A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (43 page)

Moura’s motivations for cultivating Wells were complex. He was influential, and as a literary woman she couldn’t help admiring him, and as a romantic she was attracted to him, but there was little possibility of really loving him. Unlike Gorky and Lockhart, Wells had only a moderate regard for her intellect or her talents. He thought her bright and shrewd, but believed that she thought ‘like a Russian: copiously, windingly and with that flavour of philosophical pretentiousness of Russian discourse, beginning nowhere in particular and emerging at a foregone conclusion’. She was ‘a cultivated person who thinks after the manner of literary criticism and not along scientific lines’. He compared her intellect unfavourably with his wife’s and his daughter’s, who ‘had science in their education and think in English forms’.
⁴⁴
Wells believed strongly in rationalism, even as applied to politics. Some of his younger contemporaries, such as George Orwell, considered this a fatal flaw that blinded him to human nature.

Wells must have given his opinion on this to Moura, for in catching up with her correspondence with him after the whirl surrounding Gorky’s visit to Russia, she wrote placatingly that she was trying ‘to change my asiatic habits to western ones’.
⁴⁵
She had always taken it in good humour when he criticised her prose style or her English (‘Did I
really
say “publishment”? What a shame!’).
⁴⁶
In later life his pedantry would set her teeth on edge, but for now it just amused her.

In July Moura was back at Kallijärv. There, after an interval of four years, she wrote to the one man who had valued her mind and her talents above all others, the one man who had never reproached her for ‘asiatic habits’ or treated her with jealous possessiveness.

‘Dear Baby,’ she wrote. ‘How are things with you?’ With grim humour she alluded to the breaking of the vow she had made four years earlier: ‘The Russian proverb is right when it says that the grave alone will cure the hunchback.’
⁴⁷
She wondered if he might be in Paris or Berlin anytime soon, and if he would care to meet. She was keen to hear what had happened to the ‘famous book’ he had been planning to write, and how he was progressing with his memoirs.

When he replied, the sight of his name seemed to ‘sweep away ten years and transform me into the happy young fool that used to tear open your envelope with trembling fingers’. On 28 July she wrote again, reminding him that it was ten years to the day since ‘I started on foot from Narva to join you in Moscow’.
⁴⁸

While she continued to flatter, humour and charm H. G. Wells, Moura reverted to the habit that had marked the beginning of her affair with Lockhart ten years earlier – passing him information. Gorky was back in Sorrento after his trip to Russia, and Lockhart, who was now earning a crust writing a gossip column for the London
Evening Standard
, had heard a rumour that he had ‘quarrelled with the Bolshies’. She denied it, and described Gorky’s ill health and his need to work on completing the remaining volumes of his epic novel. ‘Please don’t use my name when you give this,’ she warned.
⁴⁹

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.