A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (31 page)

In the meantime, Lockhart fought with the chronic ill health that had dogged him since his return, hoped for a career opportunity which would make him an independent man again, and wrote his letters to Moura.

The impenetrable ring around Russia was growing stronger by the month. Lenin, who was now well enough to resume making speeches, declared that the Red Army would soon be three million strong. Although there were still rumours that the Allied force in the north would win through to Moscow and Petrograd, nobody with any sense believed it any more. Moura certainly did not. (Her sources, while belying Lenin’s grandiose claim, confirmed that the army now numbered many hundreds of thousands of effective troops.) And as the Bolsheviks, whose position had seemed so precarious a few months ago, strengthened their hold it became all the more imperative – and all the more difficult – to get out.

Moura had most of the documents she needed. The one thing that eluded her was a permit for her mother to cross into Finland. Without that, it would be impossible for the elderly Madame Zakrevskaya to leave Russia, and therefore impossible for Moura to join Lockhart in England. As soon as she could she would go to Estonia (provided she could get across the border) and begin divorce proceedings. She had received a letter from Djon, who claimed that his friends the Germans were ‘making things unpleasant to him’ because of the belief that she was spying for the Allies. So great was the inconvenience she had caused him, she joked that he might try to kill her if he had the opportunity.
²⁷

Now that Germany had lost the war the Red Army was fighting its way into the Baltic provinces against resistance from nationalist armies, and Moura’s children in Estonia were in the path of the fighting.

Her mother was unwell and vulnerable. Without Moura’s influence, her home would be requisitioned and Madame Zakrevskaya would starve. In early October the flat had been searched by government officials and all their provisions seized, supposedly for redistribution. In the ‘new burgeoning world’ (as Yakov Peters had called it) you were only entitled to eat if you were a member of the working classes. Moura had had to take a job as an office manager, which shortened the time she could spend on oiling the wheels for her departure.

She put prodigious energy into cultivating foreign diplomats. The most important was Asker, the Swedish Consul-General. He was also the friendliest, and had negotiated heroically on behalf of Lockhart and the other prisoners. He was a small, neat man with precise manners and a pretty young wife. He liked Moura, and delighted her by addressing her effusively as ‘Baroness’, but she puzzled him; he had the sort of mind which ‘likes to register all he sees – and somehow he cannot register me and that perplexes him’.
²⁸

Even in the shambles of the new Russia Moura managed to scrape together a social and intellectual life, forgetting her troubles in books and concerts – she went with her Red Cross friends to hear Feodor Chaliapin sing, and accompanied the elderly Princess Saltikoff to a Wagner concert in the Winter Palace – ‘it was such a pleasure to sit with the old lady and listen to fine music. And Wagner is just restless enough to suit me, now.’
²⁹

And all the time she laid her plans for Stockholm and the reunion with Lockhart. Every month the plan altered as the political situation changed or belated news of his health came through. And each time the meeting got delayed, Moura lost a little of her stock of hope.

One December evening she walked home from work by way of the Palace Quay and the Summer Garden. The Russian winter had returned, and everything was covered in soft white snow. The great park was deserted, and she sat down on a bench, dreaming of Lockhart and their sleigh-rides along the banks of the Neva. Moura always remembered those joyful, playful rides when she walked through this part of the city, near the Embassy and the river – that period had been the bright morning of their love. ‘What children we were then,’ she recalled sadly, ‘what old, old people we are now. But how infinitely thankful I am to Providence that I have met you, my Baby, what happiness you have given me, how you have taught me to love.’
³⁰
But as the weeks had gone by, her nerves had frayed. Now, sitting on the bench amidst the snow and the loneliness, she could feel herself coming apart. Just that morning she had been sorting through some of her belongings and had come across her children’s old baby clothes. ‘Those tiny things brought back such a longing for little Peter,’ she wrote to Lockhart, ‘for a child that should be yours and mine.’

But the prospect of Lockhart fulfilling his promises to her seemed frail and unreliable now. ‘I am nervous and jumpy and morbid and my glorious confidence in you sometimes gives place to the most utter depression and torturing surmises,’ she wrote. ‘And I am jealous, Baby. But you will be true to me, Baby, won’t you? If you fail me – it will be the end of everything for me . . .’
³¹

14

Se Mettre en Quatre

December 1918–May 1919

There were two Christmases again this year. The first came on 25 December. Russia ignored it – despite the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious stance, the Church kept to the Old Style calendar. Moura marked the date – the anniversary of the embassy party – in private silence. She knew now for sure that the English would not be coming back to Russia to save her. Intervention was dead. The Allies, still holding on at Archangel, would never beat the growing Red Army, and the rumour of a British fleet steaming through the Baltic was nothing but a myth. Russia would have to steer its own course into the future.

Moura noted sardonically the Bolsheviks’ perplexity at the Tory victory in the recent British general election. They had been convinced that socialism must spread throughout Europe, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happening. But guided equally by wishful thinking, Moura convinced herself that a new revolution must occur in Russia within the month and sweep away the rotten Bolsheviks.
¹
She was usually more astute than this.

