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

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A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 30

by Deborah McDonald


  Moura would prove very useful as a source of high-level gossip for years to come. But it wasn’t the same as it had been in their youth. Feeding intelligence to an important diplomat involved in great political events was not the same as passing gossip to a newspaper columnist. And a rather lowbrow one at that.

  With her connections to Lockhart and Wells, Moura worked away at gaining admittance to the one place she most wanted to go – England.

  On 13 June 1928 she applied for a visa. She said she wanted to escort her adopted daughter Kira, now eighteen, who had been given a place at Pitman’s secretarial college in London. One of her referees was again her old SIS friend Commander Ernest Boyce (who would later be rumoured to be a Soviet double agent).50 After several letters to and fro between various government departments and the police, her application was once more declined on the grounds that she was a security risk.

  Gorky, who was considering returning to Russia permanently, asked whether Moura would contemplate going with him. She turned him down. It would be impossible to see her children if she lived in Russia. ‘And this thought, meaning separating from you, is very, very tormenting, my joy, believe me!’ she wrote.51

  In August 1928 she moved Pavel to a school in Berlin. The move proved a bad one as in March the following year a tutor took the fifteen-year-old boy to an inn, where he probed him for his political views and referred to Moura as a revolutionary. Pavel sprung to the defence of his mother and hit the tutor. Both were expelled from the school. Pavel ran away, disappearing for a few days, staying at a hotel and washing dishes to pay for his keep.52 He was moved to another school in Germany where he stayed until he was called up for military service in Estonia.

  By 1929 Moura was living most of the time in Berlin, in an untidy little apartment in Koburger Strasse, a side-street in the Schöneberg district. She spent her time socialising and building up her publishing and translating business. With power of attorney over the foreign rights of Gorky’s books she could negotiate freely for their translation.53 Moura acted as his literary agent and worked personally on the translation of many of his books. She also began organising the foreign publication of books by unknown Russian writers.

  In 1929 the opportunity she had been waiting and working for finally materialised.

  In the spring H. G. Wells arrived in Germany. He gave a lecture in Berlin entitled ‘The Common Sense of World Peace’. As he was about to go on, he was handed a letter from Moura; she had seen the lecture advertised and seized the opportunity to arrange a meeting with him. Afterwards, as the audience dispersed, there she stood, ‘tall and steady-eyed, shabbily dressed and dignified, and at the sight of her my heart went out to her’.54

  She had aged and put on weight, but it made no difference. Wells was sunk. The next day they dined with Harold Nicolson. Afterwards Nicolson told his wife, Vita Sackville-West, that Wells had flirted with Moura most of the evening.55 They ended up ‘in her shabby little apartment’, Wells recalled. ‘From the moment we met we were lovers, as though there had never been any separation between us.’56 Moura had got the break she had been waiting for.

  Almost immediately after Wells left Berlin, Lockhart arrived. She gave him all the news about Gorky’s proposed return to Russia, and confessed that she was intending to leave him while he was away.57

  They spent a week together, and the encounter relit Moura’s flame. The love she had tried to bring to a dignified conclusion at Hinterbrühl was taking her over again. She wanted him back, she wanted to help him climb out of the demeaning, lowbrow literary hole he was in. Most of all, she wanted him back for good. Reaching once more for an artistic truth, she could sense that Europe was on the verge of another conflagration, and that they shared obligations rooted in their past. ‘Why not give in to me?’ she wrote to him. ‘Why not even “sacrifice” yourself? That is done, after all, sometimes, and I want you so much – and so well.’58

  She would never be able to give him up – only the grave could cure the hunchback.

  In the summer of 1929 she got one of her dearest wishes. In June, Ernest Boyce (who had retired from SIS service in 1928) sent a letter to the Passport Control Office, in which he promised to ‘personally guarantee that there is no political reason why Baroness Budberg should not visit England’.59 Finally, after a decade of trying, she was granted a visa to enter the country which was almost her spiritual homeland.

