by David Lodge
‘Tyrants can be defeated,’ Gip objects. ‘We have defeated Hitler.’
‘Yes, but at what a cost …’ Anthony says. ‘I think it all became too much for H.G. in the end, the evidence of the power of evil in the world, mocking his belief in Progress. It wouldn’t be surprising if he felt he had wasted his energies and gifts as a writer propagandising for a lost cause. If he had listened more carefully to Henry James, he might not be so depressed about the reception of his work today.’
‘Isn’t Henry James just as out of fashion today as H.G.?’ Marjorie says.
‘Perhaps he is,’ Anthony says. ‘But he still has his devotees among the literati, and according to my mother American universities teach him as a great writer.’
Gip gives a snort of derision. ‘The world would be just the same if Henry James had never written a word. You can’t say that about H.G.’
‘How is Rebecca?’ Marjorie asks Anthony, thinking it is time for a change of subject.
‘Very busy,’ says Anthony. ‘She’s doing a lot of work for the New Yorker these days. The editor really loves her stuff.’
‘That’s nice,’ Marjorie says.
‘Yes, I wish she could pull a few strings for me in that quarter,’ says Anthony wistfully. ‘The New Yorker pays extremely well.’
In September Rebecca publishes a report on the trial of the traitor William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, in the New Yorker, and sends a copy of the magazine to him when it comes out. ‘I had to file it the day after the trial ended,’ she says in her covering letter. ‘Harold Ross told me, “I know of only five or six writers in the world who could have written such a thorough and journalistically competent story in such a short time, and of no other who could have equalled it in literary excellence.”’ Her pride in this accolade from the notoriously demanding editor is justified by the article. She conveys the character and appearance of each of the major players in the drama vividly but economically – for a drama is what a treason trial at the Old Bailey necessarily is – and achieves some degree of empathy with them all, even the central figure, the man who taunted British listeners throughout the war with his propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. Many people – though not himself – found something horribly addictive about those broadcasts, which was usually attributed to Joyce’s strange nasal drawl and unpleasant wit. He was like a pantomime villain, a man they loved to hate. So far from frightening the British public with his gloating celebration of Nazi victories early in the war, he strengthened their determination to resist; but there was a temptation to gloat in turn now that he stood in the dock, which Rebecca deftly avoided in her article. She brought out the strange twists and paradoxes of his early life and upbringing and showed how they made him first a fascist and then a traitor. She picked her way ably through the complex legal argument which dominated this first trial, as to whether the child of Irish parents born in the USA could be deemed a traitor to the United Kingdom. The judge ruled that he could, but Joyce was granted leave to appeal, which is where her article ends. Writing to congratulate her he says that he enjoyed reading it, but would enjoy seeing her even more. She replies apologetically that she is too busy at present, keeping track of the appeal, and preparing to report on another treason trial for the New Yorker. ‘Ross cabled me “We want whatever you want to write on the Amery trial”,’ she declares exultantly. Clearly, she is enjoying a surge of success and confidence as a writer, and he is glad for her.
Rebecca is too busy to visit him, but fortunately Moura is not. She moved back to London at the end of the war, into a new flat in Kensington, and calls in frequently to sit by his bedside or – if he is up – joins him in the small sitting room or the sun lounge, relieving his boredom and Marjorie of some secretarial duties. When it is necessary to write to correspondents in French or Russian she can take his dictation down in the appropriate foreign language. She gives him news of her children, Paul and Tania, and Tania’s family, and commiserates with him over the sad news about Anna Jane’s husband, Eric, now known to have died when a ship on which he was escaping from Java in 1942 was sunk. She entertains him with anecdotes about the people she knows and meets at parties and receptions in London and invites to her flat for sherry, for she has an amazingly wide and promiscuous circle of acquaintance that includes Russian exiles, British government officials, foreign diplomats, writers, artists, actors and film-makers. She brings articles she has clipped out of newspapers and magazines which she thinks will interest him and reads them aloud. Sometimes they just sit in contented silence for minutes at a time, like an old married couple for whom sex is a memory and only companionship remains – which indeed is exactly their case, except that they have never been married. They do not talk about the past very much, for there are too many minefields in that territory: buried crises and quarrels and infidelities and unsolved mysteries which it would be foolish to dig up now. But when she has left him, after squeezing his hand and stooping to kiss him goodbye, his mind often goes back in time to recall various moments in their shared experience.
For twenty-five years Moura has been woven into the fabric of his life, at first a bright thread that appeared and vanished again for long intervals, but later as a more and more prominent motif. They corresponded only occasionally after that memorable night in Gorky’s apartment in Petrograd, during the years when he was involved with Rebecca and Odette, and Moura was secretary and companion to Gorky in Sorrento, where he had gone to live for his health with Stalin’s permission. They did not meet again until 1929. In the spring of that year he went to Berlin to deliver a lecture on ‘The Common Sense of World Peace’ at the Reichstag (an inauspicious venue in retrospect), unaware that she was eking out a living there as the literary agent of Gorky, who had been persuaded by Stalin to return to Russia the year before. At his hotel he found a note from her saying she would be at his lecture. He could not spot her in the audience as he spoke, but she was waiting for him at the back of the hall afterwards, tall, beautiful, and alluring as ever in spite of her shabby, well-worn clothes. ‘Aigee,’ she said, smiling, as he came up to her with his arms held wide to embrace her, and her pronunciation of his name acted on him like an aphrodisiac injected straight into a vein. For the next two days, until he had to return to Lou Pidou and Odette, they were lovers again.
At that time, eighteen months after Jane’s death, he was in an unsettled emotional state. Odette was eager to occupy the vacant space in his life, but he was growing increasingly tired of her whims and tantrums. She had become a kind of nagging wife without the rights of a wife; but instead of doing the sensible thing, which would have been to drop Odette and take up with Moura now he had found her again, he carried on for some years a covert, quasi-adulterous affair with her, conducted through assignations in various Continental venues. In retrospect he couldn’t really explain his behaviour to himself, except that he foresaw the difficulty of cutting loose from Odette without losing Lou Pidou, but when eventually he made that sacrifice in 1933 it seemed absurdly obvious to him that Moura was the love of his life and the woman with whom he wanted to spend the remainder of it, and he courted her accordingly. Moura was perfectly happy to be his acknowledged mistress, but insisted on retaining her independence. She refused to live with him, and she was always moving about, going off on foreign trips of her own. He did not suspect her of being unfaithful, for she was not promiscuous. She told him once that she had slept with only five men besides himself: a man called Engelhardt she claimed to have married and divorced before she married Benckendorf but who he suspected had been a lover, her husbands Benckendorf and Budberg, Bruce Lockhart, and an Italian in Sorrento, whom she did not identify. All of them she said were either dead or no longer in a relationship with her, and he believed her – until he caught her out deceiving him about a visit she made to Moscow in 1934.
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.
