Within a few months of her arrival in England, Moura had managed to melt Cony; they began an affair which was destined to last for fifteen years. He was a charming person, well liked and popular.16 Moura, explaining herself to a friend many years later, said, ‘Gorky and Wells I loved. For Constantine I felt a physical passion he fulfilled.’17 His daughter Nathalie, who knew from family gossip about the affair, grew up loathing Moura.18 Dragged to Kallijärv for a holiday in 1935 when she was twelve, she was thoroughly embittered by the association, and detested all of Moura’s family. Although she found Tania beautiful, she disliked Pavel intensely and found Kira a ‘religious maniac, communion daily, queer in the head’.19
The extended Benckendorff family, with whom Moura was already on cool terms, were further alienated by the affair. Constantine spent money on Moura, buying her jewellery, escorting her to the theatre and the ballet. Nathalie considered her father a courageous man, but believed he was morally weak and Moura ‘devoured him’.20 Moura even had the gall to take H. G. down to Claydon to visit Cony. Only a woman of Moura’s calibre would dare take one lover to visit another for the weekend.21
Moura’s life was woven with lovers. Gorky at Sorrento, still wavering over whether to give up his beloved Italy and go home for good; Constantine providing passion and intrigue; and Wells, kept in the dark, believing that he was the only one. H. G. judged that Moura was ‘not a feverish lascivious woman like Odette’ and could only be made love to by a man whom she loved.22 This was true enough, but as with her intelligence, Wells underrated her capacity to love men.
Through it all, the thread that tied her to Lockhart was still strong. And between them was a secret truth – that if only it were possible, she wished she could be with him to the exclusion of everything and everyone else in the world.
Lockhart’s life was a mess. He was still writing his gossip column, still in debt, and agonising over the ruined remains of his marriage. Moura wanted to help him. She tried to inspire him to get a grip, settle his debts, and do some proper writing. ‘She is a big-minded and big-hearted woman,’ he noted in his diary in early 1931.23 He knew how difficult he had become, and what a struggle it was for the woman who still unconscionably loved him. She had once told him that he was ‘a little strong, but not strong enough, a little clever, but not clever enough, and a little weak, but not weak enough’.24 Now she urged him to ‘stop making such a mess of your life’ and take advantage of the opportunities he had in front of him. ‘You must have time to write and you must fight your physical troubles . . . Why don’t you listen to me?’25 From time to time they met and stoked the old flame again, and occasionally – apparently when she had been drinking heavily or had worked herself into a passion – she wrote him wild letters in a chaotic hand, telling him ‘my darling, you must know how much I love you . . . all my love is yours’, and swearing that it hadn’t diminished in any way since 1918.26
In 1931 Gorky was well enough to visit Moscow again. Moura busied herself selling his jade collection in order to boost his income in Europe, but was upset at only getting half as much for it as she would have liked.27 At Christmas 1931 Kira became engaged. Her fiancé was Hugh Clegg, a doctor and editor of the British Medical Journal. The couple married in the Russian Orthodox church in London the following year.28
By 1932 Lockhart was making good progress with his memoir, based on his career in diplomacy and espionage. Eager to see him produce a proper book, and equally keen to monitor what he put in it, Moura took a close interest, lending him her experienced editorial eye. In March, during an oppressively dull stay at Kallijärv (‘this little hut’), she mentioned casually in a letter, in response to some remark from Lockhart that is now lost, that ‘R is not dead as our friend said’.29 Another mysterious ‘R’. This was clearly a different ‘R’ from the one Gorky had been incensed about.
Almost certainly Moura was referring to Sidney Reilly, SIS agent and Lockhart’s former accomplice in the Latvian plot. Reilly had disappeared during a mission to Russia in 1925. It was presumed that he was dead – shot soon after crossing the border. It would later appear that he had been sent deliberately into a trap by Ernest Boyce of the SIS, who was allegedly a Soviet double agent. Some would later come to believe that Reilly’s death had been faked, and that the Ukrainian-born agent had in fact defected.30 If this was true, and if Moura knew it, she must have been every bit as deeply involved in espionage as her accusers claimed.
