Before leaving Russia, he cancelled the tickets for his and Moura’s journey from Estonia to Britain and made a codicil to his will, cutting her out of it. He was determined to excise her from his life altogether. He intended to skip the trip to Estonia and fly straight from Leningrad to Stockholm, but he couldn’t help himself; he had to see her.
Moura met him at Tallinn airport, as self-possessed as ever, and as full of affection, despite his having sent her a postcard hinting at what he now knew. Wells stewed silently and waited for the moment to interrogate her. ‘That was a funny story of your being in Moscow,’ he said. She asked him how he heard of it, and he fenced with her for a few moments. But he hadn’t the patience for it. ‘Moura, you are a cheat and a liar,’ he said. ‘Why did you do this to me?’
She claimed it had been arranged suddenly after she got to Estonia. Gorky had made the arrangements at short notice, and she hadn’t been able to resist the chance to see her country again. ‘You know what Russia is to me,’ she said. But why had she not waited for H. G., knowing that he would soon be in Russia? She claimed she couldn’t risk being seen publicly with him in Russia. She denied that she had been there three times, insisting that it must have been the interpreter’s mistake. ‘You are the man I love,’ she told him.
Wells wished he could believe her, but his innocent trust in her, which had remained unsullied for fourteen years, had been utterly ruined.
But, as with Odette, he couldn’t make the break he knew he ought to make. They talked, they quarrelled, they made love during their stay at Kallijärv, ‘but we had the canker of this trouble between us’, Wells recalled. She came to see him off at Tallinn – ‘For she loves partings and meetings; she does them superbly.’
H. G. wrote down those impressions a year later, in summer 1935.17 They still hadn’t separated. ‘We have got on together because of a real inability to part,’ he wrote. ‘She held on tenaciously.’ He had become suspicious and jealous, and Moura had become defensive. He watched everything she did. Wells went and stayed with Christabel Aberconway at Bodnant. ‘We all cheat,’ Christabel told him after he had poured out the story. In her view, women cheated on their men for one good reason: ‘Not because we don’t love you, but because you are such unreasonable things that you would not let us live anything you would call a life if we didn’t.’ He grumbled, but Christabel knew him better than he knew himself. ‘Stick to her, H. G., and shut your eyes,’ she told him. ‘Of course you love each other. Isn’t that good enough?’
Wells didn’t think it was; he either wanted her whole – ‘skin and bones, nerves and dreams’ – or not at all. He no longer trusted her. ‘Like a child she believes a thing as she says it,’ he wrote, ‘and she is indignant, extremely indignant, at disbelief. I do not now believe a single statement she makes without extensive tacit qualifications.’18
But he couldn’t let her go, and they went on the way they were – sometimes recapturing the spirit of their old happy friendship, at other times they argued, slammed doors, stormed out, but were drawn back to each other. They holidayed at Marseilles, and spent Christmas at Somerset Maugham’s villa at Cap Ferrat, where Wells enjoyed a burst of creative inspiration. He worked on a film treatment for his fantastical story ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’. When Moura travelled back to England without him, H. G. took up with Constance Coolidge, an American widow who reminded him of Moura. The two women met shortly after, and Moura was ‘amused and on her mettle’ to see H. G. apparently in love with another woman. She teased him about it.
One day H. G. found her in tears, a telegram in her hand. She let him see it. It was from Estonia; Micky was seriously ill. Wells told her she should fly to Estonia immediately. ‘You’ll be angry again if I go,’ said Moura tearfully.
‘You’ll never forgive yourself if Micky dies,’ he told her, and helped her pack.
While she was in Estonia, he sailed for America, where he met Roosevelt and published articles about the New Deal. On his way home, he wrote to Moura an ultimatum: ‘Either come into my life completely, or get out of it.’ It was hopeless, and Moura knew it. Whenever he issued these declarations and demands, she would say to him in her wounded manner, ‘Why do you write such unkind things?’ and resume their relationship with ‘invincible imperturbability’.
Wells, of course, did not discover exactly what Moura had been doing in Russia.
