A Man of Parts (70 page)

He had arranged to go there himself in July of that year to interview Stalin, having recently interviewed Roosevelt in America for the same journalistic project. It had occurred to him that it would be interesting, in view of the economic Depression now affecting the whole world, to question the leaders of the two great countries, one capitalist, one communist, to ascertain whether these ideologies could learn lessons from each other, and his name was still influential enough to secure the prompt agreement of both parties. Remembering how useful Moura had been to him as interpreter and guide in Petrograd in 1920, he wanted her to accompany him to Moscow, but to his annoyance she refused, saying that she feared she would be arrested if she returned to Russia and then, when he offered to obtain the necessary clearance, insisting that she had to go to Estonia to see her children, who were still living there in the care of their faithful Irish governess, Micky. Typically, she gave no reason other than that she simply
had to –
and set off a week or so before his own departure. It was agreed however that he would join her on his way back to spend some time at her country house, and he was sufficiently mollified to see her off to Tallinn from Croydon airport. Moura promised to write to him in Moscow.

Instead of Moura he took Gip with him on the trip and was grateful for his company, but his son’s Russian was limited, and he felt helplessly dependent on a guide and an interpreter whom he did not trust, aware that he was being manipulated by Intourist for propaganda purposes but unable to do anything about it. The interview with Stalin was just as frustrating as the one he had had with Lenin years before, the Soviet leader showing no interest whatsoever in any kind of rapprochement with liberal capitalist democracy. Afterwards he drafted a more flattering journalistic account of Stalin and Stalin’s Russia than he really felt, unwilling to give encouragement to right-wing British pundits. In fact he was depressed by the uniformity of opinion he encountered everywhere. Even Gorky spouted the Party line relentlessly when he visited him in his spacious dacha in the country outside Moscow – conformity being the price of his privileges, no doubt. They had a sterile argument about free speech, which Gorky claimed was a luxury that Russia could not yet afford. In the course of the evening he happened to mention to his interpreter Umansky that he was stopping in Estonia on his way home to stay with his friend Baroness Budberg, and Umansky said, ‘Oh, she was staying here just a week ago.’

He was speechless with surprise and shock for some moments. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he said at last. ‘I received a letter from her sent from Estonia last week.’ The Intourist man Andreychin said something in Russian to Umansky, who looked disconcerted and said, ‘Perhaps I was mistaken’, stonewalling all further enquiries on the subject. At dinner, from which Umansky absented himself, he said to Gorky through Andreychin, ‘I miss our previous interpreter, Gorky,’ and his host, taken by surprise, said, ‘Who do you mean?’ ‘Moura.’ There was a hurried exchange in Russian between Gorky and Andreychin, at the conclusion of which the latter said: ‘Gorky says she was here three times in the last year.’ Further enquiry revealed that the first occasion was at Christmas when she had allegedly been with her family in Estonia – ‘I
always
spend Christmas in Estonia,’ she had declared – and the second when he was in America to interview Roosevelt. The third was the previous week. ‘Gorky says you should not mention these visits in Estonia or England as it might cause her some embarrassment,’ Andreychin told him. ‘Obviously,’ he said, though the implication most obvious to himself at that moment was that Moura had deceived him.

There had always been rumours that Moura was Gorky’s mistress, and he realised now that Gorky must be the anonymous Italian lover on the select list of men to whom she had given herself. He would not have minded this concealment if the relationship was finished, as she had claimed was true of all those she mentioned. But clearly it was not finished. What other reason could she have for returning so frequently to Russia to see Gorky? Well, there was another possible reason, Gip pointed out, when they discussed the matter privately: she could hardly have crossed the watchfully guarded frontiers of Russia so frequently without the co-operation of the authorities. Wasn’t it possible that she was a Soviet agent, passing information about leaders of opinion in Western Europe, including himself, to Soviet intelligence? It was a plausible theory, but he was reluctant to accept it. If it was true, he told Gip, then she had only used her ‘information’ as an inducement to obtain a visa, and as far as he himself was concerned the KGB were welcome to it. But Gorky had quite enough influence of his own to facilitate her entry into the country.