It was a plausible idea. Reilly had always seemed strongly anti-Bolshevik, but in late 1918 Lockhart, who had just returned from Russia, received a letter from him. At this time, Reilly was staying at the Savoy in London on the eve of a return mission to Russia with George Hill. In his letter, which was kept secret until long after Lockhart’s death, Reilly observed that Bolshevism was ‘bound by a process of evolution to conquer the world . . . and nothing – least of all violent reactionary forces – can stop its ever-rising tide’. He gave his opinion that ‘the much decried and so little understood “Soviets” which are the outward expression of Bolshevism as applied to practical government, are the nearest approach, I know of, to a real democracy based upon true social justice’. Furthermore, he believed that ‘they may be destined to lead the world to the highest ideal of statesmanship – Internationalism’.31
Reilly knew Lockhart quite well, and certainly knew of his sympathy with socialism, his exasperation with British intervention, and might have had some inkling that Lockhart had considered staying in Russia for Moura’s sake. He might well have been a defector. If Moura was indeed letting Lockhart know that Reilly’s death was a hoax, it was an act of extraordinary foolhardiness or courageous trust. If there was one thing that Moura never learned to resist, it was the impulse to make people aware that she had her fingers on pulses that were beyond their ken.
During 1932 Moura and H. G. were seen out together more and more frequently. They spent weekends with Lord Beaverbrook (Lockhart’s boss) at his country mansion, Cherkley Court, and Wells gave Moura a key to his Baker Street flat. In April they holidayed together in Ascot, staying at the Royal Hotel, run by the eccentric John Fothergill, who wore a green suit with brass buttons and buckled shoes, and kept three elephants on the premises. Moura enjoyed feeding them ‘epples’ as she called them in her affected Russian accent.
It was here that Wells first began to talk to Moura about marriage. Unsurprisingly, she was against the idea. She wanted to go on as they had been and was adamant that she didn’t want a change in their relationship.
Wells was on the verge of breaking up with Odette Keun, but despite his talk of marriage to Moura, he had still not ended the relationship. He resented Odette’s temperamental behaviour, but seemed afraid to tell her it was over. When Wells had been diagnosed with diabetes the previous year, Odette had turned up in London, took a short course in nursing and demanded to be allowed to look after him, hoping that he would marry her out of gratitude. Wells told her that he was quite able to look after himself and certainly did not want her interfering. Seeing her for the first time in his home environment he realised just how little they had in common and how embarrassed he was by her eccentric behaviour and outlandish dress.
In late 1932 Wells wintered with her at Grasse for the last time. Increasingly suspicious, Odette discovered letters from Moura. She threatened suicide, said she would publish the letters and sell the ones Wells had sent her, and write a book about their life together. Wells and Odette parted in March 1933, and in 1934 she published I Discover the English, in which she passed damning comments about Englishmen’s attitude to sex. He was calm about it, and told her he was glad things were going so well and that her book was such a success. She told him she had been blackening his name at a party with Lloyd George and Stanley Baldwin. ‘I kept them all listening,’ she told him. ‘About you and your Moura. Do you know I’ve invented a name for her. It will be all over London. Such a funny name. All London will laugh at you. I call her . . . Baroness Bedbug.’32 If only Odette ha
d known, the men in the British government had heard worse tittle-tattle than that about Moura Budberg.
Wells was so thoroughly smitten with Moura he didn’t care what Odette did. He had always been well aware of her faults (or those which he was able and willing to see, anyway), and yet he loved her. In 1934 he wrote down his thoughts about Moura, struggling to work out what it was that fixated him so.
