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

by Deborah McDonald

  Wells had noticed that Moura was sending telegrams to Russia while they were away, but thought little of it at the time. He didn’t know of her other affairs. The more often Moura refused his offer of marriage, the more fixated and obsessed he became. Moura commented to her friend Enid Bagnold (author of National Velvet), ‘I’m not going to marry him. He only thinks I am. I’m not such a fool.’ She wasn’t going to be turned into a housekeeper.45 Enid herself had nearly dipped into an affair with Wells, decades earlier, and was forever captivated by his attractiveness – fixated by his ‘extraordinary little blue eyes’ smiling in ‘that blunt, unmoulded face’ with its cocky, Cyrano-like nose; they were ‘wildly seablue’ and she found it heavenly to be an object of attraction for ‘that greedy little boy’. And yet Enid liked Moura, and admired the way she handled him.46

  At the end of their Austrian holiday in July 1933, leaving Wells to return home alone, Moura rushed off to Istanbul to rendezvous with Gorky aboard the Soviet steamer that was carrying him from Naples to the Crimea. Moura bade him a last farewell, and he sailed on into the Black Sea. He would never return to the West. He had been given three fabulous houses, and had his adoring followers and access to his wealth, but he lost his freedom.

  Only a couple of months after his return to Russia, Moura wrote to say she was planning a brief trip to visit him there. She apparently had no doubts about her ability to gain entry and exit visas for a country where this was practically an impossibility. And so it proved. Once Gorky was home, Moura mysteriously acquired the ability to enter and leave the USSR without let or hindrance – as if the two things were somehow connected.

  Meanwhile, Lockhart’s memoirs had reached completion. He sent the manuscript to Moura for her approval. She thought it was ‘very good’ but wanted changes made to the chapters relating to their relationship. She asked him to refer to her as ‘Madame Benckendorff’. He didn’t comply. But he did give way to her insistence that he remove the passages about ‘the spying business’ which gave her ‘a Mata Hari touch which is quite unnecessary for the book . . . and quite impossible for me’.47 He also gutted his account of the plot with the Latvian riflemen, detaching himself from the heart of the conspiracy, in line with the version that had been cooked up between him, Moura and Yakov Peters in the Kremlin in 1918.

  The book was published in November 1932 as Memoirs of a British Agent, and became a bestseller. The following year it was adapted for the cinema by Warner Bros. Starring Leslie Howard as ‘Stephen Locke’ and Kay Francis as ‘Elena Moura’, the film was titled British Agent and directed by Michael Curtiz (who would later direct Casablanca). The film, which was poorly scripted, was less successful than the book. The story of the love affair between ‘Locke’ and ‘Elena Moura’ was simple and sensational. Elena is a Cheka agent set to spy on Locke, who is planning to assassinate Lenin. Elena gives Trotsky (the chief villain) information leading the Cheka to Locke’s hiding place, and Trotsky orders the building destroyed with Locke inside it. But having fallen in love with the British agent, when the confrontation comes Elena sacrifices herself for him, choosing to die with him. Both are reprieved, however, when Lenin recovers from his wounds and orders an amnesty for all political prisoners.

  Moura was unfazed by the film, and seemed to enjoy the notoriety it gave her. One of its most interesting features was the portrayal of her as spying for the Cheka and then sacrificing herself. Neither of these aspects of the story were publicly known at the time; Lockhart had excised both from the book. Given the very short production time, it may be that screenwriter Laird Doyle, who worked in consultation with Lockhart on the script, had access to information not in the book.

  If anything in the film really moved or upset Moura, it might have been the ending, in which Elena and Locke leave Moscow together, bound for England. Yet again artistic ‘truth’ trumped empirical fact.

  Lockhart continued battling his vices. He complained in his diary that he must make ‘one last strenuous effort to lead an ascetic life. Surely by now I have reached the age when other things than drink, self-indulgence and whoring will satisfy me’.48 He was never to reach that age.

  In an attempt to build on the success of Memoirs of a British Agent, he began working diligently on its sequel. When she saw the manuscript, Moura thought it better than its predecessor. But she was rattled by the accounts of his affairs with other women between 1918 and 1930 – seven of them (‘You go crescendo!’ she told him). And she was mortified to learn that he had been given two offers of postings to Russia in 1919, while she was doing everything in her power to be reunited with him, and had declined both of them. ‘Why??’ she asked.49 She had evidently forgotten (and he omitted to mention it in the book) that he was under sentence of death if he ever set foot in Russia again.

