A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (59 page)

‘Don’t give me that nonsense,’ Moura replied. ‘Find me a taxi. I’m an old comrade, and where are your manners?’

The policeman ‘was reduced to tears’, Ustinov recalled, ‘and he found her a cab’.
²⁷

Nobody ever knew whether she saw anything of her old friend Guy Burgess in Moscow. But another of her friends, Graham Greene, did meet Burgess there, and recalled their peculiar conversation. ‘I don’t know why he particularly wished to see me,’ Greene wrote, ‘as I didn’t like him . . . However, curiosity won and I asked him for a drink.’ Burgess sent Greene’s government escort away, saying that he wished to talk to him alone, ‘but the only thing that he asked of me was to thank Harold Nicolson for a letter and on my return to give Baroness Budberg a bottle of gin!’
²⁸

Maxim Gorky’s life was history now, his former home a museum, and in 1968 there was a ceremony to celebrate his centenary. Moura was there, his most beloved and only surviving lover and confidante (Yekaterina had died in 1965, while Maria Andreyeva had been in her grave since 1953).

In England the same strange process had happened to H. G. Wells, but with rather less pomp; in 1966 a blue plaque was put up at 13 Hanover Terrace, and the house opened to the public for the day. A huge crowd turned up. The new owner, slightly alarmed, spotted an elderly lady looking around on her own, and decided to ‘have a courteous word’. The old lady was Moura, revisiting the past. ‘This place I know,’ she said. ‘Mr Wells once pinched my bottom.’
²⁹

He had pinched rather more than that. However unsettled their relationship had seemed, there had been a bond. H. G.’s son Anthony West remembered the impact Moura had on him, and upon his father.

I . . . cannot forget my first breath-taking sight of her as she sat talking to my father in the garden at Easton Glebe one day in 1931. Her fatalism enabled her to radiate an immensely reassuring serenity, and her good humour made her a comfortable rather than a disturbing presence: I always looked forward eagerly to my next meeting with her, and remember my last with pleasure. I believed unquestioningly in her
bona fides
, and had never a doubt but that without her warmth, affection, and calm stoicism behind him, my father would have been a gloomier and more pessimistic man in the years that lay between his seventieth birthday and his death. Whenever I saw them together I felt sure that they were truly happy.
³⁰

Gorky’s life, Wells’ life and her own life – they were all history now, the stuff of museums. Doors closing, curtains coming down . . . nothing left but memories and secrets.

One set of memories, one avenue of life, the one that outshone and outlived the rest, reached its end in 1970.

In 1948, after living briefly with ‘Tommy’ Rosslyn, Lockhart had married his wartime secretary, Mollie Beck. She was a sensible woman who set about trying to sort out his finances. She took him out of London and they lived for many years in Edinburgh and then Falmouth in Cornwall. But he still couldn’t stay away from Moura. Whenever he was in London he would meet up with her, and he would often make the long journey to the capital for that sole purpose.

They were growing old – sometimes together, more often apart. In March 1953 she wrote to remind him that she would soon become ‘The Great Sixty’ and they arranged to meet up for a celebratory meal.
³¹
She was still his darling Moura, and he was still her Baby. As they aged, they grew ill and infirm. As in every other aspect of their lives, it was Moura who proved the more resilient. She survived breast cancer, while during the 1960s Lockhart’s health, which had been shaky ever since his return from Russia in 1918, and worsened by his habits throughout his life, began to break down badly. By the late 1960s he had begun to suffer from dementia. His brilliant mind and his compelling, quixotic personality were crumbling. His son and daughter-in-law nursed him at home in Hove, until he was admitted to a local nursing home.

Moura visited him there, and was with him in his final hours.
³²

Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart died in his sleep on 27 February 1970. He was eighty-two years old.

His obituary in
The Times
made a sketch of his life’s adventures and noted that ‘he was twice married’,
³³
but made no mention anywhere of the woman who had meant most to him, the woman who had shared his darkest dangers, who had sold herself to save his life, and who had loved him with a fierce passion that was stronger than death.

Two days after his funeral in Hove, Moura held a memorial service for him at the Russian Orthodox church in Ennismore Gardens, Kensington, close to her former home.
³⁴

The service began at noon, and as she had stipulated, there was a choir, and incense, and all the ceremonial of an Orthodox requiem under the hallowed gilt dome of the church. The only thing missing was the congregation. Moura had placed an announcement in
The
Times
, but she was the only participant. His relatives disapproved strongly, and his friends stayed away out of respect for them. It suited Moura well enough – this service was not for them; it was for herself and her Baby-Boy, for the memory of their love, for the memory of little Peter who never was, for the man Moura had loved as she believed no other woman had ever loved a man. At last, in death, she had him to herself.

Moura made her last trip to Moscow in 1973. Her health was failing. Arthritis had been dogging her for years, and she had had two hip-replacement operations. She could scarcely function without a drink to stimulate her.

