A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (46 page)

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 enjoyed 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.

Wells had noticed that Moura was sending telegrams to Russia while they were away, but thought little of it at the time. He didn’t know of her other affairs. The more often Moura refused his offer of marriage, the more fixated and obsessed he became. Moura commented to her friend Enid Bagnold (author of
National Velvet
), ‘I’m not going to marry him. He only thinks I am. I’m not such a fool.’ She wasn’t going to be turned into a housekeeper.
⁴⁵
Enid herself had nearly dipped into an affair with Wells, decades earlier, and was forever captivated by his attractiveness – fixated by his ‘extraordinary little blue eyes’ smiling in ‘that blunt, unmoulded face’ with its cocky, Cyrano-like nose; they were ‘wildly seablue’ and she found it heavenly to be an object of attraction for ‘that greedy little boy’. And yet Enid liked Moura, and admired the way she handled him.
⁴⁶

At the end of their Austrian holiday in July 1933, leaving Wells to return home alone, Moura rushed off to Istanbul to rendezvous with Gorky aboard the Soviet steamer that was carrying him from Naples to the Crimea. Moura bade him a last farewell, and he sailed on into the Black Sea. He would never return to the West. He had been given three fabulous houses, and had his adoring followers and access to his wealth, but he lost his freedom.

Only a couple of months after his return to Russia, Moura wrote to say she was planning a brief trip to visit him there. She apparently had no doubts about her ability to gain entry and exit visas for a country where this was practically an impossibility. And so it proved. Once Gorky was home, Moura mysteriously acquired the ability to enter and leave the USSR without let or hindrance – as if the two things were somehow connected.

Meanwhile, Lockhart’s memoirs had reached completion. He sent the manuscript to Moura for her approval. She thought it was ‘
very
good’ but wanted changes made to the chapters relating to their relationship. She asked him to refer to her as ‘Madame Benckendorff’. He didn’t comply. But he did give way to her insistence that he remove the passages about ‘the spying business’ which gave her ‘a Mata Hari touch which is quite unnecessary for the book . . . and quite impossible for me’.
⁴⁷
He also gutted his account of the plot with the Latvian riflemen, detaching himself from the heart of the conspiracy, in line with the version that had been cooked up between him, Moura and Yakov Peters in the Kremlin in 1918.

The book was published in November 1932 as
Memoirs of a British Agent
, and became a bestseller. The following year it was adapted for the cinema by Warner Bros. Starring Leslie Howard as ‘Stephen Locke’ and Kay Francis as ‘Elena Moura’, the film was titled
British Agent
and directed by Michael Curtiz (who would later direct
Casablanca
). The film, which was poorly scripted, was less successful than the book. The story of the love affair between ‘Locke’ and ‘Elena Moura’ was simple and sensational. Elena is a Cheka agent set to spy on Locke, who is planning to assassinate Lenin. Elena gives Trotsky (the chief villain) information leading the Cheka to Locke’s hiding place, and Trotsky orders the building destroyed with Locke inside it. But having fallen in love with the British agent, when the confrontation comes Elena sacrifices herself for him, choosing to die with him. Both are reprieved, however, when Lenin recovers from his wounds and orders an amnesty for all political prisoners.

Moura was unfazed by the film, and seemed to enjoy the notoriety it gave her. One of its most interesting features was the portrayal of her as spying for the Cheka and then sacrificing herself. Neither of these aspects of the story were publicly known at the time; Lockhart had excised both from the book. Given the very short production time, it may be that screenwriter Laird Doyle, who worked in consultation with Lockhart on the script, had access to information not in the book.

If anything in the film really moved or upset Moura, it might have been the ending, in which Elena and Locke leave Moscow together, bound for England. Yet again artistic ‘truth’ trumped empirical fact.

Lockhart continued battling his vices. He complained in his diary that he must make ‘one last strenuous effort to lead an ascetic life. Surely by now I have reached the age when other things than drink, self-indulgence and whoring will satisfy me’.
⁴⁸
He was never to reach that age.

In an attempt to build on the success of
Memoirs of a British Agent
, he began working diligently on its sequel. When she saw the manuscript, Moura thought it better than its predecessor. But she was rattled by the accounts of his affairs with other women between 1918 and 1930 – seven of them (‘You go crescendo!’ she told him). And she was mortified to learn that he had been given two offers of postings to Russia in 1919, while she was doing everything in her power to be reunited with him, and had declined both of them. ‘Why??’ she asked.
⁴⁹
She had evidently forgotten (and he omitted to mention it in the book) that he was under sentence of death if he ever set foot in Russia again.