Gip had to return to England shortly afterwards and for the rest of his stay in Moscow he was in a torment of jealousy, weeping and raging alone in his hotel room, unable to sleep, plotting all kinds of punishment and revenge. He actually drew up a codicil cutting Moura out of his will, which he got witnessed at the British Embassy, and changed his itinerary so that he could return directly to England to pursue other sanctions against her. But in the end he couldn’t wait to confront her, changed his travel arrangements again, and sent her a postcard giving her the time of his arrival in Tallinn, mentioning that he had heard an absurd rumour that she had been in Moscow lately, so that she would have an uncomfortable inkling of what was in store for her.

Of course it also gave her time to compose herself and prepare an excuse, but he was surprised all the same by how serene she seemed when she met him at Tallinn airport and kissed him affectionately. In the taxi to the city he said, ‘That was a funny story of your being in Moscow.’ ‘Yes – where did you hear it?’ ‘I can’t remember – it was just something I overheard.’ ‘I can’t imagine where it came from …’ And so they fenced for a while until he said, ‘Moura, you are a liar and a cheat. Why did you do this to me?’ She had a story ready, of course. ‘The trip was arranged suddenly after I got to Estonia,’ she said, ‘that’s why I didn’t tell you about it.’ ‘Why then did you arrange to have a letter posted to me in Moscow from Estonia in which you said nothing about it?’ Moura was imperturbable. ‘Let us have lunch in Tallinn and I will explain.’ He couldn’t help laughing at her. ‘You remind me of the wife in the
Illustration Française
, discovered
in flagrante
with a young guardsman, who is putting on his trousers in the background, saying to her husband, “Just give me time and I can explain everything.”’ Moura smiled good-humouredly and said, ‘I know a very nice restaurant with a lovely garden.’

They were seated in the shade of an awning like a great sail and served an excellent lunch of grilled crayfish, accompanied by a deliciously crisp white wine. Relaxed and refreshed by these agreeable circumstances they began to chat amicably as if nothing had happened, until he perceived the danger and called the meeting to order. ‘And now, Moura, for your explanation.’

She said that the opportunity to go to Moscow had arisen suddenly and unexpectedly. Gorky had obtained permission from the Russian Foreign Office, and she longed to see the country again after her long exile, but she hadn’t told him about it or arranged to meet him in Moscow because if they had been seen together suspicions might have been aroused.

‘What did you think of the country after – how many years away?’

‘Ten years. I was disappointed, to be honest.’

‘Moura,’ he said. ‘Why do you keep on lying? You have been to Russia three times this past twelvemonth.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Gorky,’ he said, and described the occasion. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘There must have been some mistake by the interpreter.’ Her effrontery was remarkable and compelled a certain admiration. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘why are you so upset, Aigee? You don’t suppose Gorky and I are lovers, do you?’

‘Of course I do!’

‘Pooh! Gorky has been impotent for years,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows that.’

‘Well I don’t,’ he said, taken somewhat by surprise. ‘But why should I believe you, when you lie to me about your three trips to Russia this year?’

‘That is a mistake by the interpreter,’ she repeated.

‘Moura, if you can prove it to me beyond dispute – by getting Gorky to write me a letter, for instance – I will believe you. Or get Andreychin on the telephone so we can both speak to him. You can phone him this evening.’

‘Very well,’ she said calmly.

But predictably, no proof was ever forthcoming. There was difficulty making a telephone connection that evening, the letter from Gorky never materialised, and after a while he became bored and somewhat embarrassed by his inquisitorial role. It was impossible to resist the lure of Moura’s bed in the warm summer nights of Estonia, and when they returned to England they slipped back into their old relationship. It was never quite the same for him: an element of doubt and distrust always tainted it, and for a time he was deeply depressed by the experience, which had shaken his own faith in himself – not just the discovery that he could be so blind in the most intimate relationship with another human being, but also the violence of his reaction to the disillusionment. For only the second time in his life he was seriously tempted by the idea of suicide, a mood he was able to throw off only by writing
Experiment in Autobiography
, in which he attempted to make an honest analysis of his life and character.

