A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (53 page)

It soon became apparent that the magazine needed the services of an additional staff member with a good knowledge of the French language and of French politics. Moura’s name was suggested, and she joined their team, helping with fund-raising by appealing to the Ministry of Information, a task no doubt made easier by her contact with Lockhart. She wrote and edited articles and opened
La France Libre
to her literary contacts, including George Bernard Shaw, J. B. Priestley and of course H. G. They all wrote for the magazine.

Although de Gaulle had originally given
La France Libre
his blessing, its failure to lend itself to his cult of personality displeased him. Eventually he fell out with Labarthe over the Muselier affair. Émile Muselier had been commander of the Free French Navy but became concerned about de Gaulle’s growing megalomania and suggested the formation of an executive in which he would be the head and de Gaulle the figurehead. Churchill stepped in to mediate and a French National Committee was formed with de Gaulle at the head and Muselier in a subordinate post. Labarthe sided with Muselier, and
La France Libre
took on an anti-Gaullist position.
²⁵

Moura shared this feeling. She detested de Gaulle’s autocratic style, and her anti-Gaullism became a part of her political and social stock in trade. At his house in Hanover Terrace H. G. glued a blown-up portrait of de Gaulle into the bowl of the toilet. Moura thoroughly approved. ‘It’s the place for him,’ she said.
²⁶

MI5 tolerated her work for the magazine. The head of the Aliens section said it was ‘obvious from her entire history that she is interested in political intrigue and I should be very surprised if she is not being used to some extent by the Russians, though probably in a fairly open manner’. Her work with
La France Libre
was to the Allies’ advantage, he said, and there was no need to take any further action, other than to give her a watch-it lecture. ‘If anyone is to warn her I think it should be the Foreign Office, though I suspect she would make rings round whoever tried to interview her.’
²⁷

The editorial staff of
La France Libre
became part of Moura’s social world, and she would often take them – sometimes with H. G. in tow – down to Oxfordshire to stay at Tania’s house and escape from the Blitz for a few days. They would write the magazine during the day and in the evening play bridge. They pooled their rations, supplemented by fresh vegetables from the garden, and ate well. H. G., who had grown fond of Tania during family holidays at Kallijärv, liked being there, and sometimes stayed on after Moura had returned to London.

Despite all these distractions, Moura had not let go of her own publishing work. In 1939, with the expiry of the standard three-year term since Gorky’s death, she had lost her power of attorney over his translation rights, and therefore her income from them. In 1940 she published a new translation of his
Fragments from My Diary
, and so brought to an end one of the most important phases of her life. She continued working on translations of Gorky and other Russians throughout her life, but she was no longer in control of his legacy (except for the remaining papers hidden in that elusive suitcase).

She needed all the work she could get, in order to subsidise her lifestyle: quartered in one of the smartest areas in London, taking trips abroad, throwing parties, eating out; it all added up.

On 6 March 1942 Moura celebrated her fiftieth birthday. H. G. was reminded that it had been over twenty years since their first sexual encounter. She had been ‘a tall and slender young woman’ in those days, but ‘now I told her she was like a Vatican cherub, three times life size but still delightful’. He thought her ‘an ample woman; she is very grey but that queer sub-dropsy that attacks so many women of her age, and thickens their ankles, has spared hers altogether’.
²⁸

That same day, Moura lunched with Lockhart; he passed no comment on her appearance. Rather he remarked that ‘She is full of the de Gaulle-Muselier quarrel’ and was insisting that it was time to remove the troublesome General from power. Lockhart noted that her opinion corresponded with the private views of Anthony Eden and the Cabinet.
²⁹

By 1944 H. G.’s health was deteriorating. In August Moura confided to Lockhart that he had cirrhosis of the liver and dementia. He continued to write, but ‘his mind is gone’ and the writing had become ‘mechanical’; also he had grown ‘arrogant and intolerant of any contradiction’. In Lockhart’s opinion this was no change. ‘He has written a new and savage indictment of humanity in general for not following his advice.’ (This was indeed no change; back in 1941, in a preface to a new edition of his prophetic 1908 novel
The War in the Air
, Wells had said that his epitaph should be ‘I told you so. You
damned
fools.’)

Their conversation took place at the Carlton Grill, on the corner of Pall Mall and the Haymarket, where Lockhart treated Moura to lunch. ‘Good conversation,’ he recorded, ‘but she is expensive to feed or, rather, to water. Today she drank only beer with luncheon, but she had an apéritif of three double gins at eight shillings apiece and with her coffee a double brandy at twelve shillings!’
³⁰

Life in war-damaged London continued. During the ‘doodlebug summer’ of 1944 H. G.’s house at 13 Hanover Terrace (or ‘Hangover Terrace’ as Moura called it) was damaged by a bomb. Moura was staying in Oxfordshire with Tania (who had recently made her a grandmother for the second time). H. G. wrote to her – ‘just a love letter to say nothing in particular except that everything is well here and that all your commands have been meticulously obeyed. The carpenters turned up duly & nailed up the back door and most of our lost glass has been swept up.’
³¹

The time had come for other broken remnants to be swept up.

