‘I’m sitting at the window of our college thinking of you,’ wrote Mervyn to Mila in his beautiful, cursive Russian script. ‘This damned [postal] strike is still on, they say it won’t be finished for a while, so I asked a friend to post this from Paris for me. A week has gone by and no news from you. I am waiting for your call very much.’
His language, in those very first letters, was guarded, the style formal. It is as though he was testing her reaction, her expectations of him. ‘I would call myself but I don’t want to interfere… I am still applying all my efforts to find a solution to our question. You can rely on me completely. I don’t forget my Mila for a moment. I have your photos, those old ones, but I am afraid to look at them. They are in an envelope. I know that as soon as I look at your face I will be overwhelmed by such a wave of sorrow that it will be quite impossible. It’s so empty, empty without youThe weather is hot and stuffy. A typical Oxford summer. The college is exactly the same, but I have changed. I want to know what your mood is – it will be easier for me if I know that you are not despairing. When I think of our parting my heart breaks. Do not worry – I will not leave things like this. Remember I am undertaking many steps to achieve our mutual happiness. Look after your little nerves, your health. Your, M.’
A few days later Mila’s first letters from Moscow arrived in Mervyn’s pigeon-hole at St Anthony’s.
‘Today we are starting a new life, a life of letters and struggle,’ wrote Lyudmila on 24 June. ‘I feel very bad without you, it is as though life has stopped… In the three days since you left I have lost a good deal of strength, health and nerves. I know you will be angry, but I could not do anything with myself. I am sleeping very badly, I keep on thinking that you must return, and that I should be waiting for you, I jump at every sound. My friends try and support me… Everybody here who is honest and sensible thinks that [our separation] is stupid, inhumane, vicious and shameful.’
Mila’s friends would come by to comfort her, bringing food and dragging her out to the park to walk a little. But Mila had become ‘silent around people, stupid, unable to say anything’ . She refused to change the sheets on her bed because they still carried ‘the smell of your body’. On the Saturday after Mervyn’s departure she promised herself she’d muster the energy to go to the theatre. It was the premier of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Sovremennik, but for the first time in her life Mila couldn’t sit through the performance, and left after the first act. She felt as though she was running around ‘like a squirrel in a wheel’.
‘I live only with my grief, the world outside has ceased to exist for me,’ she wrote to Mervyn the next day. ‘I am very sorry I let you go. We should have waited longer. Everything is a thousand times harder now, the loneliness is unbearable. At the Institute all the women feel sorry for me, but among themselves they think you deceived me. They say, “Will he go on trying?” I tell them that you certainly will, and that we love one another very much. They all run to the library to read the New York Times. A lot of people liked your photo… I try to get home as quickly as possible and not see anyone. My mother reacted very badly [to your departure]. She says she thought that would happen! You are a foreigner.’
If I have realized anything in writing this book, it is that my father is a deeply honourable man. He had promised to marry Mila, and he would keep his word. More, he would sacrifice much to disprove Martha’s awful accusation that he, a foreigner, would abandon Mila to her fate, orphaning her a second time. ‘My childhood and your childhood and the present all run together into one picture of pain – I so want to smash this mass and start a bright new life,’ wrote a tormented Mila. ‘It’s so bad, so cold and orphan-like since you left.’
Lyudmila left no doubt as to the answer to the unspoken question in Mervyn’s first, tentative letters – her entire existence was orientated towards the fight she had to wage, and her whole life was consumed by the pain of parting.
‘Mervusyal I believe in you, will you let me down?’ Mila wrote. ‘I will go through with this to the end. Either way, I ask you, I implore you: if you don’t want to fight to the last, write me a letter and send it with someone, it’ll be easier for me that way. No prevarication – that is the most terrible, more terrible than death.’
At Bill Deakin’s suggestion, Mervyn wrote a detailed report on his contacts with the KGB for MIS. He also saw a lot of David Footman, his moral tutor at St Antony’s, a tall, grave man who out of term lived in a large basement flat in Chelsea. Footman was, like Deakin, urbane and polished, with a formidable intellect and effortless social superiority. He had won a Military Cross in the First World War and, though my father did not know it at the time, had headed the Secret Intelligence Service’s Soviet desk during the Second World War.
I remember Footman very clearly from various visits to his Chelsea flat in my early childhood. He was very thin and immaculately dressed, and spoke in an upper-class drawl that I had hitherto heard only on the television. His flat was filled with books and photographs of the First World War planes he had piloted (and, I was thrilled to hear, crashed, or ‘pranged’, as he put it), and I recall him solemnly shaking my hand as we left, though I was no older than five or six. I think Footman was the first person ever to do so.
Over weak tea in cracked cups, Footman listened sympathetically to Mervyn’s story, carefully filling his pipe as Mervyn spoke. Young people were supposed to get into scrapes, he told my father; he’d been in a few himself. Footman confided that he’d always preferred to have a secretary who’s had a ‘tumble in the hay’ rather than a prim one, they were easier to get along with. After Mervyn had finished, Footman suggested that he have a word with ‘Battersby, from the Foreign Office security section – they would be interested.’ He refilled his pipe and passed his hand over his distinguished brow.
‘You’re not reckoning on getting her out, are you? That would be a bonus. You’ve got to be realistic about these things.’
But Mervyn could not be realistic; it was against his nature. Also, I think he had become infected by something of the irrationality and maximalism of Russia. Not so much the superficial addiction to self-dramatization, which is undoubtedly a very Russian habit, but rather the true soaring of the spirit which thrives only when reality is impossible to deal with. Being realistic, in Russian terms, meant surrender. For Mila it would have meant going to work in a cloth mill at the age of fifteen. For Mervyn it would have meant a clerk’s job in the local Co-op. Both Mila and Mervyn had always refused to reconcile themselves to what others believed was reasonable.
Soon after his conversation with Footman, a letter arrived from Moscow via Italy, where it had been posted by an Italian Communist friend of my mother’s. It was Mila’s manifesto, at once a challenge and a cri de cceur. What it emphatically was not was realistic, which makes it so magnificent – and almost unbearable – to read, even a lifetime later.
‘You will get this letter on the eve of your birthday,’ Mila wrote. ‘I am sending it via Italy. This is the cry of my love, this is just for you and me.’ Their other letters, they both assumed, were randomly checked by the KGB; this one, Lyudmila was determined, would be absolutely private.
‘I have never written such letters to anyone, everything here is honest and true. My love for you may seem pathologically strong. In our time people have been taught to be content with a little, with half-measures, with the artificial. They forget feelings easily and easily part with and betray one another, they easily accept surrogates, including in love. All my life I went against the flow; all my life has been a fierce struggle against attempts to impose a way of life on me, a way of thinking which seems to me to be absolutely unacceptable. My life has been a fight to get an education, to become cultured, a fight for independence and finally a fight for love.