A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (44 page)

But there was a deep emotional need in her too. Her men were never mere tools, least of all Lockhart. Even her daughter Tania could never illuminate the hidden parts of Moura’s character. She could never fathom how ‘somebody who had suffered as much, and lost as much, as my mother, could still expect and command such adulation’.

One way she achieved this, without doubt, was by exerting an emotional pull: she once told a friend of mine that she thought men would remain attached to her if she had slept with them. Yet the question remains of how much this was an egotistical desire to manipulate people, or a response to a deep need within herself. Certainly, once attached she never let go; and yet this seems to have been part of the attraction for those caught in this way.
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Having repaired her initial mis-step, Moura began to settle into a regular relationship with Wells. Yet neither of them was either free or constant. Gorky was still living at Sorrento, and Moura was still a part-time member of his household. At the same time she was also settling into an intermittent sideshow affair with Lockhart.

Wells, meanwhile, was still entangled with Odette Keun. She remained tucked away in the Riviera, where he visited in the winter. He refused to see her elsewhere, and kept his new relationship secret from her, for fear of the savage recriminations that would undoubtedly ensue. Despite being quite sure that it was Moura he loved, Wells had never been good at ending relationships cleanly, and now, in his early sixties, was of an age when he couldn’t face another upheaval in his routine. After Jane’s death, he had gone through a period of anxiety and had felt that his own life was drawing to a close, leaving him with an urgency to complete important work; he was reluctant to do anything that might affect this.

At the same time, Wells made it clear to Moura that he intended to stay with Odette, that he and Moura should not have a child and that he would not expect fidelity from her.
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Moved to pity by her ‘shabby’, impecunious existence, Wells settled on her an annuity of £200 a year, supplementing her business income, which was around £800.

H. G.’s conditions suited Moura very well. Gorky was away in Russia in the summers, and Wells was off with Odette in the winters, so everything fitted neatly. And she still had time to dally with Lockhart.

Somehow, Wells did not seem to realise that Moura’s relationship with Gorky had been sexual. He still believed her to have been merely his secretary. Neither did he know the extent of her feelings for Lockhart. He thought he was the only man she loved. Yet although she told him that she loved him and belonged to him, she gave him nothing like the wholehearted, abandoned declarations of love she made to Lockhart.

Moura was now past her youth and on the downward slope into middle age. And she was beginning to experience a new and irritating sensation – the presence of a generation of grown women younger than herself.

In October 1929 she took Kira to live with her in Berlin for a while. The apartment was small, and she soon found that Kira’s presence irritated her and cramped her style. She was not good at introducing the handsome young woman at gatherings and appeared jealous if any men took notice of her. Moura seemed to resent her presence, intruding into her life and taking away the limelight that she required for herself. Kira’s stay only lasted a few months.

In 1930 Gorky’s health was worse than usual. His tuberculosis had been particularly bad that winter, and he was unable to go to Russia. Moura left him in Italy and went to spend some time with Alla. Her husband had attempted suicide again, and this time succeeded, and Alla’s morphine addiction had taken hold of her once more. In March Moura admitted her to an asylum, but she wasn’t ill enough to be held by force, and ran away. Moura wrote to Gorky to apologise for missing his birthday, and continued tending to Alla. In June she moved her to a hospital specialising in treating narcotic dependency. In between, she worked away at translations of Gorky’s
Samgin
and attended to her publishing.
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She managed to find time to acquire another visa and spent some of June with Wells at Easton Glebe. Anthony West, Wells’ son by Rebecca, was staying when Moura arrived. He had been out for a walk when Moura arrived, and when he returned he found the couple sitting on a garden seat in front of a tree. ‘Their faces were illuminated by their delight in finding themselves together again, and their evident happiness made the sight an unforgettable one. When my father was happy he was the pleasantest of men to be with.’ When Anthony returned home to his mother, bubbling with excitement about the wonderful time he had had, he was met by a stony Rebecca, who was angry that her son could be so disloyal.
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They spent time in London, where Moura began to infiltrate Britain’s literary and publishing world. She was introduced to the formidable Barbara Back, the boss at Heinemann, a man-eater who was reputed to have slept simultaneously with Somerset Maugham and his secretary and lover Gerald Haxton. She ordered her office boy, the young Rupert Hart-Davis, to partner her at badminton against Moura and Wells. Afterwards they repaired to Wells’ new flat in Baker Street for tea. Hart-Davis was impressed by Moura, finding her an energetic, enthusiastic opponent on the badminton court. She refused tea, preferring ‘a brandy and soda, accompanied by a large cigar’, over which she discussed politics and government with Wells.
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She had made a deep impression on the twenty-three-year-old. In later life, he would come to admire and adore Moura for her kindness and warmth. ‘She hugged you, not just with her arms but with her whole self.’
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During the rest of that summer, she worked her way slowly back to the sick Gorky at Sorrento, via Paris, Berlin and Estonia. But by October she was in London again, lunching with Lockhart at the Savoy Hotel prior to leaving for Genoa and Berlin. They had a good gossip – Moura told him that the author Arnold Bennett was bored with his actress lover ‘and had lost his inspiration since she made him give up wearing shirts with myosotis flowers on them’.
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She regaled him with tales of Gorky, who had given away all his money and was only making about £300 a year, despite selling over two and a half million books every year in Russia. Stalin wouldn’t let money out of the country, and was making it impossible for Gorky not to return home. Meanwhile, Moura was seeing less and less of him every year, and spending more and longer periods in Britain.