She is a manifestly untidy woman with a scarred and troubled forehead and a broken nose . . . with streaks of grey in her hair; she is a little inclined to be heavy physically; she eats very fast, taking enormous mouthfuls; she drinks a great deal of vodka and brandy without any manifest results, and she has a broad soft voice flattened perhaps by excessive cigarette-smoking. Generally she is clinging to a distended old black bag which is rarely fastened up properly. She clings to it with very nicely shaped hands which are never gloved and often grubby. Yet I have rarely seen her in any room with other women in which she was not plainly – not merely in my eyes but to many others – the most attractive and interesting presence.33
She wasn’t photogenic – ‘I have never known anyone to whom the camera was so hostile . . . Usually the camera produces plain ugliness; the face of a savage woman with broad nostrils under a squat nose that was broken in her childhood.’34
Wells put her magnetism down to her air of courage, her self-possession and quiet confidence. Her hazel eyes were ‘steady and tranquil’, and her ‘broad Tartar cheekbones’ made her seem amiable even when in a bad mood.
While Wells struggled with his feelings, Moura continued to travel around Europe, and her absences caused H. G. distress just as they had Gorky.
In 1933 Gorky finally left Italy and settled in Russia. In March, before he left, Moura visited him in Sorrento one last time. It was a momentous visit. She arrived in the midst of a debate over what should be done with Gorky’s archive of letters and papers. They contained material that would, in the eyes of Stalin, incriminate their authors – émigré Russian writers and intellectuals who had written to Gorky during the 1920s, trying to persuade him out of his defensiveness about the Soviet government. The letters – filled with anti-Stalinist sentiments and personal information, including remarks about people still in Russia – had all been gathered into a suitcase, but nobody could decide what to do with them. Gorky’s son Max knew of the suitcase, and his secretary Kriuchkov probably did too. (And if they knew, Yagoda and his secret police knew as well.) But they couldn’t decide between incriminating the people whose names filled the documents (and possibly Gorky himself) or angering Yagoda and Stalin.
A decision was made to entrust the suitcase to Moura, along with the key to a safe deposit box in Dresden which contained other archive material.35 Moura was now in possession of a dangerous weapon that could result in hundreds of deaths.
A report was filed by MI5 that same year stating that despite being granted a visa Baroness Budberg was considered to be ‘politically suspicious’ and a Home Office warrant was placed on her. During a one-month stay in Britain just prior to her trip to Sorrento, her post was opened, her movements monitored and her phone tapped. The material collected – none of it conclusive – was added to her MI5 record.
As if she didn’t already have enough to occupy her time and trouble her conscience, Moura had become involved with yet another new lover, and another twist was given to the spiral of espionage in which she was implicated.
Paul Scheffer was the London correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, a liberal, anti-Nazi newspaper. She might have met him through Epokha in Berlin, or through their shared social circles in London. Little would ever be known about Moura and Scheffer other than a few documents held by MI5, which had them both under surveillance.
Scheffer had begun his career as Moscow correspondent of the Tageblatt. During his seven-year stint he became an important and influential writer. His commentaries on Russian life under the Bolsheviks were blunt and deeply angered Stalin. In 1928 he wrote of the enforced exile to Siberia of many of the leading figures of the Revolution. And he predicted that Stalin’s enforced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture – which Gorky had supported – would have disastrous consequences. Scheffer became persona non grata and was barred from the Soviet Union.
Was Moura’s interest in Paul Scheffer personal or political? She was keen for inside information about the leading Nazis, who were on the verge of taking real power (she passed this information on to Lockhart, who was keen for ‘Hitler stories’ for his column, especially if they were sexually discreditable). During the period of their relationship – from early 1932 to at least the end of 1933 – Scheffer’s predictions about collectivisation were coming horrifically true in the Ukraine. Mismanagement and conflict with peasants who didn’t want to hand over their livestock to the state were bringing on a devastating famine which would eventually kill millions of people. In April 1933 Scheffer wrote a piece in the Tageblatt publicising the investigative reports by British journalist Gareth Jones (formerly Lloyd George’s political secretary) which exposed the role of collectivisation in causing the famine.36
But the Soviet Union claimed that there was a hidden side to it. In 1938 it claimed that Scheffer had been a Nazi spy, and had himself been responsible for causing the famine. He had, the Soviets alleged, been a go-between for Goebbels and the Soviet traitor Mikhail Chernov, the Commissar for Trade for the Ukraine. Chernov had instituted policies designed to cause famine on instructions from the Nazi regime, conveyed via Goebbels and Paul Scheffer.37 During the Second World War, Scheffer went to America, where suspicion that he was a Nazi spy led to his arrest and interrogation. He was cleared, and subsequently worked with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) and served as a prosecution adviser at the Nuremberg trials.
