The Bedbug (8 page)

They soon returned to Ridgmount Gardens where they spent three years, short of money, initially with few friends and beginning to discover the reality of married life. Nadia recognised that Klop could be a spoilt child, autocratic and averse to criticism. He needed sympathetic company, people to laugh at his jokes and appreciate his repartee, to be sociable and have fun. Nadia seems to have accepted these character traits phlegmatically, balancing
them against the gaiety and exhilaration of his good moods. She was not without friends and social connections in London, including the ballerina Tamara Karsinova, a leading dancer with the Imperial Ballet who played a leading part in the development of the British Royal Ballet. She had married the First Secretary at the British embassy in St Petersburg, Henry ‘Benji’ Bruce, son of a baronet, and introduced him to Nadia’s uncle Alexandre. Benji used to attend his Sunday afternoon drawing master class for the city’s leading artists. He and Tamara escaped to London shortly before Klop and Nadia and remained friends.

As Klop and Nadia began to entertain at home, many of the guests had Russian or artistic connections. Among them was Mary Chamot, who had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and earned her living as a lecturer at the National Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum. She introduced them to William Constable, then at the National Gallery but later first director of the Courtauld Institute, where he revolutionised the study of art history and in 1933 played a part in the transfer to London of the Warburg Institute, fleeing Nazi persecution in Hamburg. Another visitor was gallery owner Earnest Lefevre, who specialised in French Impressionists, and his wife Nina. Klop was keen that Nadia should pursue the painting career for which her studies in St Petersburg had prepared her. Nina Lefevre was persuaded to pose at the flat, dressed in red evening gown, delicately manipulating a long cigarette holder. Mary Chamot came along to paint her portrait at the same time. Klop was in constant attendance, amusing their model with jokes in French and offering drinks and snacks. Nadia she did not find Klop’s domineering approach conducive to artistic expression and the result was not a happy one. Her first exhibition failed to sell a single painting, although it got a kindly review in
The Times
. Tragically this professional mishap was overshadowed by the loss of a baby through miscarriage, followed by several weeks of illness, a misfortune which the stoical Nadia dismissed in a single sentence in her account of that time. But she
wrote later about how much she regretted that they had not had more children. Klop, on the other hand, seemed to be intimidated by the responsibilities of parenthood and told her, in terms that must have jarred just as much then as now:

To worry about one is quite sufficient. And what a blessing that it was a boy! I dread to think how it could have been! Fancy us having an ugly daughter whom nobody wanted or, even worse – a very beautiful and attractive one! I would have died long ago worrying and trying to keep her out of trouble!
⁵³

Klop’s greatest achievement, in terms of raising Nadia’s artistic profile and enlarging their social circle, was his recruitment of a cook (and nanny for Peter) in place of the elderly Miss Rowe, who had died. The enigmatic Frieda, from Hamburg, spoke fluent English in an atrocious accent, cooked like a dream, and in quieter moments posed in the nude for Nadia. She attracted the attention of the Daily Mirror. In its ‘As I See Life’ column, under the headline ‘Cooks become models’ it reported:

Mme Ustinov, the Russian artist, who paints under the name Nadia Benois, is the fortunate possessor of an excellent cook who is also an excellent artist’s model. I have sampled her cookery and seen her posing. A very graceful tribute to her has been paid by Nadia Benois in the dining room of the South Kensington flat where she lives. Above the service lift she has painted the cook’s head surrounded with pots and pans and held up by little cupids.
⁵⁴

By that time Klop and Nadia’s fortunes and social standing were on the up and in 1924 they moved to a more spacious apartment in Carlisle Mansions, Victoria. Klop’s mother, acting on behalf of herself and her four surviving children, had sold a plot of land and three-storey house in Jerusalem to the Empress Zäwditu, co-regent of Ethiopia with Haile Selassie, for use as an embassy. The
price was £9,500 – equivalent to nearly £500,000 today.
⁵⁵
Klop showed his appreciation by escorting the Abyssinian delegation to the British Empire exhibition at Wembley and bringing the entire party, including the emperor, back to their new flat for dinner. The young Peter Ustinov was hauled out of bed to perform party pieces for the Lion of Judah while frantic phone calls were made to the German embassy to prevail upon their chef to despatch a meal suitable for a royal visitor round to the flat by taxi.
⁵⁶
This more spacious flat had room for a grand piano, helpfully provided by Klop’s sister Tabitha and her Palestinian husband Anis Jamal. Nadia painted the ceilings blue, adding figures representing the constellations, and turned a dividing screen door into a medieval icon depicting Klop as a scribe and twenty of their friends in appropriate guises. Here Klop could give full rein to his artistic talents: playing, singing and acting extracts from his favourite operas; mimicking chorus girls and prime ministers and telling tall stories. They could cram as many as eighty people into their Friday night buffet supper parties. Their guest list ranged from the chef Rudolph Stulik to Lady Tyrrell.

Stulik was the proprietor of the Hôtel de la Tour Eiffel, in Fitzrovia, just north of Oxford Street, which in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s had a slightly louche but glamorous reputation. Royal princes were claimed to be occasional visitors; artists Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis, socialite Nancy Cunard, poet and playwright Dylan Thomas and their literary friends were regular patrons of the restaurant, which after normal licensing hours transformed itself into an amusing but discreet nightclub. The hotel was equally discreet. Lady Tyrrell was the wife of the Foreign Office grandee Sir William Tyrrell who had been a powerful influence on Foreign Secretaries from Sir Edward Grey onwards and had founded the political intelligence department.

