A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (40 page)

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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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It wasn’t just the feeling that had gone – she had moved beyond and above him, gone through years of ordeals and trials, and had survived, maturer, stronger. ‘Her tolerance was equalled only by her complete mastery of herself. She had a new attitude towards life, which I found wholly admirable and which I myself was incapable of imitating.’

They sat down on the crag beside the stream to rest. He stumbled through his own story, which sounded sterile and barren in his own ears by comparison with hers. ‘I had lost even my old impudent self-reliance,’ he noted miserably.
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Broaching the awkward subject of his wife and son, he admitted that he had become a Catholic, and confessed ‘like a schoolboy pleading guilty to his housemaster’, the litany of ‘my debts and my follies’.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered. He was expecting reproaches, but she gave him none. She just listened silently, ‘her brows knitted, her chin resting on her hand, and her eyes fixed on the valley below, half-hidden by the heat haze’.

What she was thinking while he talked, she never recorded, but she seemed to be wondering how the man of six years ago had become the man that sat beside her now. And in that moment she realised at last that the love of 1918 could never be recaptured.

When he had finished talking, she said to him thoughtfully, ‘You will be thirty-seven on the 2nd of September – the anniversary of Sedan and Omdurman? You see I remember the date. At thirty-seven one is not the same – men are not the same – as at twenty-seven.’ Then, squashing down the feelings that had burned in her all these years, the longing for this man who sat beside her now, she made a plea that must have cost her dear, an act of superlative control. ‘Don’t let us spoil something – perhaps the one thing in both our lives – that has been perfect,’ she said. ‘It would be a mistake, would it not?’
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Lockhart didn’t know what to say. ‘There was a mist before my eyes, and my temples throbbed violently. I knew that she was right, that she had gauged my character exactly.’

She stood up and took his hands, and said firmly, ‘Yes, it would be a mistake.’

They had been talking for hours, and the sun had lowered in the sky. As its fading light reddened the trees, Moura turned and, with Lockhart following, began making her way down the mountain path.

PART 4

England: 1924–1946

She was H. G.’s match, mentally. With her quick wit and unexpectedly wide knowledge . . . 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.

Moura was a Catherine Parr to H. G., a tower of strength to him, a fount of spiritual consolation.

Lord Ritchie Calder, friend of Moura and H. G. Wells

18

Love and Anger

1924–1929

Indignant at the way Moura had been treated, H. G. Wells gave his opinion that Lockhart was ‘a contemptible little bounder’.
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Not that his behaviour was very different from Wells’ own towards lovers who were too troublesome to keep but too compelling to discard; but he felt a jealous protectiveness towards the one woman who had the least need of it. After all the mis-steps and ordeals of her life so far, she was quite capable of dealing with any eventuality, in her own time and on her own terms.

When they descended the mountain that evening and returned to the villa, the air was clearer. Four old friends together, Moura, Lockhart, Hicks and Liuba talked late into the night, as they had done so often in the flat in Moscow when it felt as if they held the future of Russia in their hands. Now none of them, save perhaps Moura, had even a fingertip hold on the destinies of nations. So they made predictions.

‘Moura prophesied that the economic system of the world would alter so rapidly,’ Lockhart recalled, ‘that within twenty years it would be closer to Leninism than to the old pre-war capitalism.’ She predicted that it might be a compromise combining the best features of both systems, but ‘if the capitalists were wise enough, it would come about without revolution’.
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When Lockhart wrote down that memory in 1933, he still had little idea how accurate her prophecy was, but he did guess that no radical changes would be wrought by their generation. They had sold their ideals after the war and gone back to the trough.

It was a pleasant but melancholy weekend of discovering that youth was gone for good. They tried playing rounders, as they did when killing time in the gardens of the British Consulate in Moscow in the long summer when the Cheka was itching to arrest every Briton and Frenchman in Russia. They couldn’t keep it up for long; Lockhart’s health, never good, had been ruined by overindulgence, and the others weren’t much fitter.

On Sunday evening, Lockhart had to return to Prague. Moura was heading to Estonia via Berlin, so they travelled together for the first leg. There were no sleeper cars, and the train was overcrowded. They sat together in a crammed first-class compartment and talked through the night. Speaking Russian for privacy, they reminisced about their months together in Russia – about Trotsky and Chicherin, Yakov Peters and the Reilly plot, and ‘Bolshevik marriage’.

They parted at Prague station at six o’clock in the morning. As Lockhart walked home he felt ill at ease and wondered whether he had made a wrong decision. He asked himself, ‘Was my indecision due to lack of courage, or had the flame of our romance burnt itself out?’
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Lockhart – or rather his obtuse male vanity – believed that Moura had seemed ‘a little bitter’ at their parting.
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In fact, if her manner with him was tight-lipped, it was irritation at his inability to understand what it was she wanted from him. After their conversation at Hinterbrühl she had suggested that they avoid seeing or communicating with each other for five years, and at the end of that they would come together again.
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He felt that she was trying to bind him to an impossible promise. Always thinking in terms of romance and sexual adventure, he failed to see the importance that their love had had for her – how it had given her life and sustenance and hope for the future. A few days later in Berlin, she wrote to him, trying to explain herself.

She chided him for having expressed his trivial regret for ‘the thrill that is gone, never to be revived’. To her mind it seemed ‘like sexual hysteria – and I should have thought you were above that’.

During all these years I have chiefly been doing my duty towards my own self-respect, or my children, or your memory . . .

I do not think you quite understood my plan of the other day. I had not meant to bind you in any way – I told you I didn’t. All I wanted was to have an illusion to live for – while for you – it would have given a certain satisfaction to your better self . . . But don’t let us mention it again.

I will not tell you, what seeing you again has meant to me, I will not speak of the triumphant feeling of knowing love that was stronger than death – all this is something which from now on belongs to me alone.

But I think that this – should be good-bye for ever. It is not because you may not want to kiss me that I prefer not seeing you again, don’t think that. But it would disturb your peace of mind . . . and as for me – it would, perhaps, spoil something which was, before God, really ‘the most beautiful romance in the world’.

So good-bye, my dearest; I am going out of your life never to return. May God give you – yes, happiness – I say it from all my heart.

Moura
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It would never be known how much it cost her to write that letter, to compose herself, to guide her often wild hand to produce the neat, flowing script of a lady at peace with herself. There was artistic truth in the letter, and some dry fact. But in the real truth of life, although she had kept her dignity, she hadn’t wholly retrieved her heart from Lockhart’s possession, and never would.