Was Paul Scheffer secretly a Nazi, or willing to do their work? When they came to power in 1933 they took over ownership of the Berliner Tageblatt, and when Scheffer became editor in chief, Goebbels freed him of the obligation to publish Nazi propaganda. He wasn’t free from pressure, though; eventually he resigned and left Germany.
It may be an extraordinary coincidence that Moura and Scheffer were lovers throughout the period when the Ukraine crisis was going on. Or it might not. They corresponded in German, and some of the letters were intercepted by MI5. Apart from some remarks related to publishing, they were mainly love letters. ‘I am sleepy,’ Moura wrote, ‘but in my sleep I see your sparkling eyes and your lower lip – and I wake up. I am very glad, my dear, that things have happened in the way they have . . . The world is empty around me.’38
Another, written on her headed notepaper (‘Baroness Marie Budberg, Author’s Representative, 3 Willoughby St. WC1’), proposed a driving holiday near London. She told him that she loved him ‘tremendously’.39 In 1933 she took a few moments from a holiday in Salzburg and Vienna with Wells to write to Scheffer: ‘I have hardly a moment to myself,’ she complained. ‘We have seen so many people, Zweig, Freud, etc. And the little old person is pedantic, and exacting like all small greats.’40
That she could refer to H. G. so callously and dismissively could be just an attempt to forestall any jealousy on Scheffer’s part. Or it might be a glimpse of her real feelings about Wells. He was devoted to her, and it sometimes exasperated her. She could be cruel. H. G. had once taken her to see the shop in Bromley High Street where he had been born in 1866. As the car drove slowly by, he pointed to a modest and shabby little shop and said with some pride, ‘That’s where I was born.’
Moura looked at the shop, glanced at Wells, and said sourly, ‘I’m not surprised.’41
By 1933 H. G. was proposing to her at every opportunity, Gorky was pleading with her to go back to Russia with him, she was still involved in a passionate relationship with Constantine Benckendorff, and Paul Scheffer had been added to the list. All were being spied upon by the intelligence agencies of various countries. The only man who was not desperate for her was the one man she really wanted – Lockhart. He enj
oyed his friendship with her and their periodic dalliances, and profited from her encouragement to write his memoirs, but he would not respond to her pleas to make her his own.
From time to time Moura saw friends from the old days, including Meriel Buchanan, who was enjoying a steady career as an author; she had already turned her experiences in Russia into three books, the first published in 1918 with Moura appearing anonymously as ‘my Russian friend’. Meriel was married now to a Major Harold Knowling of the Welsh Guards, and had a little boy. Moura wasn’t impressed, referring to the Major as ‘that blasted husband of Meriel’s’.42
Marriage was a sore subject. While on holiday in Austria, between sightseeing and writing love letters to Scheffer, Moura had to endure Wells’ continual barrage of proposals.
‘This is only the beginning of our life together,’ Wells said to her in Salzburg. ‘In a little while we will marry.’
Moura was irritated. ‘But why marry?’ she asked. She could sense that in marrying her he hoped to cage her, keep her by him always – or until he found her too troublesome. ‘I’d be a bore if you had me always,’ she told him.43
It was in this mood that she complained to Scheffer about the pedantic ‘little old person’. Lockhart’s attitude to Wells was similar; after a dinner party at which Russian politics was discussed, he commented, ‘H. G. is not impressive. He is like a board-school teacher who has all his facts marshalled and who produces platitudes with the manner of a great original thinker . . . He is a vain old boy.’44 There was undoubtedly some jealousy in his summing-up – not a lover’s jealousy but that of a struggling writer for a great and successful one, and of a thwarted professional diplomat for a lionised amateur. But Lockhart wasn’t alone in his view. The radical thinker of the late Victorian era was looking increasingly out of touch with the modern world, and growing irascible at its refusal to take his advice.
A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 31