by David Lodge
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.
His opinion was reinforced by reading Animal Farm, George Orwell’s clever satire on the Russian Revolution and its subsequent history, which his own publisher in recent years, the enterprising Frederic Warburg, brought out in August 1945 after T.S. Eliot had rejected it for Faber. According to Warburg, after a slowish start the book’s sales increased steadily in the following months as more and more East European states were taken over by Soviet-controlled communist regimes, including Poland, the very country whose independence Britain had entered the war to defend, and the benevolent Uncle Joe of Allied propaganda began to assume a sinister aspect. Animal Farm is now a bestseller, which serves Eliot right. If one of his critics was to triumph over the other, this is the way round he would have chosen.
Moura enjoyed Animal Farm when he lent her his copy, but to his surprise she is displeased when he shows her the petition to the Nuremberg Tribunal which he has signed. ‘You should not concern yourself with such matters, Aigee,’ she says. ‘You know nothing about them. And anyway what have these documents to do with what the Nazis did in the war? It is all old history – why rake it up now?’ She is unusually grumpy for the remainder of her visit, and leaves earlier than usual. When he mentions this uncharacteristic behaviour to Anthony, who drops in to Hanover Terrace later that day, he gives a knowing smile and says, ‘Moura is probably worried that her name might turn up in those documents.’
‘Why should it?’
‘She was probably spying for the Russians on the Germans in those days. Or for the Germans on the Russians.’
‘You shouldn’t say such things, even as a joke,’ he says.
‘I’m not joking, H.G.,’ Anthony says. ‘And I’m not the only one who thinks Moura is a spy.’
‘Is, or was?’
‘Both. Do you mean to say you never suspected it?’
He does not answer the question. There was of course the episode in Moscow in 1934, and Gip’s interpretation of it.
‘I don’t mean she’s a spy in the classic sense,’ Anthony goes on, ‘stealing the blueprints of secret weapons and that sort of thing. More likely she just keeps her eyes and ears open on the cocktail party circuit and at those little soirées of hers, and passes information that might be useful to the Russian Secret Service.’
‘If this is so well known that even you know about it, why hasn’t she been arrested?’
‘Perhaps she was, and MI5 turned her.’
‘Turned her?’
‘Maybe she’s a double agent.’
He stares at Anthony, but his son does not blink, or break into a grin that would declare, ‘Only teasing.’ ‘Bah!’ he exclaims at last. ‘I refuse to believe it. It’s all nonsense.’
‘Well, have it your own way, H.G.,’ says Anthony. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I assumed you always knew much more than I did. And you know I like Moura awfully. I have a tremendous respect for her.’
‘Moura’s family was destroyed by the Revolution. She never believed wholeheartedly in communism, even if she had to pretend to while she lived in Russia, and she got out as soon as she safely could. Why would she become a Soviet spy?’
Anthony shrugged. ‘Who knows? She was in deep trouble in 1918, wasn’t she – over the Lockhart plot? Maybe that gave the KGB some kind of hold over her.’
‘They weren’t called the KGB in those days,’ he says pedantically. ‘They were called the Cheka.’
After Anthony has left he stays in his armchair, tugging the rug more closely round his legs, staring into the dully smouldering fire – a few knobs of coal covered with dusty slack – and brooding on this conversation. The more he ponders the more horribly plausible becomes the scenario that Anthony has suggested. Moura was certainly compromised when her lover Lockhart was arrested in 1918 for alleged involvement in a plot which narrowly failed to assassinate Lenin. Lockhart, a British agent sent to Moscow as a diplomat with instructions to encourage the Bolsheviks to re-enter the war, claimed in his memoirs that he had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, and he was eventually sent back to England in exchange for a Russian spy. Moura was arrested with him and imprisoned for a short time. She was lucky to be released – people were shot out of hand for far less in Russia in those days. But perhaps she wasn’t lucky – perhaps she had agreed to work for the Cheka as the price of her freedom. It would explain the otherwise surprising fact – which he had taken at the time as a stroke of luck – of her appointment as his interpreter and guide in Petersburg in 1920. She could have been instructed to befriend the influential British visitor and report to the Kremlin on his activities and attitudes. Did she pretend they had met before, in 1914, in order to win his trust? Could it be that she even made love to him to secure it? The thought pierces his heart like a dagger. He cannot bear it. He will not believe it – why would she give herself to him with such a calculating motive when there was no reason to think they would ever meet again? But
some collaboration with the Soviet Secret Service would explain not only her three visits to Russia in 1934, but possibly other journeys she had undertaken alone over the years. Was this the real reason why she had always refused to marry him or live with him – so that she remained free to travel back and forth between Russia and England without his knowledge? He had discovered, or thought he had discovered, that she was deceiving him with Gorky in 1934, but now he stares appalled, trembling, dizzy, into the vertiginous abyss of a different, deeper deception beneath it: the possibility that their long love affair had been from the start directed and determined by the expediencies of her personal survival. In a way it is a possibility that he had always been aware of subconsciously, but denied or suppressed, refusing to put all the available clues together because he would rather be a jealous lover than a political dupe.