Her time was coming; all the doors had closed, there was little now to live for. Her children she loved, and her grandchildren; but they were the future. Moura was of an age where all that really mattered was the past.

In 1974 Moura left London for Italy. She was going to visit Paul; now in his early sixties, he had retired from farming in the Isle of Wight, and he and his wife had settled in Tuscany. Hamish Hamilton believed that Moura had quite deliberately ‘decided to go away to die’.
³⁵
She booked a room in a small country hotel close to Paul’s home, and set off.

Another of her close friends, the poet Michael Burn, wrote a poem for her entitled ‘Moura Budberg: on her proposed departure from England’.
³⁶
He loved Moura. He had been introduced into her circle by Guy Burgess, who had been his boyfriend; later he married an old friend of Moura’s, and he was moved by Moura’s kindness to her in her last illness, when Moura herself was unwell. She had the ‘power to solace’, he recalled.
³⁷
Of all Moura’s friends in her last years, Michael Burn was possibly the one who loved her most keenly and sincerely.

In his poem he gently satirised the myths that Moura and everyone she knew had built up around her.

Isn’t it a fact

That Talleyrand adored you,

And that for your want of tact

In the Commune of eighteen-seventy

Marx praised and Eugenie deplored you?

Brilliant balloons

Of fantasy and gossip

Inflate to legends,

. . . How well
did
you know Solomon?

And was he wise? In Berlin, certainly,

The Kaiser took you for the Queen of Sheba.

That you were born

Is also sure, and bred

In deepish purple

You preferred red.

Grey’s not your wear,

London not yours to nest in,

Not now, not any more.

Too many rats. Where to then, citizen

Baroness, what fresh fields to rest in?
³⁸

There were no fresh fields for Moura – she had been everywhere, done everything, seen it all. Italy had been the land of Gorky for a while. They had both loved it. It would do as a final place to rest, if not nest in.

A story was told that when she left London in 1974, she took with her a certain suitcase. Somewhere between the Italian border and Paul’s home, the trailer in which her belongings were being transported caught fire. The cause was a mystery. Equally mystifying was the elderly Baroness’s refusal to allow the flames to be extinguished.
³⁹

Gorky’s papers, the letters, the diary jottings, the photographs, everything she had withheld from Stalin and Yagoda – all went up in a column of smoke over the Italian countryside. Everything else went with it – all the papery minutiae of her life. Lockhart’s letters, H. G.’s, Gorky’s, the manuscript of her ‘
Mêlée
’ probably, if it still existed. Nobody, if Moura had anything to do with it, would ever penetrate the mysteries of her life. She had given instructions to her children that they were to destroy all that they had of hers. All that would remain would be the traces she had left in the possession of others – in letters, in their memories and in their hearts.

On 31 October 1974 Baroness Moura Budberg died in Italy. Paul and Tania were with her in her last days. She was eighty-two years old.

Moura had called in a priest when she realised that the end was close. She asked for a personal requiem mass to be given for herself on the theme of contrition.
⁴⁰

Her body was taken back to England, the country she had come to with such hope and ambition on that distant day in the late summer of 1929. Her funeral was held at the Russian Orthodox church in Kensington. The building was packed. Her children and grandchildren – all grown up now and most married. Kira and her son Nicholas were also there. The list of friends was long – the French Ambassador, Baron Bob Boothby, Lady Diana Cooper, Hamish Hamilton, Alan Pryce-Jones, Tom Driberg, Kenneth Tynan, Alan Moorehead, Carol Reed . . . She was buried in Chiswick New Cemetery. Her gravestone was inscribed:

MARIE BUDBERG

née ZAKREVSKY

(1892 – 1974)

СПАСИ И СОХРАНИ
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The person who had meant more to her than any other wasn’t there. He had gone before her. He had brought her to life in the frosts of Russia, loved her and abandoned her, but she had loved him and gone on living for him. In the cruel winter in early 1919, when firewood could hardly be bought and the people of Petrograd struggled to eat, Moura wrote a letter to him.

My dearest Babykins

Do you remember how you used to say: ‘Our love must stand a 6 months’ test.’ Well – do you think yours is going to stand it? As to mine – it needs no test, it is there – linked with me until death – and perhaps – Beyond.

It would seem strange to me to hear you say ‘Do you still love me?’ just as if you were to ask me: ‘Are you still alive?’ And these months of waiting – how beautiful they could be . . . for there is beauty in parting, rapture in the thought that the day shall come, when one shall be able to offer a soul, purified by suffering and longing and by the ardent desire of perfection . . . Oh Baby-Boy – what I would give to have you here, near me, with your arms round me, and have you comfort me and cuddle me and make me forget all the nightmare . . .

. . . Sleep well, my Baby – may God protect you.

I kiss your dear lips.

Goodnight.

Your Moura.
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Notes

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Notes