He was never quite sure whether Moura had told him the truth about her relationship with Gorky and her trips to Russia in 1934, but gradually he became reconciled to not knowing whether she was telling him the truth about anything. She regarded reality as something that could be patted and prodded and twisted like a child’s modelling clay to produce all kinds of interesting and attractive shapes according to the needs of the moment, and if you challenged the accuracy of her representations she would just smile and fall silent or change the subject. The embarrassment of the untruth thus exposed somehow became yours and not hers. It was, he suspected, a peculiarly Russian trait. She was a free spirit who would never be netted and tamed, and his long effort to make her commit herself explicitly and irrevocably by marrying him was always doomed. There was an almost ritual demonstration of this in 1935, when he said to her one day, ‘Let us at least get engaged, Moura. Let’s invite our nicest friends to a big lunch and announce our engagement’, and to his surprise and delight she agreed. Accordingly a private room at Quo Vadis in Soho was booked, and their friends invited to an Engagement Party, but just before the guests sat down she said to him, ‘Of course, Aigee, I am not serious about this.’ ‘Not serious?’ he said, aghast. ‘No I will make a speech telling everybody that it was a joke, an excuse for a nice party.’ And so she did, and he had to smile and pretend that he had been complicit in the joke all along to avoid a public humiliation. He never did discover whether this had been her intention all along, or whether she had decided to cancel their engagement as she walked into the restaurant.

After that he abandoned all hopes of matrimony, and settled for the loose association which was the only one she would accept: she was his companion and lover, but would not cohabit with him and remained free to come and go as she pleased. She was, he was fairly sure, faithful to him, and if he was unfaithful to her, as happened occasionally, and she found him out, she teased him rather than reproached him for it. The main thing is that, in her own inscrutable way, she loves him, and the fact that she continues to visit him in his impotent dotage and be kind to him is probably as much as he deserves from any woman, if not more. He is grateful to her for it.

Mind at the End of its Tether
is finally published in November and passed over in silence by most of the press. A few short notices regret that Mr Wells seems to have given up hope for civilisation, the human race, and the universe itself, and one says that these incoherent ramblings by a once distinguished thinker will embarrass his admirers and encourage his detractors. Gip had warned him that this would be the tenor of the book’s reception, trying to persuade him not to publish it, so he is neither surprised nor disappointed. As usual, the publication of a book acts as a kind of purge or evacuation of the intuitions, anxieties and obsessions which motivated its composition, and he is no longer oppressed by the cosmic despair expressed in
Mind
. Not that he feels any more hopeful for the future of the human race, but it doesn’t bother him so much. He has delivered his opinion – let the human race make of it what it will. He has nothing more to say.

He can still however be coaxed into collaborating with others to intervene in matters of public interest. In that same month the trial begins of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg: Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and the rest of the villainous gang. Some fastidious legal brains have questioned the legitimacy of this unprecedented tribunal, but the crimes in question are also unprecedented and there is an irresistible will throughout the victorious nations to punish them. It is essentially Nazism that is on trial. ‘
The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored
,’ the chief American prosecutor declares on the opening day, all the evidence being taken from ‘
books and records which the defendants kept with their Teutonic passion for thoroughness
’. The trial proceeds into the New Year at a snail’s pace, hampered by the involvement of four different legal teams from the four Allied countries. In February there are rumours that the Russians are trying to suppress certain documents that concern German–Russian relations going back to the 1920s and ’30s. A petition is organised by a group of prominent persons in Britain and America that includes Professor Joad of the BBC’s
Brains Trust
and the novelist Arthur Koestler, asking the Nuremberg Tribunal ‘
to make public all documents proving or disproving the alleged campaign between the NAZI party, Trotsky and other old Bolsheviks convicted in the Moscow trials
’, and he is invited to add his signature. He is glad to do so, because the suppression of free speech, and the manifestly rigged show trials of alleged traitors, has always been his most serious objection to the Soviet regime under Stalin.