‘We liked your phrase, “using an aura of friendship for purposes of recruitment”, in your report,’ McCaul told my father. ‘So we put it in one of our things.’ He did not elaborate as to what piece of MI5 literature Mervyn had unwittingly contributed to. A few days later McCaul sent Mervyn two photographs to see if he could identify them. One was of a Russian research student who’d been up at St Anthony’s two years previously, and had nothing to do with Mervyn’s case. The other picture was of a man Mervyn had never seen. He remembered Alexei’s sarcastic comments on how ineffective MIS was, and found himself in full agreement.
M15 did, to Mervyn’s surprise, finally come up with the goods on 2 March 1966, when a man met him at Charing Cross Station to show him a photograph of an elegant figure with a broad, handsome face and a distinctive streak of grey hair over his temple. It was Alexei. The M15 man told Mervyn his surname was Suntsov, the first time Mervyn had ever heard it. In Moscow he had never dared ask Alexei his surname.
In Moscow, for Mila, Mervyn was everywhere, appearing like the ghostly overcoat in Gogol’s haunting short story. At the theatre she saw some ‘long-necked, long-fingered countrymen of yours, and I became so sad, so bitter, that I decided not to stay for the performance,’ she wrote. ‘My Boy! Where am I to find the strength to wait for so long?’
Mila’s life was slowly being suffused and taken over by the virtual presence of Mervyn. She covered one wall of her little room with photographs of her fiancé, and in the evenings she would walk alone down Gogolevsky Boulevard to Kropotkinskaya Metro and look at the people streaming out, watching for Mervyn to appear. ‘If only I could meet you now at the Metro; we would walk home together, breathe the summer night air. The Arbat backstreets would seem beautiful, the people kind, the evening soft. But now it seems that everyone looks at me judgmentally. The trees seem old and yellow with you they were young and alive. I look enviously at women who have a man’s hand on their shoulder.’
On the large boards by the Metro where the day’s newspapers were pasted up, she would stop and read stories about mods and rockers fighting on Hastings beach. Then she’d go back home and write, leaving the apartment again late at night to post her letter in the postbox on the corner of Starokonushenny Pereulok and the Arbat so that it would go with the first post. The little rituals which were to rule her life for the rest of her time in Russia were forming into a comforting pattern, a routine which could assuage, at least a little, the powerlessness of her situation.
‘In the morning, as soon as I wake up I write a letter, my beloved boy… I imagine you sleeping, getting up, bathing… No more letters… the waiting is the worst. Even if the postman brought three a day it would not be enough, and now we have a gap… No news, it is as though my life has stopped.’
Mervyn spent the rest of the summer working with Alexander Kerensky, the bright lawyer who had risen to head the Provisional Government of the Russian Empire in the precipitous months between July and October 1917, when he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks’ coup. Kerensky was now very elderly, a spidery little man with a shock of grey hair and thick glasses. Mervyn helped him with his research, which was devoted to trying to unravel the events in which he himself had played a leading part. Mervyn told Kerensky his story. The old man was sympathetic, but for him Russia was a distant and hostile country which he had fled half a century before and would never see again. They talked about the Revolution and the ruthless men it had brought to power.
‘Rasputin? Oh, yes, he was very strong, very strong!’ Kerensky would mutter. ‘Lenin! I should have had him arrested when I could.’ Mervyn nodded in sincere agreement.
My father began writing to sympathetic MPs and dignitaries who might be able to help his fight. Professor Leonard Schapiro of the London School of Economics gave him a list of names and addresses, and Mervyn began a tireless correspondence which eventually grew to fill an entire three-drawer filing cabinet. He wrote to Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, who was in the Soviets’ good books for his anti-nuclear campaigns; Selwyn Lloyd, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary who had ‘got on well’ with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko; Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Riga-born philosopher of All Souls College; George Woodcock, Secretary of the Trades Union Congress and a well-known fellow-traveller. All replied with polite expressions of concern, but offered little real help.
By now most of Mervyn’s time was spent writing letters, making phone calls and visits. His academic work was falling by the wayside. Mervyn paid a visit to the Soviet ambassador’s private secretary, Alexander Soldatov, but to his disappointment the meeting yielded nothing beyond polite platitudes. My father, with perverse persistence, kept filing Soviet visa applications; with equal persistence, the Soviets kept turning them down.
Mervyn had little hope that a visa would actually come through. Mila, on the other hand, seemed to have formed a firm belief that her own application for a Soviet exit visa, a rare privilege usually granted only to the most politically trusted, had a chance of being approved. When she learned on 18 August that her exit visa had been refused ‘at the highest level’, she was distraught.
‘The last two months with the help of my friends and family I have lived in hope that my suffering will end but yesterday I discovered that my hopes are in vain,’ she wrote, the writing paper stained with tears. ‘All night I wandered in the heat, unable to sleep, and today I am still bathed in tears, as though in front of my eyes a piece of my heart has been torn out. I am once again in terrible despair. I beg you, my darling, don’t let me down, I am on the verge of death.
‘I am sitting at home like a bird in a cage, I slept badly, in a terrible mix of love and pain, but I will have to live, bear it, wait. It seems one more minute of waiting and my heart will tear itself to pieces and blood will pour from my mouth. Together with you I am ready to bear any tortures, but alone it’s terribly hard… Some people are rejoicing: there is nothing they love more than to see the blood dripping from souls they have torn apart with their claws. They think they have saved me from a fiery Gehenna. They think you are a devil incarnate, and they themselves are saints. Keep knocking at the gates of heaven, listen and you will hear my voice calling to you from behind them. Even though the gatekeeper won’t let you through, don’t let him sleep.’
A few days later her mood seemed to have lifted. Mila apologized for her desperate letters of the previous week. ‘If only you knew how your decisiveness is like oxygen to me. Please, Mervusya, never tell me that you have given up beating your head against the wall. Don’t retreat! Storming the walls doesn’t always work first time. I can never bear to hear that you have given up hope, faith in your own powers.’
In Moscow the summer was ending. Mila harvested the potatoes and cucumbers which Mervyn had planted. Berrying season had come, and Mila and her nieces spent days in the woods with iron buckets collecting wild strawberries, bilberries and cranberries in the marshy clearings. Sasha picked fruit, and Mila and Lenina boiled up vast pots of jam in the dacha kitchen. Mila kept some jars aside, which she planned to eat with Mervyn just as soon as he came back.
‘Please tell me all the details of your life, the little curry house in the centre of town,’ wrote Mila to Mervyn, calmer than she’d been in months after her spell in the country. ‘All these things are vital to me. In them I see my real live little person, my beloved boy.’ At the end of the letter Mila drew some little sketches of a shirt she was sewing. ‘Here’s a funny poem for you,’ she wrote a day later. ‘Mervusya – happiness, Mervusya – bottom, Mervusya – joy, For Mila – sweetness… Is your room warm, your blanket? Do demons of temptation come to you?’