  20

  A Cheat and a Liar

  1933–1934

  Despite his devotion to Moura, Wells had not lost his philandering urge.

  Hilda Matheson (known as ‘Stoker’), head of the Talks strand on the BBC, persuaded H. G. to take part. The chance to disburse his wisdom to a rapt nation was irresistible to him. His topics included ‘Can Democracy Survive?’, ‘World Peace’ and ‘Whither Britain’.1 He became an overnight radio star and he and Hilda became friends. At this time Hilda was the lover of Vita Sackville-West, but Wells knew nothing of her sexual preferences and, early on in their friendship, made an attempt to seduce her in his flat. Writing to Vita she complained that due to the flat’s position at the top of the block, ‘No shouts would have been heard anywhere. So I had to do the best I could’. Violent resistance would only serve to excite him, she believed, so she ‘took it with the utmost lightness and laughed at him . . . and by the end he had become ruefully avuncular’.2

  On another occasion, wintering at Grasse, he lunched with his old flame, the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim – known as ‘Little e’. He told her afterwards he had enjoyed her latest book but castigated her playfully, ‘I could spank you (very lovingly and wanting to kiss the place afterward) for some of your involved sentences.’3 He might have been devoted to Moura but he could never be satisfied with just one woman.

  In late summer 1933 Moura and H. G. planned a holiday at Portmeirion, the faux Italian village that Clough Williams-Ellis had begun building in a little enclave on the North Wales coast. But on 28 July Moura sent him a letter confirming what they had feared and had been joking about for some time. She was pregnant.4 She was forty-one years old and Wells was sixty-seven.

  The news was hardly welcome for either of them and Moura decided to have an abortion. She seemed very blasé about the whole affair, calling it a small and unimportant matter that she would hardly have bothered to write to him about had they not been planning to spend part of the holiday at the home of Wells’ friend Christabel Aberconway at Bodnant near Llandudno; Moura would have to miss the first two weeks of the visit as she would be away in Europe undergoing the operation. (Abortion was not only illegal in Britain in 1933; the law had recently been tightened.)

  She told H. G. that he could not write to her at the place where she would be staying (which she didn’t specify); instead he could write to another address and she would arrange to collect any post.

  Was she really pregnant? If this was a ruse, it must have been a cover for something very important – not merely some joy trip with Paul Scheffer or Cony Benckendorff. Portentously, she told H. G. not to be alarmed. She assured him that she was thinking of him and asked him to take care of Kira, Tania and Paul if she should fail to return.5 Abortion was a risky procedure, and the only European country in which it was legal was Russia, where it had been decriminalised in 1919. If this was her secret destination, she might have been as worried about the visit as she was about the operation. She’d had letters from Gorky complaining that he was now unable to leave the country. Did she think the same thing might happen to her?

  It didn’t. She either had the operation or completed whatever business the pregnancy was a cover for, an
d was soon back with H. G., rejoining him in time for the last part of the holiday at Portmeirion and Bodnant.

  Now that Gorky was lost to her, she continued in earnest to cement her relationship with Wells, despite turning down his persistent offers of marriage. Paul Scheffer and Cony Benckendorff provided passion, and Lockhart was her true love, but without Gorky in her life, H. G. was her refuge, her source of safety and influence.

  Although she was still only a visitor, Moura was becoming settled in London. She acquired a flat at 88 Knightsbridge, which she shared with her old friend Liuba Hicks, now a widow. ‘Hickie’, who had suffered from tuberculosis for years, had died in 1930. Liuba had been left with nothing and was supporting herself by running a small dress shop. Despite coming from different backgrounds, Liuba and Moura had their shared experiences in Russia to keep them together, and despite both wanting to be the centres of their own worlds they remained friends.6

  There was no longer any need to visit Estonia to see the children – they were all here in England. Kira and Hugh Clegg were living in London. Paul had moved to England in 1933 (leaving behind the Russian name ‘Pavel’); he studied agriculture and took up farming in Yorkshire. In 1934 Tania came to London, got work in an office and moved into a room in the same building as Moura and Liuba. She found them both difficult. Moura would invite her to parties but never introduced her to anyone, holding forth among the mêlée and leaving Tania alone with nobody to talk to.

  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.’7

  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.8 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.9

  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.10

  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.11

  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.’12 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.13 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’.14 An argument ensued, clumsily conducted through an interpreter.

  In the awkward atmos
phere 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!’15

  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.16

  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’.