kills the consciousness of other things of which I know the value’,3 she waited for an opportunity to find her way back to Lockhart’s embrace.

  Just like before, there was a husband in the way. But this time the husband was entirely dependent on her. She sent Budberg to Rio de Janeiro – about as far away as could be – where he would be forced to earn his living giving bridge lessons.4 They would never see one another again. Now that she had hopes of Lockhart, she had little use for her professed ‘reason for facing it all’.

  As time passed, nothing came from Lockhart – just silence. The months dragged slowly by in the quiet little town of Bad Saarow.

  In the summer Moura travelled to Paris. Her sister Alla was there, now married to her third husband, a man named Trubnikov. They had both become hopelessly addicted to opium, and Moura had been called upon – not for the last time – to try to help her sister. She wrote to Gorky to tell him that this time she thought Alla was cured.5

  Moura spent time in Estonia too, but her visits there were frustrating. She loved being with her children, but she missed being in the orbit of Gorky. She was jealous that other people could be with him and she couldn’t. When the British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who had sculpted the likenesses of Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, came to visit Gorky in August 1923, Moura was detained in Berlin by business (she was managing his struggling Berlin-based magazine, Beseda) and by dental work (she was forever troubled by her teeth). When she was away from Gorky, she felt distanced from him emotionally too, and his cold, unsentimental letters unsettled her. She was particularly piqued by the thought that Sheridan (‘that Englishwoman’) might be spending too much time with him.6

  In December she was forced apart from him again – back in Paris, en route to join the children in Estonia for New Year. Alla was not cured after all and had been admitted to hospital for her nerves. Between her mother and now Gorky and Alla, Moura’s life seemed to be defined by waiting upon chronically sick people. After Christmas Moura herself became ill with influenza, and was stranded at Kallijärv when Kira too fell sick.

  By February 1924 she was back in Saarow. It was a year since her letter to Lockhart, and still there seemed no sign of him coming back to her.

  Her path had very nearly crossed with H. G. Wells’ in Paris before Christmas. ‘So we missed each other again,’ she wrote to him, ‘And I would like to see you so much. Well – let us be patient.’7 Her letters to ‘dear H. G.’ were always warm, and seemed to hint at the possibility of romance, but for the time being she maintained a distance, always signing off with ‘Best love to you and Gip’ from ‘Moura Budberg’. As in the early days with Lockhart, Moura’s ‘best love’ was reserved for men she had hopes for but whose worth was yet to be proven.

  Gorky’s stay in Saarow was over. He and his household were moving on to Ita
ly. Gorky had lived in Capri in the days of his pre-revolutionary exile, and longed to return there. But Mussolini was in power, and like all ideologues jealous of their position and their cults of personality, he was wary of Gorky. After persistent lobbying, permission was given for Gorky to stay in Italy, but not to return to Capri. Instead he settled for Sorrento, where he and his entourage moved into a villa called Il Sorito.8

  Set just outside the town on the Capo di Sorrento, it was enchanting. It had a large garden filled with cypress trees and a terrace where they could eat supper, drink wine and tell stories. Gorky’s room on the top floor overlooked the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius, the climate suited his health and he was soon a local celebrity. But despite his love of Italy he couldn’t speak the language and never tried to learn – Moura, who spoke it fluently, helped him out. He also missed his homeland, but there was nothing anyone could do about that.

  But Gorky was happy. Among the commune he now had his son, Max, and his wife, Timosha, as well as Moura. They were the three most important people in his life. But Max had an ulterior purpose in joining his father’s household – he had been briefed by Lenin to try to change Gorky’s political orientation, which he half-heartedly attempted to achieve.9 Max loved to spend his father’s money and had no real purpose in life; no real job or occupation. He was supposed to be his father’s assistant and yet it was Moura and Pyotr Kriuchkov who did the work while Max took up tennis, motorcycling, stamp collecting, devouring detective novels and going to the movies. He longed to go back to Russia because the authorities had promised him a motor car.10

  While living in Sorrento, Moura realised that she and Gorky were being watched by the Fascist authorities. Given that Gorky’s visa had been approved by Mussolini himself, Moura was indignant on his behalf. She managed to engineer a meeting with Il Duce and challenged him over it. Gorky was in the country legally, she pointed out, and deserved to be treated with respect. ‘Oh it’s not Gorky, it’s you,’ he told her. A Russian émigré had denounced her. The Fascists thought it strange that a baroness should be on close terms with a socialist like Gorky. Moura riposted, ‘Well, don’t people change?’ She reminded Mussolini that he had once been a socialist, and had edited the left-wing newspaper Avanti (after his conversion to Fascism, his blackshirts set fire to the newspaper’s offices). He saw the irony, roared with laughter, and ordered the surveillance terminated.11

  Although Moura had settled into the routine of the commune, she was restless. The abiding longing was nagging at her, and she decided that the time had come to seize her chance. In the summer she made her regular trip to Estonia to visit the children, and on the way she stopped off in Vienna, where her old friend Will Hicks and his wife Liuba were living. Hickie had left the diplomatic service and taken a job heading the Cunard office there. Moura asked him if he would contact Lockhart on her behalf.

  Lockhart’s career with the Foreign Office had not lasted long. The salary for his modest post at the Consulate in Prague had not been enough to cover his lifestyle. In early 1923 he had taken up a much more lucrative job as ‘industrial director’ at a bank in Prague that had been taken over by a British firm.

  He was despatched to London for three months to learn the business. While he was there he made the acquaintance of Lady Vera Rosslyn, known in society as ‘Tommy’, the wife of the Earl of Rosslyn, who was a notorious drinking, gambling rake.12 Lockhart and Tommy began an affair. Besides appealing to his powerful sexual needs, Tommy widened Lockhart’s social horizon, introducing him into the circle of the Prince of Wales. She was also a Catholic, and her influence on him was so great that he converted to the faith.