Perhaps the stress and privations of her life were degrading her percipience. She was getting thinner all the time, plagued by a persistent cough, and the temperature indoors hovered around 6°C. Firewood cost up to 500 roubles a bundle (a month’s wages for a workman), and was difficult to get even at that price. Moura sometimes spent whole days trekking through the snowbound city looking for fuel.
²
The authorities were shutting down the tramways and the electricity supply to homes. ‘No food comes from anywhere,’ Moura wrote, ‘and from to-day they are giving oats and bran-smash instead of bread. So gradually we will all develop into little cows and horses.’ To her horror, shops had begun to appear in the city selling dog meat; Moura took extra care when she was out with Garry, frightened that he might be snatched.
³

Two visitors came calling during that British Christmas, one less welcome than the other. One was a Red Army officer who knew of her contacts with British intelligence. He claimed to represent a network of White Guard infiltrators who were preparing to betray the Red Army to the Allied forces. Three quarters of the artillery were ready to go over to the White side, and many infantry regiments. Moura asked him if he didn’t think that Russians could overthrow the Bolsheviks without foreign help. ‘It revolted me to see this man refusing to admit that anything could be done without foreign intervention and I don’t believe he is right either.’
⁴
Neither did she think there was much substance in his claims, but she passed the information to Lockhart, as she did with every rumour and snippet of political news that she thought might interest him.

Perhaps unconsciously she was repeating what she had done in the early months of their relationship, when, responding warmly to his admiration for her intellect and insight, she sought to impress him with opinions and information. She stoked up her consumption of literature in all her various languages – ‘I’ll read and read and read,’ she had promised him, ‘and become such a blue stocking that all your knowledge will be nothing next to mine.’
⁵
She also enrolled at the university to study for a diploma – as ‘a tonic . . . in order to keep a more or less balanced mind – which otherwise would go to pieces in this atmosphere’.
⁶

Her endeavours began to pay off. The other visitor in late December was much more promising. The literary critic, satirist and anglophile Korney Chukovsky, mop-haired and thickly moustached, called on her with an offer of work translating English poetry. Like Moura, Chukovsky had worked for the British missions as an interpreter.
⁷
He was now involved with a new venture which had been set up to publish Russian translations of the greats of English literature. Thrilled, Moura decided immediately to accept, but kept him dangling. Next day she called at his office to discuss the proposal. There she was introduced for the first time to the man who was heading the publishing house – novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and contender for the title of greatest living Russian, Maxim Gorky. Aside from Lenin, there was probably no man in Russia more well known or more admired.

He had just turned fifty, and the intense, glaring good looks of his youth were starting to give way to the haggard, drawn features of his age – the razor cheekbones were hollowing out from beneath, the moustache was thickening, greying and drooping as if it too felt the weight of age, but his piercing black eyes still glittered brightly under the crinkling lids.

To a woman of Moura’s literary pretensions, it was a remarkable achievement to be noticed and offered work by this man. But she played it cool in her letters to Lockhart. ‘We talked of English authors,’ she wrote, ‘of which, strange to say, he knows a good deal, even the modern ones. He asked me to give him a list of books I thought would be interesting to translate! It all amused me rather and I will go there twice a week to kill time. The whole atmosphere there is very bohemian – but rather stimulating.’
⁸

She was curious about Gorky’s politics; although he was a socialist he was protective of his aristocratic acquaintances and used his influence to save them from the Bolsheviks. Moura guessed cynically that he was motivated by a wish not to be ‘compromised abroad’. He told her that his ideal was ‘to have the world ruled by people of creative thought . . . without any distinction of class. He thinks himself a d’Annunzio of Russia.’
⁹

Perhaps in another, earlier time in her life she might have been more impressed by this turn in her fortunes. Now, though, she felt that Russia must change itself or lose her. She wanted freedom and comfort, she wanted her children, and most of all she wanted Lockhart. ‘How I wish I had news from you oftener, Baby-Boy. It would have been such a comfort in these terrible days to know more about you.’ To a woman who lived on attention, thrived on knowledge, it was unbearable. ‘I feel stupid to-day and can’t write. Sometimes the longing for you, for the certainty of you, for the feeling that you belong to me is so great – that writing becomes a torture and words cease to mean anything.’
¹⁰

Nonetheless she took it as a good omen when the first book she was given to translate (at a fair wage of 10 kopeks a line) was the biography of Walter Scott by John Gibson Lockhart. Perhaps that meant something.
¹¹

The official Russian Christmas came in early January. Although she had never felt less like celebrating, Moura bought a bedraggled tree from the market and struggled home with it through the cold streets.

It was now three months and two days since she had last seen Lockhart. (She kept count.) As she did every evening, she sat and wrote to him, pulling together little scraps of news, gossip, political intelligence, all held together with her inner thoughts. She was in the middle of describing a rumour that the charismatic head of the Petrograd Soviet, Grigory Zinoviev, had been arrested by Lenin ‘for disobeying orders about provisions’ when her mother’s voice cut in on her train of thought.

‘Are you writing again to
that man
?’ she said.

Moura paused. ‘Yes,’ she admitted, tight-lipped.

‘Quite useless – I am sure he has forgotten all about you by this time.’

Ugh
.
Moura went on writing, and a few minutes later came another interruption. ‘
He
has been eating pudding for his Christmas,’ said Madame Zakrevskaya bitterly, ‘while we here have to suck our thumbs and grind our oats. But he doesn’t care!’

Staring down at the page, shaken, Moura copied down her mother’s words, and added, ‘Do you, Baby?’
¹²
Did he care? Would he come to Stockholm when it was time? Would he take them both out of this nightmare? She was beginning to lose faith in the future, and sometimes hated writing to him: ‘Letters are such horrible – unsatisfactory things. And you seem so unreal – out there in the darkness – where these little slips of paper perhaps never even reach you.’
¹³