20

A Cheat and a Liar

1933–1934

Despite his devotion to Moura, Wells had not lost his philandering urge.

Hilda Matheson (known as ‘Stoker’), head of the Talks strand on the BBC, persuaded H. G. to take part. The chance to disburse his wisdom to a rapt nation was irresistible to him. His topics included ‘Can Democracy Survive?’, ‘World Peace’ and ‘Whither Britain’.
¹
He became an overnight radio star and he and Hilda became friends. At this time Hilda was the lover of Vita Sackville-West, but Wells knew nothing of her sexual preferences and, early on in their friendship, made an attempt to seduce her in his flat. Writing to Vita she complained that due to the flat’s position at the top of the block, ‘No shouts would have been heard anywhere. So I had to do the best I could’. Violent resistance would only serve to excite him, she believed, so she ‘took it with the utmost lightness and laughed at him . . . and by the end he had become ruefully avuncular’.
²

On another occasion, wintering at Grasse, he lunched with his old flame, the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim – known as ‘Little e’. He told her afterwards he had enjoyed her latest book but castigated her playfully, ‘I could spank you (very lovingly and wanting to kiss the place afterward) for some of your involved sentences.’
³
He might have been devoted to Moura but he could never be satisfied with just one woman.

In late summer 1933 Moura and H. G. planned a holiday at Portmeirion, the faux Italian village that Clough Williams-Ellis had begun building in a little enclave on the North Wales coast. But on 28 July Moura sent him a letter confirming what they had feared and had been joking about for some time. She was pregnant.
⁴
She was forty-one years old and Wells was sixty-seven.

The news was hardly welcome for either of them and Moura decided to have an abortion. She seemed very blasé about the whole affair, calling it a small and unimportant matter that she would hardly have bothered to write to him about had they not been planning to spend part of the holiday at the home of Wells’ friend Christabel Aberconway at Bodnant near Llandudno; Moura would have to miss the first two weeks of the visit as she would be away in Europe undergoing the operation. (Abortion was not only illegal in Britain in 1933; the law had recently been tightened.)

She told H. G. that he could not write to her at the place where she would be staying (which she didn’t specify); instead he could write to another address and she would arrange to collect any post.

Was she really pregnant? If this was a ruse, it must have been a cover for something very important – not merely some joy trip with Paul Scheffer or Cony Benckendorff. Portentously, she told H. G. not to be alarmed. She assured him that she was thinking of him and asked him to take care of Kira, Tania and Paul if she should fail to return.
⁵
Abortion was a risky procedure, and the only European country in which it was legal was Russia, where it had been decriminalised in 1919. If this was her secret destination, she might have been as worried about the visit as she was about the operation. She’d had letters from Gorky complaining that he was now unable to leave the country. Did she think the same thing might happen to her?

It didn’t. She either had the operation or completed whatever business the pregnancy was a cover for, and was soon back with H. G., rejoining him in time for the last part of the holiday at Portmeirion and Bodnant.

Now that Gorky was lost to her, she continued in earnest to cement her relationship with Wells, despite turning down his persistent offers of marriage. Paul Scheffer and Cony Benckendorff provided passion, and Lockhart was her true love, but without Gorky in her life, H. G. was her refuge, her source of safety and influence.

Although she was still only a visitor, Moura was becoming settled in London. She acquired a flat at 88 Knightsbridge, which she shared with her old friend Liuba Hicks, now a widow. ‘Hickie’, who had suffered from tuberculosis for years, had died in 1930. Liuba had been left with nothing and was supporting herself by running a small dress shop. Despite coming from different backgrounds, Liuba and Moura had their shared experiences in Russia to keep them together, and despite both wanting to be the centres of their own worlds they remained friends.
⁶

There was no longer any need to visit Estonia to see the children – they were all here in England. Kira and Hugh Clegg were living in London. Paul had moved to England in 1933 (leaving behind the Russian name ‘Pavel’); he studied agriculture and took up farming in Yorkshire. In 1934 Tania came to London, got work in an office and moved into a room in the same building as Moura and Liuba. She found them both difficult. Moura would invite her to parties but never introduced her to anyone, holding forth among the mêlée and leaving Tania alone with nobody to talk to.