With every journey she widened her social web, gathered new intelligence, added new authors to Epokha’s list. And the rumours about her never ceased – that her travels were the cover for spying, either as a Soviet agent or a British double agent. At the same time, her restless and potent emotions drove her to take new lovers.

She didn’t lodge with Wells when she was in England; instead she stayed with Count Constantine Benckendorff and his wife. Constantine, a distant cousin of her late husband Djon, was the son of Count Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff, the last imperial Russian Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Alexander’s widow, Countess Sophie, had settled in England after his death in 1917, renting out her house in London and living in her quaint garden cottage, Lime Kiln, at Claydon in Suffolk, where she cultivated roses. Sophie had died in 1928, and Constantine had inherited Lime Kiln. Boldly citing her Benckendorff connection and exerting her charm, Moura threw herself upon Constantine, presuming his hospitality – and received it.
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Over the next decade and a half, she would receive a good deal more from him.

Constantine, a political liberal, was married to the harpist Maria Korchinska, and had a seven-year-old daughter, Nathalie. Constantine was twelve years Moura’s senior, had served in the Russian Imperial Navy, was captured by the Japanese during the war of 1905, and worked for a while in London with his father. While there he made friends with writer, traveller and socialite Maurice Baring, who introduced him into the political and literary circles that included Arthur Balfour, George Bernard Shaw, King Edward VII and H. G. Wells. Constantine returned to Russia before the Great War to work on the family estate, and shared a flat in St Petersburg with Baring. After the Revolution he decided to throw in his lot with the proletariat and joined the Red Navy. But his career became irksome, marred by the Bolsheviks’ suspicions of his background. At various times he was incarcerated in both the Kremlin and the Butyrka – the very same prison in which Moura had spent those two terrifying weeks in September 1918.
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As veterans of the Cheka jail, and as progressive nobles who had worked for the Bolsheviks, perhaps there was a fellow feeling that drew Constantine and Moura towards each other. Like Moura, ‘Cony’ was believed by some Russian émigrés to be a Soviet spy.
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Some believed that Moura’s acquaintance with him pre-dated her arrival on his London doorstep in 1930. He had once served as a border commissioner in Estonia, during the time when Moura was crossing the frontier.
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Constantine resembled Djon – stolid, blunt and now tending to be portly. But in temperament he was closer to Moura – progressive, liberal, adaptable to circumstances and cultured. He was a flautist, and on leaving the Navy had joined an orchestra, where he met his wife, Maria. He was forty; she was twenty-seven. They had escaped Russia in 1924 and joined Countess Sophie in England. Like many other Russian émigrés, Cony had little to do in England, and turned to gambling, leaving his wife to earn their money. She spent most of her time in London pursuing her career while Cony lived at Lime Kiln.

Within a few months of her arrival in England, Moura had managed to melt Cony; they began an affair which was destined to last for fifteen years. He was a charming person, well liked and popular.
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Moura, explaining herself to a friend many years later, said, ‘Gorky and Wells I loved. For Constantine I felt a physical passion he fulfilled.’
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His daughter Nathalie, who knew from family gossip about the affair, grew up loathing Moura.
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Dragged to Kallijärv for a holiday in 1935 when she was twelve, she was thoroughly embittered by the association, and detested all of Moura’s family. Although she found Tania beautiful, she disliked Pavel intensely and found Kira a ‘religious maniac, communion daily, queer in the head’.
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The extended Benckendorff family, with whom Moura was already on cool terms, were further alienated by the affair. Constantine spent money on Moura, buying her jewellery, escorting her to the theatre and the ballet. Nathalie considered her father a courageous man, but believed he was morally weak and Moura ‘devoured him’.
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Moura even had the gall to take H. G. down to Claydon to visit Cony. Only a woman of Moura’s calibre would dare take one lover to visit another for the weekend.
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Moura’s life was woven with lovers. Gorky at Sorrento, still wavering over whether to give up his beloved Italy and go home for good; Constantine providing passion and intrigue; and Wells, kept in the dark, believing that he was the only one. H. G. judged that Moura was ‘not a feverish lascivious woman like Odette’ and could only be made love to by a man whom she loved.
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This was true enough, but as with her intelligence, Wells underrated her capacity to love men.

Through it all, the thread that tied her to Lockhart was still strong. And between them was a secret truth – that if only it were possible, she wished she could be with him to the exclusion of everything and everyone else in the world.

Lockhart’s life was a mess. He was still writing his gossip column, still in debt, and agonising over the ruined remains of his marriage. Moura wanted to help him. She tried to inspire him to get a grip, settle his debts, and do some proper writing. ‘She is a big-minded and big-hearted woman,’ he noted in his diary in early 1931.
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He knew how difficult he had become, and what a struggle it was for the woman who still unconscionably loved him. She had once told him that he was ‘a little strong, but not strong enough, a little clever, but not clever enough, and a little weak, but not weak enough’.
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Now she urged him to ‘stop making such a mess of your life’ and take advantage of the opportunities he had in front of him. ‘You
must
have time to write and you
must
fight your physical troubles . . . Why don’t you listen to me?’
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From time to time they met and stoked the old flame again, and occasionally – apparently when she had been drinking heavily or had worked herself into a passion – she wrote him wild letters in a chaotic hand, telling him ‘my darling, you must know how much I love you . . . all my love is yours’, and swearing that it hadn’t diminished in any way since 1918.
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