In May 1934 she had heard the news that Gorky’s son, Max had, died, apparently of pneumonia. He was hurriedly buried the following day. He was only thirty-seven and seemingly fit, so it was surprising that he should be struck down by such an illness. Gorky was devastated; he never really recovered.19 In order to try to stop him grieving for the death of his son, Stalin had sent him on a river trip along the Volga.
‘I embrace you very tenderly,’ Moura wrote to Gorky from London. ‘My dear, my most valuable treasure’.20 Immediately afterwards, she flew off, ostensibly to Estonia but actually to Moscow, leaving behind the still innocently trusting H. G. And evidently this wasn’t the first time she had been allowed in and out of the USSR to visit Gorky.
So much for the danger of being shot if she set foot in Russia. C. P. Snow, who became one of Moura’s friends in later life, said that she ‘was the only woman Stalin would speak of with respect’. Baron Boothby, the controversial Conservative MP, agreed: ‘She was treated in Moscow like a visiting princess.’21 It was apparently around this time that the French Deuxième Bureau picked up the rumours of Baroness Budberg’s travels to the USSR and noted them in her file.
Gorky himself was coming more and more under the control of Stalin. The holiday on the Volga was a special fillip to help restore him to his former Bolshevik self. His commitment to the Party was beginning to slip after the death of Max and the realisation of how restricted his own travels were. Life in Russia was not quite as he had expected it to be.
When Wells arrived in Moscow, Gorky had just returned from the river voyage and Moura had slipped away to Estonia. If it hadn’t been for the interpreter’s momentary gaffe, H. G. would never have known. Writing from Estonia, probably when Wells was with her and remonstrating with her about her deceit, Moura wrote to Gorky.
All the trouble is still not over, but it is settling down. In my thoughts I am always with you, especially after the visit to see you. Everything here seems unreal, devoid of meaning. It is harder to live here. My dear friend, how are you? You know how difficult it is for me to write to you. Neither you nor I like certain words. But you truly feel how strong and indestructible this closeness is to you.22
She was surely lying to him just as glibly as to Wells. Neither man trusted her now. But neither man could bear to be without her, and each wished that he could have her all to himself, permanently by his side.
If anyone heard anything close to the truth it must have been Lockhart. She met up with him after her return to England. She regaled him with her troubles, and afterwards wrote to apologise for being ‘such an egocentric ass’ and giving him such a dull evening. ‘But it helped me a lot. Please tell me que tu ne m’en veux pas* and that we’ll have another, better evening.’ She added: ‘And you’ll never mention to anybody what I told you, will you. You know I never “complain” as a rule, and you’re the only person I could make such “revelations” to.’23
It is unlikely that she told even Lockhart anything approaching the whole truth. Her involvement in the Gorky affair was deeper than anyone could have imagined. She still had possession of the suitcase of letters she had carried away from Sorrento and the key to the Dresden safe deposit box – both hidden away somewhere known only to her.
Notes
* coll.: you aren’t cross with me.
21
The Mysterious Death of Maxim Gorky
1934–1936
Even though he wrote down a detailed narrative of his shocking discovery in Moscow, his confrontation with Moura and of the disputes that harried them in the months that followed, H. G. never committed to paper t
he full account of Moura’s claims about her activities in Russia. It might well be that at the time of his writing in 1935 she hadn’t yet resorted to her last line of defence. That probably occurred in late 1935 or early 1936.
Wells confided to his son, Anthony West, what Moura had told him when confronted again with the evidence of her visits to Russia. Having reached a point where her nonchalant dismissals and her charms were no longer sufficient to mollify him, she told him an incredible story.1
Moura claimed that her life had not been her own since 1916, at the height of the Great War, when the Germans caught her spying for the imperial Russian government. Under sentence of death, she had been turned, and began spying on the Russians for the Germans. Ever since, she confessed, she had been forced by circumstance to do the bidding of whichever government had the greatest hold on her. Hence her trips to Russia at the demand of Stalin, for the purpose of keeping Gorky pacified and happy. What had happened to her, she said, was the consequence of revolution; one must do what one has to do, or die.