As the war came to an end, so did Moura’s affair with Constantine Benckendorff. It had continued throughout all these years, without H. G. ever having an inkling of it, despite Cony having holidayed with Moura in Estonia on at least one occasion in the 1930s. Presumably the fact that this was Benckendorff territory and Cony was accompanied by his adolescent daughter Nathalie made the visit seem innocuous. Nathalie herself, who knew perfectly well what was going on, had been disgusted by it.

In the end, Cony’s wife, Maria Korchinska, who had tolerated the affair for years, took a stand and after a terrible argument with Constantine she told him to choose between Moura or her. Cony rang Moura to tell her it was finished.
³²

More significantly for Moura, and for the world at large, time was drawing down for H. G. Wells.

On the Thursday after VE Day, Lockhart treated Moura to lunch again at the Carlton. All she wanted to talk about was H. G. She had been visiting him daily. The royal physician, Lord Horder, had diagnosed cancer eighteen months earlier and given him six months to live. Horder was wrong – there was no cancer, and H. G. lingered on. In July Moura took him to vote in the general election; he cast his ballot for Labour. By August she was convinced he had no more than a month to live.
³³
She too was wrong. He survived into his eightieth year, but he was becoming weaker and weaker, and employed day and night nurses to help him manage. He wasn’t in pain but was wasting away. Moura visited constantly; so did Gip and his wife Marjorie, who had been looking after H. G.’s domestic affairs for years, fulfilling the role he had hoped Moura would take up.

Despite his weakness he continued to write almost to the end, his last two books –
The Happy Turning
and
Mind at the End of Its Tether
– appearing in 1945, and his last article in July 1946.

He had become known for a vision of a future in which war could be prevented by the establishment of a world state with the power to limit the armaments and actions of every country. Man, he said, must adapt or perish like the dinosaurs. In the midst of a global war his ideas had seemed absurd. In 1941 George Orwell had written that ‘All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but then sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves.’ Wells had failed to appreciate that mankind did not live by reason, and had therefore misjudged twentieth-century history, including the temper of the early Bolsheviks, who in Orwell’s opinion ‘may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men’. Their rule was ‘a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials’. Wells had been ‘quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity’. Orwell felt guilt at criticising Wells in this way, likening it to parricide:

Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation . . . I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920 . . . influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow inadequate thinker now.
³⁴

H. G. Wells was, in the last analysis, ‘too sane to understand the modern world’.

He hadn’t long left in which to be bewildered by it all. On the afternoon of 13 August 1946, six weeks short of his eightieth birthday, H. G. Wells died. For the third time in her life Moura was left on her own by a man whom she had loved. For despite everything, he had been dear to her, just not as dear as he had wanted to be. This time there was nobody upon whom she could fall back.

PART 5

Moura’s Salon: 1946–1974

I find the photographs that insist that she was a plain woman who dressed dowdily so many inexplicable mysteries, and 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.

Anthony West,
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life

24

The Movie Mogul

1946–1948

After the train pulled away from the darkened Moscow station on that October night in 1918, taking Lockhart with it, Moura’s life became a sequence of endings. Doors closing, curtains falling, clasps snapping shut on travel trunks full of memories and secrets. Some of the doors she kept knocking on even though they were bolted against her.

Lockhart’s departure had been the end of the great adventure of her life. She had persuaded herself at the time that it was just the prelude, but really it was the close of a first act which had begun that day in January when he arrived at the British Embassy on the snowbound Palace Quay. When had its final end come? Perhaps in that damp woodland in Terijoki, when she threw herself on the wet ground and sobbed her heart out for her lost love. Or with the news that Lockhart had a son, and that the dream of little Peter was over.

Moura’s life as a ‘Russian of the Russians’ ended when she crossed the border into Estonia two days later. After that day, she would never have a home on Russian soil again, and even her visits would be fleeting. With the death of Maxim Gorky, her existence as a Russian effectively ceased; the last meaningful tie was cut, the door closed.

H. G.’s death meant the end of her time as a mistress, a lover, a paramour. Another door clicked shut, another of life’s avenues closed off.

And so it would go on, doors closing, curtains falling, cases snapping shut. Moura’s life was growing smaller and narrower. But still there was life in her, still choices to be made and paths to tread.

The evening of H. G.’s death, Moura went ahead with a small drinks party with two friends, writer Denis Freeman and his partner, actor Neville Phillips. She had helped Freeman with his war memoir, and knew Phillips through her new job as head of Alexander Korda’s script department. All she wanted to do all evening was drink vodka and talk about H. G. While Neville went home at the end of the evening, Denis, who had known Wells, listened through the night.
¹