11. Mila and Mervusya
My love is stronger than their hate.
Mila to Mervyn
Mervyn awoke to birdsong. Outside it was a bright summer morning in a neat English suburban garden. From the kitchen downstairs he could hear the clink of breakfast plates and the drone of BBC radio. As he lay in bed, the events of the last few days crowded in like the aftermath of a nightmare.
‘He’s a stubborn fool, and he should know better,’ his forthright mother had told the Daily Express the day before, and she was surely right about the stubbornness. But there was more to it than that. Mervyn had fought all his life against the provincial drudgery that others had ordained for him. Now, he realized, he would have to fight for Mila too.
That morning Mervyn resolved to do everything in his power to get Mila out of Russia. This was no impulsive decision. Ever the pragmatist, he gave himself five years. Then, if it was still hopeless, he would reconcile himself to failure, and move on.
Mervyn set up an office in the back bedroom of his halfbrother Jack’s small house in Barnes. From there he began making calls, picking up the strands of his life. One of his first was to St Antony’s. The college’s warden, Bill Deakin, had been following the press coverage of his student’s antics in Moscow with increasing concern. Deakin suggested they have dinner at Scott’s fish restaurant in Mayfair the next evening. Deakin was a stately character, patrician to the fingertips. He had been an associate of Churchill’s during the war, and had parachuted into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito’s partisans alongside Sir Fitzroy Maclean. Though Mervyn liked and respected Deakin, he was exactly the kind of smooth establishment figure who put him on the defensive.
Deakin had taken little notice of Mervyn before he left for Moscow, but now that the shy Welshman had committed the sin of putting the college’s name on the front pages it was time for a serious chat. The dinner was expensive and indifferent my father thought that Alexei’s hospitality in Moscow had been superior – but Deakin was charming as he downed his whisky and sodas. His first concern as he extracted the full story from Mervyn was to ensure that he had not been involved in any criminal activity in Moscow which could damage the reputation of the college. Over coffee, Deakin suggested that my father ‘have a talk with the security people’ about his experiences. Outside, Deakin hailed a taxi, leaving my father to walk to the Tube. My father noted Deakin’s lavishness with ten-shilling tips.
Even as he was boarding the plane in Moscow, Mervyn had come up with a plan bold enough to fulfil his urgent need to act. Nikita Khrushchev was due to visit Sweden with his wife the following week, and Mervyn planned to deliver them a personal letter, pleading for them to help two ordinary young people get married.
Somehow, either from something he’d said to the press or to his brother Jack, Mervyn’s mother got wind of his plan. ‘For my sake, Mervyn, give up the idea of going to Scandinavia to see Khrushchev,’ she wrote to her son from Swansea. ‘He is moving about with a terrific bodyguard and you might get shot.’ Mervyn ignored her advice, which was to become a habit over the years to come.
He boarded a plane to Gothenburg, but landed just as the Khrushchevs were leaving. The Swedish police were waiting for Mervyn, having found out from the newspapers about his visit, and were enormously relieved when he arrived too late. ‘Khrushchev gone,’ a Swedish plain-clothes policeman told Mervyn, pointing up at the watery sunset.
Mervyn was invited to dinner by the editor of the Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfarts Tidning, and gave an interview. Having missed Khrushchev in Gothenburg, Mervyn followed him to Stockholm, taking the train through the rainy Swedish night. When he arrived he found himself a cheap room at the Hellman Hotel, and set up his tea kit: an electric spiral element, a perforated spoon for the leaves, and a mug. It was a habit he stuck to well into my childhood. I vividly remember the tea kit, always there on stained tables in cheap hotel rooms wherever we stayed, in Provence, Istanbul, Cairo, Florence, Rome. He also brought a plate and cutlery, because he couldn’t afford Swedish restaurants. Instead, he ate snacks and sandwiches bought in grocery shops.
In the morning Mervyn made for the offices of the two big Stockholm dailies, Aftonbladet and Stockholms-Tidningen, where reporters told him that the security around Khrushchev was tight, and that he shouldn’t try to get near the great man. They promised to run major feature articles in the next day’s edition.
That evening, Mervyn went alone to an amusement park on one of the islands and watched the young couples dancing. They had to pay separately, he noticed, for each number. He imagined himself and Mila going through the turnstiles together.
At three in the morning he was woken by a knock at the door. It was Des Zwar, a reporter from the Daily Mail. Mervyn tried to get rid of him, but Zwar was persistent. He’d been round every hotel in town looking for Mervyn, he said. ‘The office thinks there might be a good story in it, so they sent me over.’
They sat on the bed and talked. Mervyn told Zwar his story, and Zwar told Mervyn about the passions of his life, golf and beautiful women, ‘in that order’. Zwar’s story, a masterpiece of tabloidese which my father preserved in the first of many files of newspaper clippings, appeared in the next day’s edition.
