On her return to Moscow, she spoke to Mervyn at the Central Telegraph. Not wanting to raise false hope, he said nothing of his plans. Still, she must have felt some optimism in his voice; walking home from her ‘phone call of life’ Mila sang, ‘Sweetheart, remember when days are forlorn; It is always darkest before the dawn.’
‘We are two pendulums swinging at the same rhythm,’ she wrote that night. ‘I kiss the dear end of your pendulum.’ She drew two stick figures with giant hearts on the letter.
Mervyn began writing to friends and acquaintances for money. Isaiah Berlin replied that he knew no one in Oxford ‘with a large bank account and a generous heart’. Rauf Khahil, an old Oxford friend whose family owned so much of Egypt that Raufwould claim that he ‘couldn’t bear to think about it’, had inconveniently dropped dead at his lectern a few years before while lecturing in Africa. Another friend, Priscilla Johnson at Harvard, was persuaded to ask Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, to part with some of her handsome book royalties in the cause of Mila’s liberation, but to no avail. Lord Thompson of Fleet, the press baron, with whom Mervyn had managed to wangle a two-minute meeting, gave no money, but offered good advice. Ask the sellers to give you an option, Thompson said as he gave Mervyn a lift in his big grey Rolls-Royce, ‘it won’t cost much and it’ll leave your hands free’.
But without money, Mervyn’s plan could get nowhere. Worse, when Mervyn went to the Maurice Thorez Institute of Marxism in Paris to see their Lenin expert, M. Lejeune, he firmly pronounced the notes in the Aleksinsky archive not to be Lenin’s writing.
Autumn fell in London, and the great paper chase seemed to be fizzling out. Mervyn’s meetings with Derek grew more despondent. The Finns had stopped their trips to the Baltics, and visits to Russia were out of the question. The Lenin papers had proved a flop, and his bridges were well and truly burned with the KGB. He had no money, and the end of the five years that my father had given himself to get Mila out of the Soviet Union loomed. The sharp desperation of their early love letters had worn down to a dull ache; Mervyn’s optimism became more and more forced. Truly, it seemed as though the end of the affair was near.
There was another lead – and though my father refused to admit it to himself, it was a last-ditch effort. A friend put him in touch with Pavel Ivanovich Veselov, a Stockholm-based Russian émigré who called himself a ‘juridical consultant’. He specialized in getting people out of the Soviet Union and had had eleven successes so far. His methods were unspectacularcareful documentation, campaigns in the Swedish press, string-pulling, much the same as Mervyn was doing already. It was a faint hope, but Mervyn had few other options.
Veselov wrote from Stockholm. ‘I am a hunter rather than a fighter, a strangler rather than a boxer,’ he told his prospective client. Mervyn was impressed. He was also poor. At the end of term, he took a boat from Tilbury to Stockholm. The smorgasbord dinner cost thirty shillings, and Mervyn went hungry rather than pay the money. His third-class cabin had four berths in it and was noisy and cramped. He continued to write to Mila, but through his friend Jean-Michel in Brussels in order to conceal his whereabouts from the KGB censors. In Stockholm he checked into the Salvation Army Hotel. Mervyn’s great crusade was becoming a distinctly threadbare affair.
Veselov turned out to be a dishevelled fifty-year-old with high Slavic cheekbones who lived in a tiny apartment on a nondescript street in a working-class area of the city. He introduced his young Swedish wife, who spoke no Russian, and then, with more interest, his black cat, Misha. They sat down to talk in the apartment’s single room, dusty and stuffed with furniture, Russian-style.
He described his past triumphs with great animation to Mervyn; one of his greatest successes had actually been released from a prison camp. Producing a large roll of what looked like wallpaper, Veselov walked to the end of the room and dramatically unrolled it. The wallpaper was covered with press cuttings from one of his cases. Mervyn admired his skills, both at collage and at getting people out of Russia.
Veselov spoke little of himself, but did tell Mervyn that he was an Old Believer, a schismatic sect of Russian Orthodoxy renowned for its traditionalism, which had been persecuted in Russia for centuries. He also said that he had served as a colonel in Finnish Intelligence in the war. Mervyn suspected that Veselov had deserted from the Red Army during the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-40. He had a heavy Volga accent, smoked strong cigarettes, liked company and was passionate about honesty. If the press ever heard that he had lied, Veselov said, they’d never accept another story from him again. He was also an enthusiastic amateur novelist, and was working on an epic about ancient Rome. His heroine was a lusty Roman courtesan, who resembled, Mervyn thought, a Volga whore. Late in the evening, Veselov treated Mervyn to a lengthy and passionate reading of his manuscript. Every so often its creator would pause and say, ‘Oi, Mervyn! What a girl, what a girl!’ When Mervyn finally plucked up the courage to cut him off and go home, in the early hours of the morning, Veselov seemed deeply offended. ‘Oh, that’s enough is it?’ he sniffed.
In July, after a long period of silence, the spirit, or rather the news that Alexei Kosygin was due in Stockholm on an official visit, moved Veselov to contact Mervyn. There was press interest, and Mervyn should try once again to get to the Soviet Premier and give him a letter. Mervyn was sceptical. One more letter, after all the others which had no doubt gone unread, would probably do no good. But the publicity might be helpful.
Expressen, the Swedish daily, was delighted when Mervyn called. A love interest was just what was needed to pep up the rather dour story of Kosygin’s visit. The paper agreed to pay some of Mervyn’s travel costs. My father’s expenditure on constant travel was by this point so far ahead of his income that he was considering selling the Pimlico flat and getting something cheaper in the suburbs.
Mervyn arrived in Stockholm on the eve of Kosygin’s visit, and put up in the Apolonia Hotel. The next morning he was met at the hotel by an Expressen car, a journalist and two photographers, armed with a detailed plan of Kosygin’s itinerary. The plan was to hand Kosygin a letter as he drove to the Haga Palace, the government residence. As he sat in the park he had time to write a letter to Mila.
‘As you probably guessed I’ve come to Stockholm to see Alexei Nikolayevich [Kosygin] and if possible give him a letter… Just now I’m sitting in the quiet park surrounding the government residence. He should be here in an hour. The residence is very large, with a beautiful lake in front. There’s a police boat on it at the moment. A typical corner of Scandinavia, rather sad. I’m glad they don’t charge you for sitting on the benches, but I am sure that the day will come when they fit coin boxes.’
In the event, the massive police guard kept Mervyn and the Expressen team far away from Kosygin’s speeding car. The Expressen men left immediately afterwards, and Mervyn wandered around uselessly in Kosygin’s wake, and in the late afternoon decided to ask the Swedish police if they could help him deliver his letter to Kosygin and his daughter, but he was arrested and put in a cell till the evening. He was finally released without explanation, and made his way back to Veselov’s, tired and indignant. Veselov was filled with joyous outrage.
‘Terrible! And this is a so-called civilized country! But it’s just what we needed. We might be able to win the case through this! Come on, we’ve got to get down to the Expresser: office, perhaps they can still get something into tomorrow’s edition.’ Veselov’s jaw was set hard, spoiling for a fight. ‘The police officer will have to be disciplined, and we’ll write to the Interior Minister about it.’