‘Goodness, what’s the matter, H.G.?’
Marjorie is in the room and is stooping over him with a look of great concern.
‘Why are you crying?’ she says. She takes the silk handkerchief he wears in his breast pocket and gives it to him to wipe his eyes.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ he mutters. ‘I’m tired. I want to go to bed.’
He wakes suddenly in the middle of the night and is instantly reminded of his conversation with Anthony and the new narrative of Moura’s life it prompted. He goes over it again and again, adjusting and emending it, revising and expanding it, in the light of newly remembered facts. If it is true, then she has made a complete fool of him. He has to know if it is true. The next time Moura visits him he will confront her once more and demand to know the real truth. He rings for the night nurse and asks for a sleeping draught, knowing that he will not get back to sleep otherwise.
He wakes again when the nurse draws the curtains of his bedroom to let in the grey light of a damp March morning. She helps him put on his slippers and dressing gown and steers him across the room and into the bathroom to pee and put in his false teeth. Then he gets back into bed and she places his breakfast tray with tea and toast and a boiled egg across his knees, and puts a folded copy of the Times on the chair beside his bed. As he slowly consumes the food, his thoughts travel in the same groove as during the night, but with a different, more forgiving tone. After all, how else could Moura have survived all the dangers and crises she had encountered in her lifetime except by compromise and deception? But if he were to confront Moura with this new narrative of her life and she admitted it was true, it would be the end of their relationship. Does he really want that? No, he does not. He values her companionship, he looks forward to her visits, they are among the few things that make his tedious existence tolerable, as his life seems to stretch on and on against all reason and expectation. It is apparently his fate to die very very slowly, to sink inch by inch towards oblivion, in a succession of days and nights that are all the same except for the sparks of interest and the warmth of human contact that visitors bring to him, Moura above all. He does not want to lose her. He will swallow his pride, he will sacrifice the satisfaction of knowing the truth – what good after all would it do him now? He will accept living on, and dying, in a state of uncertainty.
To his surprise, for he did not expect to see her again so soon, Moura returns later that morning, bringing with her a bunch of early daffodils that light up the room like a torch. He is in bed when she breezes into the room, for he seldom rises before the afternoon. ‘Hallo, Aigee! You were not expecting me, I know, but I was in a cross mood yesterday, and left sooner than usual so I have come to make up for it. Here are some nice signs that spring is on the way.’ She stoops to kiss him on the cheek.
‘Thank you, Moura, that is very sweet of you,’ he says, and watches her, bulky under her shapeless shift dress, but still graceful as she moves about the room, finds a vase, fills it from the bathroom, and begins to arrange the flowers.
‘How are you today, Aigee?’
‘Much as usual,’ he says. And then to his horror, he hears himself saying without any premeditation, ‘Are you a spy, Moura?’ The suppressed desire to know the truth seized his vocal organs and made them utter the question he had decided not to ask.
Moura does not reply at once. She continues to arrange the daffodils and is silent for so long that he thinks perhaps she did not hear the question, or that he only imagined that he had asked it. But then she speaks.
‘Aigee … That is a silly question. Shall I tell you why? Because if you ask that question of someone and she is not a spy she will say “No”. But if she is a spy she will also say “No”. So there is no point in asking that question.’
‘No, of course not,’ he says. ‘Forget I ever asked it.’
‘I have forgotten it already,’ she says, with a smile, and removes the newspaper from the chair next to his bed to sit down beside him. ‘Would you like me to read you something from the Times?’
‘Yes, please,’ he says. ‘Read me the obituaries.’