‘Dr Mervyn Matthews, the thirty-one-year-old research student who was refused permission to marry a Russian girl, was in Stockholm tonight waiting for his chance to see Mr Khrushchev tomorrow. Earlier today he wandered around Stockholm’s city centre with a letter to Mr Khrushchev in his pocket. He said, “I won’t give up”… If Dr Matthews tries to break through the cordon of machine gun carrying police he runs the risk of being shot dead. Security men, nervous since the reported threat to kidnap Mr Khrushchev, are in the trees, lining the roads and even on horseback, with orders to shoot if there is a sudden move to get near the Russian leader.’
Mervyn’s money was running out, and he had not succeeded in getting anywhere near Khrushchev. The next day, he flew back to Oxford empty-handed.
‘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.
‘From my earliest childhood I have conducted a heated running argument with life. Life told me: Don’t study! Don’t love wonderful things! Cheat! Don’t believe in level Betray your friends! Don’t thinkl Obey! But I stubbornly maintained that my answer was “No”, and ploughed my difficult path onwards through the debris. Life was cruel and vengeful. It denied me love, kindness, warmth. But my thirst for them only grew. Life tried to convince me that happiness is impossible, but still I believed, continued to search for it and wait, ready to fight for it when I found it and never to give it up.
‘They say that you should only love someone for their good qualities – but I love everything in you, good and bad. I am not ashamed of your weaknesses, I carry them within me like something sacred, unattainable for outside eyes. I don’t hear when someone speaks ill of you. I believe that only I see all of you, and from this comes my conviction that you are the best. I love you as my child, like a part of my body; I often feel that I have given birth to you. I so want to rock you in my arms, to protect you from danger, to save you from illness.
‘Do you believe me, my boy, that I am willing to give up my life for you? I try, with my feeble woman’s courage, to help you to refuse to fear these people, not to give in to them. Do you feel that? I still refuse to fear them, even though they are all-powerful. Truly, these dark days have shown me how much I love my mouse, how I have grown together with him in heart and soul, and what terrible surgery has been carried out on me – an operation on my heart. My aim now is to show this avenging eagle, this ravenous predator, that my love is stronger than their hate.’
How could Mervyn have refused to fight after such a soulwrenching letter? How could anyone, after being made the object of such love and faith and hope, let their beloved down? ‘Love me,’ she wrote. ‘Or I will die.’
‘For me nothing was as it was before,’ he replied. ‘But you have placed a heavy moral task on my shoulders and I am not sure that I will have the strength to carry it. I am not talking about the difficulties in our marriage – you can be sure that this plan will be fulfilled by 150 per cent. No, I mean the high moral example you set me, the necessity of perfecting myself. Your praise embarrasses me. It suggests that I am better than yo
u. But for the most part I can only learn from you. You gave me a completely new outlook on life exactly when I needed it.’
His Russian, for all the years they corresponded, was as stiff and formal as hers was fiery and passionate. It is almost as if he is struggling against his upbringing to find words to express feelings too big, too powerful to fit into the narrow confines of polite letter writing. My father signed the letter just quoted with a flamboyant flourish; a small thing, perhaps, but it was a more extravagant signature than he’d allowed himself on any previous letter.
Mervyn managed to book a telephone call to Lenina, and told her to pass on a message to Lyudmila to be at the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street later in the week. Mila was electrified by the first long-distance conversation since their separation. ‘As soon as I heard your voice the blood rushed around my body like a rocket,’ she wrote. ‘I want to kiss your voice.’ Lyudmila couldn’t use the communal phone in the corridor of her apartment because of her nosy neighbours, so they set up a system of fortnightly phone calls. The calls had to be booked in advance, and they had to be short because of the cost. But the few minutes of conversation in a cramped booth at the Telegraph became a lifeline for Mila.
‘Little Mervyn! I miss you so much, I so want to kiss your little head, your neck, your little nose, but what am I to do, eh, my little boy?’ she wrote soon after their first phone call. ‘How are we to overcome this obstacle which divides us so absolutely? It’s so cruel, so hard, to have a loved one and not be able to see him, to be near him. Sometimes hope blossoms in me, belief, I want to be so courageous and strong, but more often I feel such despair, such frustration, such a terrible pain in my heart, so bitter, that my strength leaves me and my nerves can’t bear it, I want to cry out to the whole world. I still can’t believe it’s true, that you aren’t by my side. So cruel, so unfair! But who will you prove this to, who has time for our pain, our injustice? A machine doesn’t feel, it doesn’t think, it only sweeps people underneath it, this evil juggernaut of history.’
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