H. G. was inclined to believe the story – and Anthony certainly believed it when he heard it later. But Wells was appalled at what he regarded as a mere excuse. In his opinion, he said, there were ‘things that could not be done in any circumstances – things so utterly ignoble that it would be preferable to die’. Moura laughed at him, but forgave him his moral glibness. She reminded him that he had ‘never known what it was to be absolutely helpless’. As long as survival was possible, as long as one was not so damaged physically that death was inevitable, ‘one more day of life was worth whatever it might cost. Anything might happen in the course of another twenty-four hours.’2
And that was all she would tell him. Aside from that, the ashes would have to be left unraked, and episodes from her past that she would rather not relive would have to remain untold. If H. G. wanted to continue with their relationship, he would have to take her on her own terms, ‘the first of which was that all her skeletons should stay in the dark in the cupboards in which she had put them’.3
What Moura told H. G. was a mixture of truth and lies. When Tania read Anthony’s account half a century later, she recognised the fundamental falsehood at the heart of it: it was quite impossible for Moura to have been in any position in 1916 where she could have been caught spying by the Germans and sentenced to death. That would require her to have been in German territory, which was impossible.4 Tania denied the possibility of her mother having been a spy.
And yet there were facts that Tania never knew – that nobody knew at the time. Moura didn’t need to go near the front lines to be a spy during the war. Tania knew nothing about ‘Madame B’ and her salon in Petrograd where Russians sympathetic to Germany gathered and were spied on by their hostess for Kerensky’s secret service. The gatherings were run by German agents who were willing to murder anyone seen as a threat to their security.5 For years afterwards, Moura was rumoured in Petrograd to be a German spy, and only British SIS agents such as George Hill, and probably Lockhart, knew the truth of it – that she had pretended to spy for the Germans while working for Russia.
The rest of the tale Moura told H. G. was a fair representation of the forces that had pushed and pulled her one way or another ever since. She had been to places – physical and emotional – that even the prodigious imagination of H. G. Wells could not encompass. She had suffered dreadful privations; he had not. She had looked death in the face and been beset on all sides by state-enacted mass murder, in a culture in which the people of her class had been officially declared less than human. Only a moral theorist who had never known anything but safety and security could believe that there were things ‘so utterly ignoble that it would be preferable to die’. Only those men and women who had been obliged to make that choice were qualified to judge.
And so life went on. By 1936, when H. G. had moved into his new house at 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, which he planned as his home for his ‘concluding years’, he had given her a key. ‘Maybe there is a limit to estrangement,’ he wrote, ‘just as there is an aphelion set to the path of a planet. I doubt if we shall ever have quite done with each other. There is an irrational gravitation between us.’6
He would undoubtedly have agreed with Arthur Koestler, who, although he liked Moura, described her as ‘a man-eating flower, not unlike one of those insect-devouring orchids if not as pretty’.7
H. G.’s prediction was correct. In spite of the rupture that had occurred, he would always love her. The one thing he could never reconcile was that she was his equal and an independent person. He knew he needed her but could never quite understand why, because he couldn’t entirely value her for herself.
Their close friend Peter Ritchie Calder, the Scottish socialist writer, believed that Moura ‘was H. G.’s match, mentally. With her quick wit and unexpectedly wide knowledge of many subjects, she could hold her own with him. More than that, she could handle him in his sometimes querulous moods – with a laugh or a joke or even a regal snub at his expense.’ Ritchie Calder saw Moura as ‘a Catherine Parr to H. G., a tower of strength to him, a fount of spiritual consolation’.8
But she also brought him anxiety and self-reproach. That was Moura’s way, and she could do no other.
Their relationship worked as long as they were in London and could go about their lives separately. When they holidayed abroad and were forced to be in each other’s company the strain would show, especially during those tense times after 1934. ‘It has such a dreadful sapping character about it,’ Moura wrote to Lockhart at the end of that year, when she and H. G. were staying with Somerset Maugham at his villa. (She liked Maugham, who had worked for the SIS in Russia during the British intervention in 1918–1919, although sometimes his viciousness exasperated her.) ‘I feel imprisoned in a net of considerations which are the most deadly of all – compassion, pride, self-reproach.’9 Lockhart was on the verge of a nostalgic voyage to the Orient, and hoped to write a book about it.10 Half-joking, she implored him, ‘Darling, take me away with you to the East.’