  They were both Catholics with elastic consciences that allowed them to indulge in the sins of the flesh as they pleased. Lockhart’s life was going out of control – the very same pattern of wild, self-destructive behaviour that had nearly ruined his career in Russia before the Revolution, and which his marriage to Jean had been supposed to cure. He was still married to her, and his new religion forbade them the divorce they needed. Jean had a nervous breakdown in July 1923 and had a spell in a nursing home.13 And yet the marriage limped on. Lockhart didn’t know what to do with his life. He’d had some success as a journalist after coming home from Russia, but his ambition was to write books. Inspired by fatherhood, he’d proposed a book of fairy tales, but it had been rejected. And he was in debt.

  Banking in Prague was the only way forward. That and a regime of hard work and abstinence from sinful pleasures. He had done this before, and it never lasted long. By the height of summer 1924 he was hating every moment of his job. He found the meetings ‘overwhelmingly tedious’, and life generally uncongenial. ‘For six days a week I sat dutifully in the bank, doing my best to keep my end up and praying silently for the Sunday’.14 On Sundays he went shooting or played golf; in the evenings he worked half-heartedly on a book about Czechoslovakia. ‘For ten weeks I led the life of a saint.’

  He was in this state of mind one Tuesday afternoon at the end of July. He was in a meeting with a man named Geduldiger (who was ostensibly his adviser on local industry but who actually did all the work) when the telephone rang. It was Will Hicks, calling from Vienna. They chatted for a minute or two, and Lockhart wondered why Hickie would make an expensive international call just to talk trivia. Suddenly Hicks paused and said, ‘There’s someone here who wants to speak to you.’

  The phone was passed over, and Lockhart experienced another of those moments that would live for him forever. The voice that came down the line from Vienna was ‘slow and musical’ and sounded ‘as if it came from another world’.15 It was Moura. It was the first time he had heard her voice since their parting in the darkness on the railway tracks in Moscow in October 1918. The receiver shook in his hands, and he found himself asking inanely, ‘How are you, my dear?’ The memories took hold of him – Geduldiger and the office disappeared, and he was back in the flat in Moscow: the endless games of patience, the unanswered phone calls to Petrograd, while Moura was on her mission to Estonia and he feared they might never see each other again. And the ecstatic relief when the phone rang and he heard her voice and knew she would be back with him that night. He didn’t realise it, but that had been six years ago to the very day – 29 July 1918.16

  Listening to the familiar, measured voice relating the tale of her life since then, Lockhart had just one thought. Stammering, he asked Moura to put Hickie back on the line. ‘May I come for the weekend?’ he asked. ‘Can you put me up?’

  Then he left the bank and ‘went home in a stupor of uncertainty’.17

  During all the years in between, as he followed the path of least resistance back into his old life and his old ways, he had never stopped loving Moura. He preserved every one of the letters she wrote him during those dreadful months in Petrograd after he left. It had been easy to doubt her commitment, and to believe that her failure to follow him to England indicated cold feet. But hearing her voice again made it much more difficult, and brought vividly to mind the unparalleled strength of the love that had held them together through the dangerous summer of 1918.

  Perhaps the time had come to make a break from England – the break he had shied away from in his last days in the Kremlin. But he was approaching middle age, divorce was out of the question, and there was four-year-old Robin to consider.

  On Friday, after four days of agonising and still undecided, he took an evening train for Vienna, arriving early on Saturday morning.18 Before he’d even checked into his hotel, he sought guidance by going to mass at St Stephen’s Cathedral. It didn’t help. He had several hours to kill before his rendezvous with Hicks at his office, so he sat in his hotel, drinking coffee, chain-smoking and trying to read the paper. Eventually he stubbed out his last cigarette and began walking slowly along the Kärntner Strasse, looking in shop windows to waste more time. The weather was glorious, the sun so hot in the blue sky that it softened the asphalt underfoot. At the end of the street, he turned into the Graben, where Cunard
had its offices above a bookshop.

  Moura was there. At the foot of the stairs he saw her standing alone in the streaming sunlight, waiting for him, just as she had been on that April morning in 1918 when she first came to his hotel in Moscow and he raced down the stairs to greet her.

  What a difference six years had made. She looked different – a little older, more serious, and with a touch of grey in her hair. With marvellous self-control, she greeted him calmly and led him upstairs to the office, where Hickie and Liuba were waiting.

  ‘Well,’ said Moura, ‘here we are.’

  To Lockhart, in that moment, it was ‘just like old times’.19

  The four old friends caught the electric train up to Hinterbrühl, the idyllic forest resort in the hills outside Vienna, where Hickie and Liuba had a villa.

  Lockhart’s mind was still in turmoil. As they were leaving the office, Hickie had whispered to him to be careful, and Lockhart understood. Although Moura had changed a little in appearance, it was he who had changed the most, ‘and not for the better’. He was nervous, Hickie and Liuba were nervous; they all talked too much and laughed too much on the journey; of the four of them, only Moura seemed entirely self-possessed.

  After lunch at the villa, Lockhart and Moura took a long walk together up into the hills. He dreaded to speak his mind, and by the time they reached a high rocky crag beside a splashing stream, he was sweating with nerves and exertion. She told him the rest of her story – from Petrograd to Sorrento. He was amazed by her calmness and her strength of character, just as he had been since their very first meeting. ‘I admire her above all other women. Her mind, her genius, her control are all wonderful,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But the old feeling has gone.’20