* * *
On August 6th, Rebecca West returns to England from Nuremberg, where she has been observing the trial of the Nazi war criminals to write an article for the New Yorker. She is flying from Berlin to Croydon in a British civil aircraft. A newspaper briefly scanned in the Berlin departure lounge reminded her that this day is the first anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, but she does not think of that as she gazes out of the plane’s window at the Kent coastline sliding slowly past under the Dakota’s wing. She is thinking about a very unexpected and very passionate love affair she has had during the past fortnight. Was it only two weeks ago that she flew in the opposite direction in a Royal Air Force plane with a group of journalists on the same assignment as herself ? It seems impossible that so much intense experience could have been compressed into so short a span of time.
Not that the trial itself had much intensity. It has been going on for nine months and is not expected to reach a conclusion until several more have elapsed. With so many defendants and four teams of prosecutors, each with its own legal tradition and code of practice, and given the tribunal’s anxiety to be scrupulously fair to the defendants (apart from the Russians, who regard the whole event as a show trial with a foregone conclusion) its progress has been painfully slow. Somewhere in the daily tedium of the proceedings the catalogue of evil that was being investigated had ceased to have emotional impact. Those who had attended from the beginning were clearly suffering from atrocity-fatigue, and simply longing for it to be over – all except the defendants, in whose interest it was to spin out the trial for as long as possible, since most of them were likely to be hanged at the end of it. In a curious way, the defendants were controlling the trial, and punishing the prosecutors with boredom. The courtroom was a citadel of boredom. Not of course for herself, to whom it was all new and fascinating, but it would need all her literary skill, when she came to write her article, to compensate for the lack of drama.
Outside the court, there was a quite different atmosphere. The lawyers, the servicemen, the journalists, the officials and civilian secretaries, relieved their boredom in the most obvious way, in sexual love – especially the Americans, who were the dominant presence in the Allied community, numerically and economically. There was hardly a man among them who wasn’t separated from a wife or sweetheart thousands of miles away, who wasn’t spiritually sick from a surfeit of war and exile, and who didn’t seek comfort and release in the arms of any available woman. As soon as she arrived she could almost sniff the heady scent of erotic arousal in the air, and before long she was overcome by it herself.
Francis Biddle was one of the chief American prosecutors. He was a virile sixty, lean, handsome in spite of a balding pate, intelligent and cultured, full of energy and wit. She had known him and his wife Katherine in Washington and Philadelphia between the wars, and liked him immensely – his wife less so. Katherine had joined him in Nuremberg for a while, but had returned to the States to look after their children, as he told her almost as soon as they met. It was her first workin
g day. ‘Rebecca!’ he cried, spotting her in the crowd outside the court building, and came across to kiss her on the cheek. ‘It’s wonderful to see you. You’re as beautiful as ever.’ ‘No, I’m not, I’m a frump,’ she said, quite sincerely. He laughed. ‘We can fix that.’
And he did. He got her a precious card admitting her to the PX, a passable imitation of an American department store which had miraculously materialised in bomb-damaged Nuremberg, complete with soda fountain, where she could get her hair done and buy nylon stockings and lingerie and other clothes that were unobtainable in England even if you had the coupons. Coiffed and manicured and dressed in a New Look summer frock she could almost believe his insistence that she was a woman who had ‘let herself go’ in the drab environment of austerity England and was now restored to her ripe beauty. He rescued her from the crowded dormitory-style accommodation where she had been billeted with other women journalists, and brought her to the Villa Conradi, an impressive Italianate residence in its own park where he and the other senior American lawyers lived comfortably, and led her to a spacious, high-ceilinged bedroom, with a highly erotic painting of Venus and Mars facing the bed that was a pictorial declaration of his hopes and intentions. He soon confessed that he hadn’t met her by accident on her first day – he had seen her name on a list and looked forward eagerly to their reunion. He had followed her life at a distance through her books, especially Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – which he claimed he and Katherine loved so much they would read it aloud to each other – in the hope that one day they would meet again. ‘I always had a yen for you, Rebecca, but I never had the chance to act on it, until now,’ he said, the second time he kissed her, this time mouth to mouth. When she raised the subject of his wife he waved her scruples away. ‘Katherine is a good buddy and a great mother, but that’s all there is to our marriage these days. She never liked sex much anyway. Wouldn’t do it for eighteen months after our second was born.’