Klop’s position as the Wolff Bureau representative meant that he had access to German celebrities visiting London. The acclaimed concert pianists Wilhelm Backhaus, Artur Schnabel and the
Russian Vitya Vronsky would visit his flat to practise on the baby grand. Schnabel and Nadia enjoyed a mild flirtation which provoked a jealous response in the constantly libidinous Klop. At around this time they also got to know the Chenhalls family, Alfred and his sisters Hope and Joan. Alfred was an accountant but in reality more of a showbiz agent. Among his clients was the actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley Wilkes in
Gone with the Wind
. The two men died in 1943 when the Luftwaffe shot down a civilian aircraft carrying them from Lisbon to London. There has long been speculation that they were involved in a secret operation for MI6; Alfred bore more than a passing resemblance to Winston Churchill and he had a connection to the intelligence services. His sister Joan worked for MI5 for twenty-five years, liaising closely with Klop while maintaining a public persona as a lively spinster, Methodist minister’s daughter and head of the international wing of the Girl’s Brigade, where she introduced lessons in deportment and encouraged the girls to wear lipstick. Hope had been secretary to the British film star Charles Laughton, worked with Harry Yoxall who founded British
Vogue
and would go on to be chief inspector of the
Good Food Guide
. Yoxall was another of Klop’s lunch and dinner guests and a great admirer of his cooking.

With professional musicians to provide the entertainment, Klop could indulge in playing the part of a host, supervising the eating and the drinking, steering the conversation and flirting; above all flirting, with any attractive new female who appeared in their midst, seeking to establish a semi-amorous relationship. For the most part Nadia took an indulgent view:

The adventurous, somewhat Casanovian spirit of his youth never died. He was always on the look-out, eager for new conquests. But as he was superstitious, even a God-fearing man, he never intended ‘going the whole hog’, for he believed that some terrible calamity would befall us all as retribution for his sins. A mildly amorous relationship sufficed him. His imagination did the rest and the certainty that everything was possible completely satisfied him. Klop’s flirtations … were light and gay, like a joyous pas de deux on ice, with lots of slips and slides but never a fall.
⁵⁷

What did exasperate her were his frequent attempts to make her a conspiratorial partner in his assignations, trying to draw her into a discussion of their respective merits. He pushed his luck too far over the photographer Thea Struve. Nadia recalled later:

I had to sit there and listen to their endless tête-à-tête of a rather superficial kind, yet heavily laden with hidden allusions, mainly on Klop’s side: I felt like an unwanted old duenna. This was Klop’s usual stratagem. He always wanted to draw me into the situation for some reason. I often told him: You know, Klop, I’d rather you had a real love affair without my knowledge – for what I don’t know does not exist – than to sit through that kind of insipid deal.
⁵⁸

In her mostly affectionate portrait of her husband this is the nearest Nadia ever comes to a reproach for his infidelity but their son Peter, growing up in this heavily charged atmosphere and occasionally inveigled by his father into comment on his latest amour, was outraged and instinctively recognised the wounds his mother preferred to conceal. His father’s entertaining style involved ‘galloping like a daring scout in the no man’s land between wit and lapses of taste,’ full of juvenile double-entendres and risqué jokes with which his mother sportingly laughed along. Peter regarded his mother’s behaviour on such occasions as ‘always impeccable.’
⁵⁹

Looking back, the paradoxes of his father were apparent to a son whose relationship with him was frequently antagonistic and bitter. The mask of the convivial party host disappeared when the guests were gone. Klop had ‘a mercurial temper and, at times, a wicked and hurtful tongue’. In contrast to his own Calvinistic father, Klop was totally irreligious. Family rows were frequent and he was domineering and didactic with regard to Nadia’s artistic
method. She stood up for herself only within the bounds that would preserve a fragile peace. And in his early teens Peter turned on his father over his dismissive criticism of one of Nadia’s paintings, thereafter treating Klop’s sarcasm with cold imperviousness. The atmosphere in the flat was, said Peter, ‘glowering and intense’.

Yet he conceded that his father had a distaste for the brutal and cruel and a moral courage surprising in a man so devoted to the good life. Even in later life, in the company of his favourite young women, he ‘offered consistent amusement, an elegance of spirit, a sense of joyous irresponsibility’.

Peter shared a greater warmth with his mother whose benign, liberal nature led her to accept all sorts, even Klop’s girlfriends who remained friends with her long after Klop’s glad eye had alighted on another social butterfly. Peter was convinced though that this merely disguised the humiliation and degradation she must have felt. He regarded her account of Klop, however affectionate, as a subtle stab at his character that was the only cold revenge her pride would permit. When Nadia died, in February 1975, Peter found conflicting evidence in support of his view. Letters that Klop and Nadia exchanged, even during a long period of virtual separation, were warm and confidential but her private diary was ‘searing evidence of the moral injury she had suffered’.
⁶⁰

When Klop and Nadia were waiting impatiently to come to London, the British-owned Reuters news agency in the city had done its best to help. They wrote to Percy Koppel at the Foreign Office asking him to speed clearance from the British passport control officer in The Hague. Passport Control in those days performed a dual role of vetting foreign visitors and working for MI6.
⁶¹

Reuters and the Wolff Bureau were nominally in competition with each other. Although independent of government both had
expected to perform patriotic duties during the First World War. The rapid and reliable transmission of news and propaganda had been increasingly recognised as crucial by governments and journalists – sub-marine cabling was expensive but essential. In the aftermath of war, Lord D’Abernon, the new ambassador in Berlin, was particularly anxious that British influence should play its part in rebuilding the peace in Germany. He was concerned that reports of British policy were being filtered through the French Havas news agency in Paris and being deliberately distorted.