‘You’ll come to my room later?’ Mervyn whispered as Vadim turned to go up the stairs. Nina squeezed his hand.
Mervyn tipsily wove his way down the corridor towards his room. The light was on, and someone was inside. Whoever it was had heard him coming upstairs and opened the door. Backlit from the room, Mervyn didn’t see the man’s face, but demanded to know what he was doing. ‘Fixing the electricity,’ the man said calmly. ‘But we’re done now.’
After the men had left, Mervyn sat down heavily on the bed. Even here in the middle of Central Asia, the KGB was tailing him. Mervyn noticed that on the table were two empty glasses. Secret policemen, apparently, liked to have a quick drink on the job.
He undressed quickly, shivering, and got into bed. There was a soft knock on the door. Thinking it was Vadim, Mervyn got up and opened it. It was Nina. She pushed him inside the room, frisky. He bundled her back out. A rape scandal was the last thing Mervyn needed; he pictured Nina’s plump embrace turning into a wrestling hold, and help waiting just outside the door as she screamed for rescue. He climbed into his frigid bed alone.
Moscow State University was the largest of Stalin’s grandiose highrises which punctuated the Moscow skyline like a ring of watchful vultures. It was also, at thirty-six storeys, the tallest building in Europe at that time. On the sweeping terrace in front of the building were gigantic statues of well-muscled male and female students looking up confidently from their hefty stone books and engineering instruments into the bright future. It was a long way from the haphazard sandstone quads of Oxford.
The university put Mervyn up in the ‘hotel’ wing, in fact identical to the rest of the university’s five thousand-odd rooms except that, unlike ordinary students and professors, guests were provided with the luxury of a cleaning woman. The room was small, furnished with a sofa-bed, a deal desk and a built-in cupboard. The oversized window, dictated by the monumentalism of the façade, was completely out of proportion to the size of the room.
Nevertheless, Mervyn was delighted to be there. The university was the antithesis of his closeted diplomatic life; it was earthy and profoundly Soviet. Above all, Mervyn was significantly more free than when he was at the embassy. True, KGB radio cars stood outside, ready to put tails on foreigners as they left the building, but the surveillance was mercifully sporadic, and his fellow students, though still wary, were freer in associating with Mervyn than any Russians, apart from Vadim, had been before.
Mervyn had made a point, while at the embassy, of eating whenever he could at stolovayas – cheap public canteens – and riding on public transport wherever possible. Now at the university Mervyn ate in the canteen every day, with its papery meatballs, thin soup and watery potato puree. He had no choice but to pile on to trolleybuses, packed with the heavily padded narod, or people, and the smell of sweat and pickle-breath. He loved it.
Georges Nivat, a young Frenchman who was one of Mervyn’s fellow students and a friend from St Anthony’s and the festival, shared his love for immersing himself in Soviet life. Georges lived on a floor of the university which he shared with some Vietnamese graduates. The smell of their cooking, peppery chicken feet and garlicky cabbage soups, wafted down the corridors, much to Georges’ distress. ‘It is ruining my life!’ he would complain with Gallic élan when he came to Mervyn’s room for solace, tea and biscuits, gesticulating fatalistically. ‘Ruining my Iife!’
Georges’ fascination with Russian literature had brought him to Moscow. Soon after he arrived at the university he began frequenting one of Moscow’s great literary salons, the apartment of Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya on Potapovsky Pereulok. Ivinskaya had been the typist and collaborator of Boris Pasternak since 1946. She was also the beleaguered poet’s mistress, and was the inspiration for Lara, the heroine of Doctor Zhivago. She had paid heavily for her association with Pasternak. In 1949, after refusing to denounce her lover as a British spy, Ivinskaya was imprisoned for five years. She was pregnant by Pasternak at the time but lost the child in prison. She returned to Potapovsky Pereulok only after Stalin’s death in 1953, and they recommenced their affair. But all her life, Ivinskaya was tortured by Pasternak’s refusal to abandon his wife and children. The two families lived in a curious ménage, with the poet lunching and spending the afternoons with Olga before bowing politely to his mistress’s guests and leaving to join his wife for dinner.
Irina Ivinskaya was Olga’s daughter by a previous marriage to a scientist who committed suicide rather than face arrest in the Purge of 1938. But despite the tragedy which dogged her mother’s life, Irina was charming, happy and passionate about books and ballet. Georges fell utterly in love. Within months, he proposed. Pasternak toasted the young couple at a crowded tea party at his dacha in Peredelkino. Mervyn was invited to go and meet the author, but says he was too shy. ‘I would have nothing to say to Pasternak,’ he told me.
I have often thought about this strange refusal, because it sits so ill with my father’s apparent love of risk and danger at that time in his life. Perhaps it was because he only felt at ease with his friends and social equals and couldn’t stand formal functions – a dislike which continues to this day. He has always struck me as a very private man, cocooned in a protective world he weaves around himself to keep the outside world at bay. His study in London, the various austere academic apartments he occupied during visiting professorships, these were all fashioned into small masculine nests where he could escape into his piled papers, his pots of tea and his Bach. At social events he usually wears his frayed two-pound charity shop shirts and sagging tweed jackets, and hangs in a corner with a forced smile, waiting until it’s time to leave. In a fit of shyness, he even left my wedding dinner early. I said goodbye to him on the steps of the old Splendid Hotel on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul, as he stood in his antique dinner suit and a beige mackintosh. He thanked me warmly for a good party, as the music of a raucous band of young Gypsy delinquents belted from the dining room. ‘I don’t really like these big gatherings,’ he explained, and turned to walk back alone to our house through the light evening drizzle.
Soon after Georges’ engagement party, Vadim invited Mervyn to dinner at the Praga restaurant to celebrate Vadim’s newly won MA degree in oriental studies. The other guests were mostly elderly academics, Vadim’s supervisors and department heads. But opposite Mervyn sat an elegantly dressed man, about five years his senior, with a distinctive grey streak in his combed-back hair. Vadim whispered to Mervyn that the man’s name was Alexei, a ‘research assistant’ to his mysterious uncle. But he didn’t introduce them, and they did not speak. Alexei made a long, witty toast. Mervyn made conversation with his stony-faced neighbours and drank too much.
A few days later Vadim called to pass on a message from Alexei: he wanted to invite Mervyn and Vadim to join him for an evening at the Bolshoi ballet. Mervyn was surprised, and flattered. Though they hadn’t spoken at dinner, Alexei was probably interested to meet a foreigner, Mervyn reasoned. He accepted the invitation.
Alexei was poised and confident, a true member of the post-war Moscow nomenklatura, or official élite. He wore foreign-made clothes and had travelled; his wife, Inna Vadimovna, was tall and slim, and, Mervyn noticed when they met at the Bolshoi, wore an expensive gold bracelet with a watch set in it. Alexei remarked proudly that his wife was ‘a typical Soviet woman’. Mervyn thought of his cleaner, Anna Pavlovna, panting to the bus stop with her string bags full of eggs from the university canteen. She seemed to Mervyn to be a more typical Soviet woman.