Meanwhile, Gorky’s health was declining, and he was missing Moura. She was a fount of spiritual consolation for him too, and of anxiety. He felt ill and lonely, and he needed her. He wrote asking her to visit him again. It wasn’t possible, she told him, blaming it on unspecified ‘dark forces’ which had become ‘unexpectedly stronger’ and ‘now seem insurmountable’. H. G.’s angry suspicions, perhaps? Or maybe some more powerful force was keeping her out of Russia. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ she wrote, ‘and do not blame me, my dear and only person. This is not at all easy for me, as you might think. But I will come, of course. Maybe a bit later.’11
In September 1935 Gorky travelled to the Crimea for his winter sojourn. He had a dacha there in the Tesseli area of the seaside town of Foros.12 The coast here was rocky and picturesque, a little like Sorrento. His movements had become ever more restricted; he could stay at one of his homes or commute between them; nowhere else. A friend heard him mumbling to himself, ‘I’m so very tired. It’s as if they’d put up a fence around me and I can’t step over. I’m surrounded, trapped. No way forward or back! I’m not used to this.’13 Moura visited whenever she could, and her visits must have had the full authorisation of the headquarters in the Lubyanka, if not from the Kremlin itself. Genrikh Yagoda, whose security and intelligence department had evolved from the Cheka into the GPU and now the almighty NKVD,14 must have known and approved of every visit, as must Stalin. Not only was the Soviet Union now the most tightly controlled territory in the world, but Maxim Gorky was one of its most guarded assets. Yagoda, via Pyotr Kriuchkov, was even providing her with cash, without receipts, presumably to cover her considerable travel expenses. And a letter written by Gorky indicates that on one visit she was accompanied by Stalin himself.15
The simple truth was that the USSR needed Gorky – the people needed him as a symbol, and the Soviet regime needed to control that symbol. Not only as a figurehead but as a writer of propaganda. (In 1934 h
e published a notorious book hailing the completion of the White Sea–Baltic Canal as a triumph of Soviet achievement. In fact, it had been achieved with slave labour, under Yagoda’s direction, and tens of thousands of workers had died in its building.) And just as his country needed Gorky, Gorky needed Moura. Even though he knew that their days of being master and ‘wife’ were long gone, she brought him comfort and joy.
That was the simple truth; the more complex truth was wrapped up in the obligations and deceits Moura incurred through her involvement – the lies to Wells, the entanglement of other members of her family, and the risk to her reputation and safety in the West. And that truth only Moura really knew about. There was also the matter of the dangerous archive of letters to Gorky from the anti-Stalinist Russian émigrés which was still in her keeping. Gorky was anxious about it, Yagoda wanted it, and Moura had it, cached away somewhere safe.
Later that year, back in London, Moura received a surprising and unsettling visit.
Timosha Peshkova, widow of Gorky’s son, Max, along with her mother-in-law, Yekaterina Peshkova, Gorky’s first and only legal wife, had been allowed out of the USSR to clear up the last remaining items of Gorky’s property at the Sorrento villa. Both women had had long and intimate working relationships with the Cheka and NKVD; Timosha indeed had had an affair with Yagoda. While she was outside the Soviet Union, Timosha travelled to London, where she called on Moura in the hope of persuading her to relinquish Gorky’s archive. She failed, and went back to Moscow empty-handed.16
H. G., despite being in his seventieth year, carried on having affairs. He had a fling with Constance Coolidge, a rich American divorcee, and with the journalist Martha Gellhorn. He was lonely, and hated it; he had a child’s fear of loneliness, he told Constance. ‘But I suppose I want my woman at my beck and call. I don’t want to follow her about. I want her to follow me about.’ It maddened him that he couldn’t have that with Moura. ‘She is always flitting off. I scream with rage when I am left alone, like a bad child.’17 He was still the ‘greedy little boy’ Enid Bagnold had been smitten by more than twenty years earlier. In H. G.’s eyes (those sparkling sea-blue eyes) it was Moura’s fault that he had to go on having affairs. As for whose fault it had been during the decades of affairs before her, he didn’t comment.
A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 33