A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (47 page)

Moura had not lost her love of her bed. She conducted her morning’s work from it, and liked to stay there until lunchtime, making appointments for the remainder of the day and writing her letters. Often she lunched with friends and would visit H. G. for an hour or two in the afternoon, then in the early evening invited guests would drop in for sherry; after an hour or so she would shoo everyone out, but would expect someone to escort her out for dinner if she was not dining with H. G. At weekends she would usually accompany H. G. to the country homes of his rich, influential and famous acquaintances.

H. G. was still convinced that Moura would marry him. He arranged a huge party at the Soho restaurant Quo Vadis to celebrate their ‘marriage’. It was a wedding reception without a wedding. All their friends were invited. The guest list included the cartoonist David Low, Violet Hunt, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Harold Nicolson, Juliette Huxley, Lady Cunard and Enid Bagnold. When Enid went up to Moura to congratulate her, she smiled and said she had no intention of marrying him. In the middle of the dinner, Moura announced to the guests that the whole event had been a joke. ‘We tricked you. We never got married today and have no plans to do so in the future.’
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Given that H. G. Wells was unlikely to play such a ‘joke’ on his friends, he must have been hoping that the prospect of public shame would force her to play along and marry him. In making her announcement, Moura must have achieved some payback for having been railroaded into the party, and at the same time impressed upon him once and for all that her refusals were serious.

After the dinner the guests were invited to Wells’ flat in Bickenhall Mansions, where hired gilt chairs had been laid out in rows in anticipation of a performance by the harpist Maria Korchinska, otherwise known as Countess Benckendorff. Whose unfortunate idea it can have been to ask the wife of Moura’s lover to perform at her bogus wedding supper is not known. The Countess did not make her anticipated appearance. Enid Bagnold, surprised, recalled that nobody thought to move the chairs out of the way so the guests sat on them in rows until the end of the evening.
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The couple borrowed Enid’s home in Rottingdean, Sussex, for their ‘honeymoon’, which went ahead as planned.

Afterwards, H. G. continued living alone with his daughter-in-law Marjorie as his housekeeper and secretary.

Like Gorky before him, Wells was perpetually upset by Moura’s constant flitting abroad. She always told him where she was going, and he trusted her, but couldn’t shake off a nagging suspicion. Eventually, by a freak accident, the truth about one of her liaisons came out. Their relationship would never be quite the same again.

In 1934 H. G. asked her to accompany him on a trip to the United States, explaining, with a persistent, forlorn hope, that they must marry prior to going; unmarried couples received dreadful hounding from the puritanical press (not much had changed since Gorky and Maria Andreyeva’s tour in 1905). She told him that in that case he would have to travel on his own. He also asked her to go with him to Russia later in the year as he wished to meet Stalin.

Wells’ ego was a vast entity. He was attempting a one-man crusade to bring about world peace and to influence it according to his vision of a unified world state. To achieve this he wanted to meet up with both President Roosevelt and Stalin and engineer a rapprochement between them. Where legions of diplomats were failing, he saw no reason why Mr H. G. Wells should not succeed. Moura assured him that Russia was out of bounds for her and that if allowed entry, she would, like Gorky, probably not be allowed to leave. She told him that she might even be shot.

He travelled alone, leaving for America aboard the RMS
Olympic
in April. He was not happy. He wanted a lover in his old age who would stay by his side, caring for his every need and providing companionship. He was beginning to accept that it was never going to happen with Moura. During the voyage he wrote to Christabel Aberconway:

I think I am really going to break up with Moura. She’s lovely to me – she’s adorable – but I can’t stand any more of this semi-detached life. I’m tired, I’m bored by a Moura whom I can’t bring to America & who rambles round corners & for all I know is a drug trafficker or a spy or any fantastic thing.
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He was closer to the truth than he realised. As soon as he was safely off on his transatlantic voyage, Moura put in motion a plan to visit Gorky in the Soviet Union. She had written to him that it would give her joy to see him in Moscow, but she believed she would find life there too hard for her now. Instead she intended to visit him during one of his stays at his dacha on the Crimean coast.
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In July, after his return from America, H. G. made another attempt to persuade her to go to Russia with him, and again she insisted that it would be impossible. She told him she was going to Estonia. She suggested that he make his homeward journey via Estonia and join her for a month’s break at Kallijärv. He agreed. When the time came, H. G. saw her off tenderly from Croydon airport, kissing her goodbye and watching her smiling face as the plane taxied off. It was the last glimpse he would have of the Moura he thought he knew.
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He and Gip set off for Russia a week later.

In Moscow and Leningrad they attended several literary parties at which they were introduced to those writers – including Aleksei Tolstoy – who had been able to reconcile themselves with the regime and had not yet been killed or sent to Siberia. Wells found the restrictions placed on his movements very tiresome; he became irritable and unwell. He had a conversation with Stalin, hampered by their inability to speak each other’s languages. Wells was suspicious of Stalin, thinking him a potential despot, but he had to admit that the country was being governed and becoming successful. Despite Stalin’s disagreeableness (‘a very reserved and self-centred fanatic, a jealous monopoliser of power’), Wells decided that he was good for the country. ‘All suspicion of hidden emotional tensions ceased for ever, after I had talked to him for a few minutes . . . I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest.’
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His assessment was about as accurate as his first summation of Moura in 1920. Once again H. G. Wells had been hoodwinked by his Soviet hosts.

And then he made a dreadful discovery. A couple of days after his talk with Stalin, Wells was taken to dine with Gorky at his huge dacha near Moscow.
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Wells was pushing for freedom of expression in Russia, a sentiment with which the Gorky of 1920 would have been in passionate agreement. However, this was a new Gorky that greeted Wells. Although looking little different despite the passage of years, he had turned into an ‘unqualified Stalinite’.
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An argument ensued, clumsily conducted through an interpreter.

In the awkward atmosphere that followed, the interpreter, making conversation, asked Wells about his itinerary. Wells mentioned that he would be spending time in Estonia with his friend Baroness Budberg. The interpreter was pleasantly surprised; he remarked blithely that the Baroness had been with Gorky just the previous week.

‘But I had a letter from her in Estonia,’ Wells said, ‘three days ago!’
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The interpreter, embarrassed and confused, fell silent. ‘Surprise’ wasn’t the word to express what Wells felt. He managed to contain himself and continued his conversation with Gorky, ‘with a sort of expectation that suddenly Moura might come suddenly smiling round a corner to greet me’. As the party got ready for dinner, Wells, unable to let the subject lie, brought it up again. Gorky confirmed that Moura had been to visit him three times in the past year. There was a hasty consultation between the interpreter and the official guide, who explained to Wells that ‘there had to be a certain secrecy about Moura’s visits to Russia, because it might embarrass her in Estonia and with her Russian friends in London’. It would be better, Wells was told, if he didn’t mention her visits to anyone.
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With those few words, ‘my splendid Moura was smashed to atoms’. Wells didn’t sleep for the rest of his time in Russia. ‘I was wounded as I had never been wounded by any human being before. It was unbelievable. I lay in bed and wept like a disappointed child.’ No excuse he could imagine would explain why Moura had not told him she was coming to Russia or waited for him there. He felt betrayed, abandoned, ‘a companionless man’.

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.