  19

  Not Such a Fool

  1929–1933

  Wednesday 18 September 1929, Dover, England

  Moura’s first sight of England was the inner harbour under the chalk cliffs, its quays crowded with tall-stacked tugs and cross-Channel steamers. The boat from Calais, bluff-bowed and dragging smoke from its funnel, edged in and settled beside the dock.

  The little girl, now thirty-seven years old, who had learned the English language in the cradle, whose dearest friends were British, and who had risked her life for British interest, looked at last on the country she had been making her way towards for more than ten years.1

  She hadn’t much time to take it in. The visa she’d been grudgingly issued was valid for just one week, and she had things to do and people to see.

  Her principal mission was to see H. G., and having deposited Kira in London (London!) she travelled on to Essex, where H. G. had his country home. Easton Glebe was a pleasant, unassuming Victorian house on the estate of Easton Lodge. H. G. had been renting it from Daisy Greville, the Countess of Warwick, since 1910. This was his arcadian retreat, and many of his books had been written here – among many others, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, his novel of humane courage in wartime; its village setting was based on Easton. Mr. Britling had been popular in Bolshevik Russia, and was one of two books given by Yakov Peters to Lockhart while he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka (the other being Lenin’s State and Revolution).2

  H. G. and Moura spent the week together. Moura got to see the gardens he was so pleased with and which he had sent her picture postcards of. And they went up to London, where Wells kept an apartment: 614 St Ermin’s Hotel in Caxton Street, Westminster.

  They had a polite, decorous time – or at least Moura attempted to fashion it in that way. She was having to adjust herself to H. G.’s view of her, and she tended to misjudge it. Accustomed to the admiration of brilliant men who treated her as an intellectual equal – or at least as a gifted protégée – it wasn’t easy to adapt to a man who appreciated her brightness but seemed to want to regard her in a playfully romantic manner. How should she respond?

  She chose levity, loaded with a barb to provoke his jealousy. After her brief interlude in England, she returned to the Continent. Stopping off at the Hôtel Meurice in Paris, she dashed off a brief note to H. G., mentioning that she was awaiting a rendezvous with a ‘faithless swain’ (presumably Lockhart). More pleasure, she said, was to be had in ‘writing to you to tell you how charming, delightful you have made my visit to London, dear’. She belittled herself lightheartedly – ‘I am a very grateful little person . . . and will never forget it.’3

  It was the wrong approach. She was startled by his reply, in which he complained about the brevity and tone of her note; he’d got the impression that having had her entertainment she would now ‘go her way’. Alarmed, on her return to Berlin she wrote him a longer letter. She denied that she wanted to cast him off. On the contrary, she insisted, ‘I want, in a very womanly, if very “unintellectual” way to feel that I belong to you’. Ever since Petrograd he had meant a great deal to her, and her ‘silly letter from Paris’ had been intended so that ‘you should not feel my heartache’. One quality Wells perceived in her was her strength, apparently, so she played to it. ‘Yes, I am strong, I suppose, strong enough not to make a fool of myself.’ But she urged him to ‘not be too strong, H. G. my dear, be a little “weak” . . . if that means thinking of me more than you ought to’.4

  If her cultivation of Wells cost Moura anything in pride, she didn’t let it show. She had learned the importance
of pandering to men’s vanity in a Cheka prison, with Yakov Peters as her subject, and her ‘training of the mind’ had been sharpened through years of handling secret policemen, spies, commissars and diplomats. One Englishman, however august, shouldn’t be too severe a challenge for a woman of such talent.

  There might well have been a hidden motivation: that she was not merely cultivating or seducing him but grooming him. If the rumours about her spying for the Soviet government were true, and the misgivings of the British and French secret services were justified, Britain would be a doubly good place for her to be. H. G. Wells’ circle was international; it encompassed royalty and writers, film stars and aristocrats, and politicians at the very top of their countries’ leadership. Lockhart too, although not well known like Wells or Gorky, mixed with the rich and famous, including at one time or another Winston Churchill, Oswald Mosley, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken, the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson. Between these two men, a spy whose métier was political gossip would find rich pickings.

