For a few months in 1965, Mila seems to have become preoccupied with the fear that her good-looking fiancé might be stolen from her. It even pervaded her sleep. Mila dreamt that she was at the Bolshoi with Valery and caught sight of Mervyn down in the stalls with another woman. She called and shouted, and was seized by an uncontrollable desire to throw herself over the balcony down to him.
The pain of separation had shaken loose all Mila’s deepest fears – of abandonment, most profoundly, but also lesser insecurities about her appearance. Mila felt acutely that she was no beauty. ‘This is the most painful question for me, and I never speak of it to anyone – but I am terribly sorry that I will not please your friends and acquaintances in this respect,’ Mila wrote. ‘I am so afraid of that, I worry about it. Though I do have one comfort – all my life I have had lots of friends, including pretty ones, and they all loved me and were attracted to me. I know that you like beautiful women, like any man. I love beauty too. I hope very much that you will see beyond this and see what others do not see. We will look at beautiful women together. I am not so insecure that I cannot acknowledge the beauty of other women if they are not bitches or fools. All my life I had very few photos taken of me – you know why, but if something comes out I’ll send it to you. I feel shy when you show my photographs to people.’
At work, Mila would show Mervyn’s letters around. She had a man, which in turn made her fully a woman. ‘I want someone to love me – I want people to know that I am not such an unfortunate.’ But the pain, and perhaps an obscure sense of shame and guilt at having lost her lover, kept her behind late at work so that she would not have to see other girls being met by their husbands and boyfriends.
In late September 1965, Mervyn saw a hopeful story in the Sun. Secret talks on swapping Brooke for the Krogers had got further than Mervyn had suspected. Wolfgang Vogel, a mysterious East German lawyer, represented the Soviet side. Vogel had a good track record – he had brokered the 1962 spy swap of the American U2 pilot Gary Powers for the veteran Soviet spy ‘Rudolph Abel’. Abel, whose real name was William Fischer, had, ironically enough, been the Krogers’ controller when they worked in the US in the 1940s, running messages for Moscow’s atomic spies in the Manhattan Project. Vogel was also rumoured to have arranged the ‘purchase’ of East Germans by their relatives in the West.
‘The British government has bitterly rejected all suggestions of a swap, now or in the future,’ said the Sun on 22 September 1965. ‘They consider Gerald Brooke, jailed in Moscow for subversion, is being held to ransom. But this reaction has not apparently deterred Herr Vogel… On Monday night his green and cream Opel was waved through Checkpoint Charlie without the usual close scrutiny of papers for a meeting with Mr Christopher Lush at the British HQ in West Berlin.’
Four days later Mervyn was on a train trundling eastwards through Germany. The heating in the carriage had been switched off, and he passed the guard towers and barbed wire around West Berlin at dawn, shivering cold. He stayed, as usual, in the cheapest hotel he could find, the Pension Aleron in Lietzenburgerstrasse. Mervyn telephoned Jiirgen Stange, Vogel’s West German lawyer contact, and made an appointment for the next day. He spent the rest of the day in East Berlin sightseeing. Wartime ruins were everywhere, and the place was tense and drab. Later in the afternoon he visited the Zoo and watched the monkeys staring at him gloomily from their cages.
Mervyn explained his case in detail to Stange, who promised to arrange a meeting with Vogel the next night. Their rendezvous was the Baronen Bar, a small and expensive place frequented by businessmen where Vogel often stopped for a drink before returning east from his regular trips. As Mervyn waited he noticed that the tall barman wore extravagant cufflinks, intended, Mervyn supposed, to inveigle the customers into giving him larger tips.
Vogel was round-faced, bespectacled and friendly. Mervyn’s German was poor, and Vogel had no English; Stange had explained that his knowledge of foreign languages was confined to Latin and Greek. But Vogel was upbeat, and made a lot of optimistic noises about improving relations. He suggested that maybe Mila and perhaps one other person could be exchanged for one of the Krogers, something that Mervyn thought highly unlikely. But he was heartened by the German lawyer’s enthusiastic tone.
As Vogel stood to leave, Mervyn sprang to his feet and offered to carry a small suitcase Vogel had brought with him into the bar. The case was impossibly heavy, and Mervyn could barely lift it. He staggered after Vogel and heaved the suitcase into his Opel, and waved as he drove off in an easterly direction. Mervyn never found out what was in the case, and never dared ask.
The next day Mervyn met Christopher Lush of the British Foreign Office at Western Allied Headquarters, and asked him to contact London for an official response to the idea of an exchange. Lush was dismissive. ‘We don’t want to become a channel for this sort of thing,’ he told my father. ‘We don’t want everyone coming here.’
Vogel never contacted Mervyn. It was another blind alley.
Soon after he returned from Berlin, Mervyn heaved his Oxford trunks into his battered Ford and drove north to his new academic quarters at Long Eaton, near Nottingham, doubtless sitting up straight at the wheel after Mila’s admonitions not to ‘slouch as though you are carrying buckets’.
Mervyn found Long Eaton a place of profound dreariness, a grimy industrial town which reminded him powerfully of the miseries of his childhood in South Wales. Nottingham University’s lecturers were accommodated in very much less style than he had been used to in Oxford. Mervyn did not like drinking in pubs, which left sitting at the laundromat watching the clothes whirl around as the only alternative local entertainment. After Moscow and Oxford, Nottingham was a fall from grace indeed, but at least he now had the time to devote to his campaign. Despite having an epileptic fit in the station cafeteria at King’s Cross – the first he had ever suffered – Mervyn resolved to stay optimistic.
‘From that day on, regardless of the news from Russia, I always made a point of going into the classroom with a cheery smile on my face,’ he told Mila. ‘I’m not in the least bit worried about the cancellation of my book.’ A photograph from that autumn shows Mervyn at his desk at the university, a tinny radio I remember him still using in the mid-1970s in front of him, books piled on sagging bookshelves behind. The room is small and poky, and he is earnestly reading a letter. He looks strangely childish and dislocated, among the unruly piles of his possessions, but quite content.
Mervyn’s mother, during one of his rare visits to Swansea, harangued him about giving up his self-destructive obsession with his Russian girl. ‘This morning my mother tiger showed her claws – leopards, to change the metaphor, don’t change their spots,’ wrote Mervyn as he sat in his Ford in the car park of Nottingham University sports club, where he took his daily swim. ‘She says I’m home so rarely and make her suffer so much – she said that the recent events in Russia nearly killed her. “And when I think of what’s happened to your career I am filled with horror,” she said. “Shut up,” I said, “or I’ll leave the house – the car’s just outside,” so she went quiet.’
Mervyn considered other options. One was for Mila to apply to visit another socialist country, meet him there, and somehow escape. The problem was that Mila would have to get a reference from her employers to travel, even to a friendly state, and no one at the library would dare risk giving her such an endorsement. She could also arrange a fictitious marriage to an African student, who could then take her abroad – but that idea, as well as being distasteful, was impractical since it required KGB permission, and would cast a shadow on their campaign if it failed.