  But there was a deep emotional need in her too. Her men were never mere tools, least of all Lockhart. Even her daughter Tania could never illuminate the hidden parts of Moura’s character. She could never fathom how ‘somebody who had suffered as much, and lost as much, as my mother, could still expect and command such adulation’.

  One way she achieved this, without doubt, was by exerting an emotional pull: she once told a friend of mine that she thought men would remain attached to her if she had slept with them. Yet the question remains of how much this was an egotistical desire to manipulate people, or a response to a deep need within herself. Certainly, once attached she never let go; and yet this seems to have been part of the attraction for those caught in this way.5

  Having repaired her initial mis-step, Moura began to settle into a regular relationship with Wells. Yet neither of them was either free or constant. Gorky was still living at Sorrento, and Moura was still a part-time member of his household. At the same time she was also settling into an intermittent sideshow affair with Lockhart.

  Wells, meanwhile, was still entangled with Odette Keun. She remained tucked away in the Riviera, where he visited in the winter. He refused to see her elsewhere, and kept his new relationship secret from her, for fear of the savage recriminations that would undoubtedly ensue. Despite being quite sure that it was Moura he loved, Wells had never been good at ending relationships cleanly, and now, in his early sixties, was of an age when he couldn’t face another upheaval in his routine. After Jane’s death, he had gone through a period of anxiety and had felt that his own life was drawing to a close, leaving him with an urgency to complete important work; he was reluctant to do anything that might affect this.

  At the same time, Wells made it clear to Moura that he intended to stay with Odette, that he and Moura should not have a child and that he would not expect fidelity from her.6 Moved to pity by her ‘shabby’, impecunious existence, Wells settled on her an annuity of £200 a year, supplementing her business income, which was around £800.

  H. G.’s conditions suited Moura very well. Gorky was away in Russia in the summers, and Wells was off with Odette in the winters, so everything fitted neatly. And she still had time to dally with Lockhart.

  Somehow, Wells did not seem to realise that Moura’s relationship with Gorky had been sexual. He still believed her to have been merely his secretary. Neither did he know the extent of her feelings for Lockhart. He thought he was the only man she loved. Yet although she told him that she loved him and belonged to him, she gave him nothing like the wholehearted, abandoned declarations of love she made to Lockhart.

  Moura was now past her youth and on the downward slope into middle age. And she was beginning to experience a new and irritating sensation – the presence of a generation of grown women younger than herself.

  In October 1929 she took Kira to live with her in Berlin for a while. The apartment was small, and she soon found that Kira’s presence irritated her and cramped her style. She was not good at introducing the handsome young woman at gatherings and appeared jealous if any men took notice of her. Moura seemed to resent her presence, intruding into her life and taking away the limelight that she required for herself. Kira’s stay only lasted a few months.

  In 1930 Gorky’s health was worse than usual. His tuberculosis had been particularly bad that winter, and he was unable to go to Russia. Moura left him in Italy and went to spend some time with Alla. Her husband had attempted suicide again, and this time succeeded, and Alla’s morphine addiction had taken hold of her once more. In March Moura admitted her to an asylum, but she wasn’t ill enough to be held by force, and ran away. Moura wrote to Gorky to apologise for missing his birthday, and continued tending to Alla. In June she moved her to a hospital specialising in treating narcotic dependency. In between, she worked away at translations of Gorky’s Samgin and attended to her publishing.7

  She managed to find time to acquire another visa and spent some of June with Wells at Easton Glebe. Anthony West, Wells’ son by Rebecca, was staying when Moura arrived. He had been out for a walk when Moura arrived, and when he returned he found the couple sitting on a garden seat in front of a tree. ‘Their faces were illuminated by their delight in finding themselves together again, and their evident happiness made the sight an unforgettable one. When my father was happy he was the pleasantest of men to be with.’ When Anthony returned home to his mother, bubbling with excitement about the wonderful time he had had, he was met by a stony Rebecca, who was angry that her son could be so disloyal.8

  They spent time in London, where Moura began to infiltrate Britain’s literary and publishing world. She was introduced to the formidable Barbara Back, the boss at Heinemann, a man-eater who was reputed to have slept simultaneously with Somerset Maugham and his secretary and lover Gerald Haxton. She ordered her office boy, the young Rupert Hart-Davis, to partner her at badminton against Moura and Wells. Afterwards they repaired to Wells’ new flat in Baker Street for tea. Hart-Davis was impressed by Moura, finding her an energetic, enthusiastic opponent on the badminton court. She refused tea, preferring ‘a brandy and soda, accompanied by a large cigar’, over which she discussed politics and government with Wells.9 She had made a deep impression on the twenty-three-year-old. In later life, he would come to admire and adore Moura for her kindness and warmth. ‘She hugged you, not just with her arms but with her whole self.’10

  During the rest of that summer, she worked her way slowly back to the sick Gorky at Sorrento, via Paris, Berlin and Estonia. But by October she was in London again, lunching with Lockhart at the Savoy Hotel prior to leaving for Genoa and Berlin. They had a good gossip – Moura told him that the author Arnold Bennett was bored with his actress lover ‘and had lost his inspiration since she made him give up wearing shirts with myosotis flowers on them’.11 She regaled him with tales of Gorky, who had given away all his money and was only making about £300 a year, despite selling over two and a half million books every year in Russia. Stalin wouldn’t let money out of the country, and was making it impossible for Gorky not to return home. Meanwhile, Moura was seeing less and less of him every year, and spending more and longer periods in Britain.

  With every journey she widened her social web, gathered new intelligence, added new authors to Epokha’s list. And the rumours about her never ceased – that her travels were the cover for spying, either as a Soviet agent or a British double agent. At the same time, her restless and potent emotions drove her to take new lovers.

  She didn’t lodge with Wells when she was in England; instead she stayed with Count Constantine Benckendorff and his wife. Constantine, a distant cousin of her late husband Djon, was the son of Count Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff, the last imperial Russian Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Alexander’s widow, Countess Sophie, had settled in England after his death in 1917, renting out her house in London and living in her quaint garden cottage, Lime Kiln, at Claydon in Suffolk, where she cultivated roses. Sophie ha
d died in 1928, and Constantine had inherited Lime Kiln. Boldly citing her Benckendorff connection and exerting her charm, Moura threw herself upon Constantine, presuming his hospitality – and received it.12 Over the next decade and a half, she would receive a good deal more from him.

  Constantine, a political liberal, was married to the harpist Maria Korchinska, and had a seven-year-old daughter, Nathalie. Constantine was twelve years Moura’s senior, had served in the Russian Imperial Navy, was captured by the Japanese during the war of 1905, and worked for a while in London with his father. While there he made friends with writer, traveller and socialite Maurice Baring, who introduced him into the political and literary circles that included Arthur Balfour, George Bernard Shaw, King Edward VII and H. G. Wells. Constantine returned to Russia before the Great War to work on the family estate, and shared a flat in St Petersburg with Baring. After the Revolution he decided to throw in his lot with the proletariat and joined the Red Navy. But his career became irksome, marred by the Bolsheviks’ suspicions of his background. At various times he was incarcerated in both the Kremlin and the Butyrka – the very same prison in which Moura had spent those two terrifying weeks in September 1918.13

  As veterans of the Cheka jail, and as progressive nobles who had worked for the Bolsheviks, perhaps there was a fellow feeling that drew Constantine and Moura towards each other. Like Moura, ‘Cony’ was believed by some Russian émigrés to be a Soviet spy.14 Some believed that Moura’s acquaintance with him pre-dated her arrival on his London doorstep in 1930. He had once served as a border commissioner in Estonia, during the time when Moura was crossing the frontier.15

  Constantine resembled Djon – stolid, blunt and now tending to be portly. But in temperament he was closer to Moura – progressive, liberal, adaptable to circumstances and cultured. He was a flautist, and on leaving the Navy had joined an orchestra, where he met his wife, Maria. He was forty; she was twenty-seven. They had escaped Russia in 1924 and joined Countess Sophie in England. Like many other Russian émigrés, Cony had little to do in England, and turned to gambling, leaving his wife to earn their money. She spent most of her time in London pursuing her career while Cony lived at Lime Kiln.

 

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